Soul City was meant to be an antiracist town in the American South.
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In the 1960s, Floyd B. McKissick, a prolific civil rights activist, embarked on an ambitious idea: What if Black Americans could build and lead their own city? A place centered on the idea of racial equality and economic power, where everyone, especially people of color and the poor, could thrive? That idea turned into Soul City, North Carolina: the Black-led, capitalist utopia that almost came to be.
At the time, the federal government was encouraging the idea of new cities. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development opened up a process to finance new towns built by private developers. McKissick took the opportunity to pitch his idea and hoped to secure federal funding to finally make his dream a reality. But to do it, he also made an unlikely ally: Republican President Richard Nixon. By 1972, Soul City was approved for funding, and McKissick broke ground on hundreds of acres of former tobacco plantation land in Warren County, North Carolina.
Designs were drafted. Land was cleared. An electrical grid and water system were constructed. Infrastructure was built, like roads, a public pool, a health clinic, and a massive industrial building called “Soul Tech One” — meant to be a manufacturing hub. But within just seven years of breaking ground, McKissick’s dream of Soul City was cut short. In the piece above, we explore what happened to this experimental town. With the help of McKissick’s son, former Sen. Floyd McKissick Jr., and one of Soul City’s first residents, Jane Ball-Groom, we look at what got built, what remains today, and the forces that came together to cause its end.
Sources:
Jane Ball-Groom’s book on Soul City: https://www.abebooks.com/9781329821828/SALAD-PICKERS-JOURNEY-SOUTH-Ball-Groom-1329821823/plp
Devin Fergus’s research on Soul City: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-policy-history/article/abs/black-power-soft-power-floyd-mckissick-soul-city-and-the-death-of-moderate-black-republicanism/E74DBA176BD3C5A747B1805EC2178FD2
Thomas Healy’s book on Soul City: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53138153
Floyd B. McKissick Papers: https://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/04930/
For further reading:
https://www.charlottemagazine.com/the-derailed-dream-of-soul-city/
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/20/989108031/a-utopia-for-black-capitalism
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/lost-dream-soul-city/618012/
Note: The headline on this piece has been updated.
Previous headline: How Black Americans almost built a utopia
And if you want to read more about Warren County’s environmental justice history, here’s a link to a great piece on another reason why this place is so important: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2021/environmental-justice-race/
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