Soul City: An African American Utopia Never Completed

When it comes to ghost towns, the absence of what’s there tells as much of a story as what is lacking. That paradigm is certainly the case with Soul City, North Carolina, which is a few miles off Route 1. Nowadays, visitors are greeted by vestiges of one man’s expired dream. A rusted rectangular sign with red script declares the city’s name; further on, a vandalized health-clinic, an empty pool, and a similarly-abandoned recreation center all offer little more substance than that contained in a passing glance. Indeed, the Warren Correctional Institution, an 809-bed prison that stands nearby, is the most justifiable reason for now heading to Soul City. But untold by these landmarks is the story of one Black activist and community leader’s efforts to restore power to the African American community, by building a city that would allow Blacks to become equal economic participants in the dawn of the newly-birthed Civil Rights era. 

Soul City was officially born in February of 1969. A man named Floyd McKissick had just purchased 1,800 acres of land that once held a slave plantation. McKissick’s plans for Soul City entailed going out on a limb from the get-go: he had relied upon a Chase Bank loan in order to make a down payment on half the land’s asking price of $387,000. In the same vein of thinking, McKissick’s ambitions were both practical and fantastical. On the one hand, building new cities was an accepted, if not totally common, practice at the time. Brazilia City in Brazil, for instance, famously came to life after a five-year growth spurt. Closer to home is the city of Columbia, Maryland, built to fulfill developer James Rouse’s vision of communal harmony. Crystal City in Virginia, or even Washington, D.C., are further examples of urban developments that began as a single person’s dream.

While these cities hold some parallels to McKissick’s vision, the seed of Soul City carried a unique DNA. McKissick intended to use the land to form a self-sustaining community of African American entrepreneurs and business people as a response to the limited options available to this population at that time. More specifically, African Americans often found themselves living in impoverished neighborhoods that reinforced racial stereotypes, limited upward mobility, and further enabled the uneven power dynamic that existed between Black and White people. Soul City, McKissick believed, could change that. Citizens would invest in their own dreams and businesses, allowing for economic and social self-sufficiency that did not depend on the influence of the majority. This type of noble and visionary ambition was leaps and bounds ahead of mainstream thinking, although McKissick had good reason to believe in it. His own life experiences had led him to believe fully in the empowerment of African Americans, starting with his own education.

A 1948 graduate of Morehouse College, McKissick filed a lawsuit with the N.A.A.C.P. in 1951, asking that the University of North Carolina’s law school change its policy of barring Black students from admission. After winning the case and earning his law degree from that same institution, McKissick went on to become a leader in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an influential civil-rights organization. Soul City was McKissick’s version of Utopia: a fully realized dream that was built upon his work with CORE by granting Blacks equality in all respects. While McKissick couldn’t legally make the city just for Blacks due to the governmental funding he received, he did advertise it for a time as such, and won support—both political and eventually, financial—from President Nixon for building out his dream. 

McKissick worked alongside Architect and Urban Planner Harvey Gantt to draw up plans for Soul City. The first step of realizing their vision involved building out basic infrastructure, since Soul City lacked basic amenities such as water, sewer systems, an electric grid, and paved roads. A wastewater treatment plant, utility company, health center, and “industrial incubator facility”—a building that would act as training grounds for the citizens of Soul City and their roles as laborers, manufacturers, and entrepreneurs—would be built first. After that, McKissick envisioned the city including three residential villages and a recreational center. 

McKissick worked to secure $6 million in governmental grants after purchasing the land, and in 1972 received $14 million from the Nixon administration. That money, he believed, would allow for 2,000 citizens to inhabit Soul City. And yet, 10 years later, the development offered only 135 jobs and housed 124 residents, including McKissick. The city’s failure to thrive was haunted by both strategic and contextual limitations. On the one hand, building a city from the ground up took resources of both time, money, and expertise that even the most experienced developer would be hard-pressed to manifest and maneuver. Adding to that pressure was the fact that the country’s economic downturn at the start of the 1970s discouraged the infusion of African Americans that McKissick’s plan had so heavily relied upon for the town’s growth. On a larger scale, however, the city’s lack of evolution reflected a hard truth that many visionaries have come to face: that their best-intentioned plans and most ardent efforts to back them up with the right resources cannot always overcome the present-day societal limitations. 

In May of 1980, the government program that funded Soul City foreclosed on it, leaving McKissick with some debt and a small portion of the land. He was buried there in 1991. Between then and now, the area has seen little change, save the renovation of the industrial incubator facility into a prison, and the dumping of hazardous waste in a nearby landfill. Still, travelers might benefit from visiting Soul City: to look at the bones, as it were, in order to understand the body they once aspired to hold up.