Floyd McKissick

Floyd Bixler McKissick was born on the ninth of March 1922 in Asheville, North Carolina, the only son among four children of Ernest Boyce McKissick and Magnolia Esther Thompson McKissick. His father, a Black man who served as head bellhop at Asheville's Vanderbilt Hotel, refused to let his children inherit the indignities of his own labor, charging young Floyd to secure an education so that he would never have to bow.

Denied entry to the University of North Carolina School of Law on account of his race, McKissick first enrolled at the law school of North Carolina College in Durham. With the NAACP taking up his cause and Thurgood Marshall arguing his case, a 1951 federal appellate ruling opened the university's doors. McKissick thus became the first African American admitted to the University of North Carolina School of Law and among the first to earn his degree there, going on to build a distinguished legal practice in Durham.

From his Durham office McKissick became a central architect of the movement, defending demonstrators and championing direct action. He rose to national chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality and, succeeding James Farmer, served as its national director from 1966 to 1968, steering the organization toward the assertive vision of Black Power and self-determination.

In 1968 he departed CORE to found Soul City, an ambitious planned community in Warren County, North Carolina, conceived as a place of Black ownership and dignity. In his final years he was ordained and pastored, and in 1990 was appointed a state district court judge. Floyd McKissick died on the twenty-eighth of April 1991. May the doors he forced open, and the freedom he pursued, keep his name honored among us.