McKissick in Asheville

Born on March 9, 1922, Floyd McKissick and his family lived on Ridge Street, off what’s now South Charlotte Street. Growing up, McKissick “carted ice on a homemade wagon, delivered newspapers and shined shoes to help support his family,” according to a 1991 New York Times obituary.

His father did hotel work (including serving as the head bellman at the Vanderbilt Hotel) and was an agent for the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Co. His mother worked for the company as well and also made clothes. “We had a sign on the house: ‘Seamstress,’” McKissick recalled in a 1989 interview for the Southern Oral History Program. “I had a very good religious influence in my life and an excellent social life. … In the black community, the church and all of its programs … represented the society in which we lived.”

Still, he continued, “There were many problems of segregation in the city, which we were fighting every day.” Once, as a child, he was riding up front on the Montclair trolley, so he could watch the driver. His aunt told McKissick that he couldn’t sit there. “And while she was explaining to me, some big, heavy man, weighing about 300 pounds, told her if she couldn’t get me up, he was going to pick me up and throw me to the rear of the bus. … And my aunt picked me up and took me to the back, and she just cried as she sat there with me. I sort of got the understanding of what things were all about a little later in life, not then.”

But it was another pivotal early “bitter experience,” said McKissick, that really planted the seeds of future civil rights activism. In 1935, when he was a 13-year-old Boy Scout, “We had a street on which we skated, South French Broad, and I was assigned by my scoutmaster to direct traffic and help the smaller kids. The scoutmaster had just placed us in the intersection to keep the smaller kids from coming through the intersection. Some cops came up and said get off the street: We didn’t have no business being there. And in trying to explain to them, they proceeded to beat and slap me around a little bit, and I retaliated by throwing a skate.”

Those experiences bore fruit years later, he related. “I think probably the first real politicalization came when the Asheville City Council refused to permit Paul Robeson to speak at the City Auditorium, and this small delegation of an integrated group went to the City Council meeting to ask them to change the policy to permit Paul Robeson to speak. … I just went there as one of the group, but I ended up being practically the spokesman for the group.”

McKissick graduated from high school in 1939 and left Asheville to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta. After serving in the Army during World War II, he returned to Asheville. But the fledgling civil rights movement soon focused his attention elsewhere.

In 1945, he was part of a group that picketed the state Legislature to get the law school at N.C. Central University (then the North Carolina College for Negroes) accredited and adequately funded. Meanwhile, a federal lawsuit filed by future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who was then a lawyer with the NAACP, led to McKissick’s becoming the first African-American student at the UNC Law School. His association with the school continued long after graduation, and “a number of the professors over there were closely associated with me in the development of Soul City.”