Soul City: Floyd McKissick's Unfinished Utopia

Floyd McKissick had led the Congress of Racial Equality through the civil rights battles of the nineteen sixties. In nineteen sixty-nine he bet everything on a different strategy: build a new city from scratch in rural Warren County, North Carolina, one that would provide economic opportunity for Black Americans on their own terms.

Soul City was planned for five thousand acres. The federal government agreed, backing it under the Urban Growth and New Community Development Act and providing thirty-one million dollars in loan guarantees and grants between nineteen seventy-one and nineteen seventy-eight. But the population that was supposed to arrive never materialized at the scale needed. Political attacks and federal audits helped cut off funding in nineteen seventy-nine, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development foreclosed on the project. What remains today is a quiet, predominantly Black community with a church and a scattering of houses. The dream of a self-sufficient Black city in the rural South ended not with a failure of vision, but with a failure of political will.