Thomas Healy - Soul City: Race, Equality, and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia

On a sweltering summer day in 1972, Floyd McKissick led a reporter for the New York Times across the green fields and red clay roads of an old plantation in his home state of North Carolina. Once a thriving tobacco farm worked by a hundred enslaved people, the estate had fallen on hard times in recent decades as tobacco prices sagged and the economy of the agrarian South collapsed. Tumbledown sheds and shacks now marred the landscape, while cattle from nearby ranches grazed the fallow pastures. But there were still signs of earlier prosperity, including a white eighteenth-century mansion resting on a small hill among a stand of cedars. Strolling in the shade of these ancient trees, McKissick looked up at the house, then turned to his guest and laughed.

I can just see ole massa now, he said. Up there on the veranda, fanning himself and watching us black folks slaving in the fieldand I cant help but wonder what he might say now.

What ole massa might have said is anybodys guess, but he would certainly have been stunned by the transformation taking place around him. Where Black men and women once toiled in bondage and despair, they were now engaged in an ambitious project to complete their emancipation: the building of a new city where Black people would have a majority share of power, capital, and opportunity. Named Soul City, the project was designed to be a model of Black economic empowerment, bringing money and jobs to a region that had been left behind by the twin forces of industrialization and urbanization. In the process, its supporters hoped, it would reverse the exodus of poor Blacks from the rural South and ease the overcrowding of the northern slums.

Launched by McKissick three years earlier, Soul City had at first seemed little more than a quixotic dream, another in a long line of Black separatist fantasies. McKissick, a lawyer by profession, had risen to prominence as head of the Congress of Racial Equality, one of the foremost civil rights groups of the 1960s. He was a fiery speaker, a tenacious litigator, and a visionary civil rights leader, one of the few remaining after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the self-exile of Stokely Carmichael to Africa. But McKissick had no experience building a city and nowhere near the resources to do so. And the site he had chosen was an unlikely location for an urban utopia: five thousand acres of tapped-out farmland in Warren County, North Carolina, one of the poorest areas of the country, where 40 percent of homes lacked indoor toilets and seven out of ten adults lacked a high school diploma. One-third the size of Manhattan, the site had none of the infrastructure a viable city needsno water or sewer systems, no paved roads, no electrical grid. And it was desolate: an hour from the nearest existing city, it lay in the middle of what one roadside billboard boldly proclaimed Klan Country.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle was the idea itself. Although Soul City was intended to be an integrated community open to all races, McKissick made clear that his primary goal was to help Black people, especially those who were poor or unemployed. For that reasonand because of its nameSoul City was quickly branded an experiment in Black Nationalism, a sort of domestic Liberia. This played well among advocates of Black Power, whose ranks and influence had grown sharply in recent years. But to many who had fought for integration, or at least come to accept it, Soul City seemed like a step backward, not forward. As one southern newspaper put it when McKissick announced his plans, in January 1969, How terribly tragic it would be should all civil rights roads cut in the past twenty years lead to Soul Citya Camelot built on racism.

In reality, McKissicks dream was about economic equality, not separatism. It is true that he had emerged as one of the leading spokesmen for Black Power and that his rhetoric was often divisive and inflammatory. If white America does not respond to peaceful protest, he wrote in his 1969 book Three-Fifths of a Man, Black People will be forced to work for their liberation through violent revolution. But he had also spent his entire life breaking down racial barriersfirst for himself, then for his children, then for the Black community at large. It was McKissick who integrated the University of North Carolina Law School in 1951. It was McKissick whose children integrated the Durham public schools in 1958. And it was McKissick who led nonviolent protests against segregated buses, lunch counters, dime stores, ice cream parlors, swimming pools, bathrooms, water fountains, and amusement parks for two decades, enduring taunts, beatings, arrests, and humiliations, all in the name of integration. Over the years, however, he had become frustrated by the failure of the civil rights movement to bring about sustained, meaningful change. Like many Black leaders, he had come to realize that marches and demonstrations, lawsuits and legislation, could only achieve so much. For Black Americans to be truly free, he believed, they needed powereconomic power, to be precise. If a Black man has no bread in his pocket, the solution to his problem is not integration, McKissick liked to say. Its to go get some bread. Thats why, although McKissick had no desire to exclude whites, his dream was to build a city where Blacks would call the shots, where a race of people who had once been bought and sold to enrich others would finally control its own economic destiny.

And despite the obstacles he faced, that dream was no longer fantastical. Just weeks earlier, the Nixon administration had awarded Soul City a $14 million loan guarantee (the equivalent of about $87 million today) to prepare the land for development. The loan was part of a fledgling program created by Congress to finance the building of new towns across the country, and Soul City was not the only project to receive support. So far, the Department of Housing and Urban Development had approved the building of eleven new communities, from a futuristic high-rise complex near downtown Minneapolis to an eco-friendly exurb outside Houston. But Soul City was the only project located in a rural area, far from a major metropolis, and the only one led by a Black developer. And federal support had not come cheaply. In return for the loan guarantee, McKissick had changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican and endorsed Richard Nixons 1972 reelection campaign. He would soon become the presidents chief Black spokesman, traveling the country giving stump speeches and raising money from Black voters.

It was a bizarre political union: Nixon, the law and order president whose southern strategy had exploited racism to win white votes, and McKissick, the militant Black leader who was under surveillance by the FBI. And it raised more than a few eyebrows, with conservatives questioning Nixons judgment and prominent Black leaders accusing McKissick of selling out. But like most political unions, it offered benefits to both sides. For Nixon, Soul City was a chance to improve his image among Black voters without risking his support among whites. Instead of embracing civil rights and an expansive welfare state, he could portray Soul City as a capitalistic solution to the problems of race and poverty. McKissick, meanwhile, desperately needed federal backing to get Soul City off the ground. Although he had secured private loans to purchase the land, investors were not exactly lining up to bankroll a speculative new town. If becoming a Republican meant he could get the money he needed for his dreamand show that Black people were capable of achieving something truly monumentalhe was prepared to take whatever heat came his way.