Soul City

by Thomas Healy

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  In memory of Margaret L. Healy

  PROLOGUE

  “Comes the Colored Hour”

  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 field—and I can’t help but wonder what he might say now.”

  What “ole massa” might have said is anybody’s 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 needs—no 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 reason—and because of its name—Soul 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 City—a Camelot built on racism.”

  In reality, McKissick’s 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 barriers—first 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 power—economic 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. “It’s to go get some bread.” That’s 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 Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign. He would soon become the president’s 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 Nixon’s 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 secure
d 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 dream—and show that Black people were capable of achieving something truly monumental—he was prepared to take whatever heat came his way.

  Already the alliance was paying dividends. In June, McKissick had given the keynote address at a Black fundraiser for Nixon at the Washington Hilton. Speaking to a crowd of 2,500, he declared that it was time for Black voters to stop “sucking the sugar tit” of the Democratic Party. The event was a roaring success, bringing in a quarter million dollars and emboldening Nixon’s campaign to predict that he would receive 25 percent of the Black vote in the fall election, double his share from 1968.

  News of the loan guarantee had also given Soul City a jolt of momentum and credibility. Major corporations such as General Motors had begun to take the project seriously, the governor of North Carolina had offered his state’s full support, and the national press had weighed in enthusiastically. An editorial in the Washington Post praised Soul City as “the most vital experiment yet in this country’s halting struggle against the cancer of hectic urbanization,” while the New York Times called it “a sane and practical as well as imaginative concept.” Even local skeptics had come around, with one official saying Soul City was “the best thing that has happened to Warren County in the last hundred years.”

  Now McKissick was living with his wife and youngest daughter in a trailer on the edge of a cornfield, a far cry from the Harlem brownstone they had occupied for the past five years. They were joined by a half dozen other families, mostly Black but a few white, some with babies still in diapers. They had come from different places—New York, Boston, Washington, DC—but all for the same reason: to pursue the dream of building a new city. And after three years of planning, negotiations, and frustrating delays, they were eager to get started. The night before, they had celebrated the first annual Soul City Founders Day with a banquet at the old armory in Warrenton, the county seat. Seven hundred supporters had packed inside the unair-conditioned building, where the temperature soared above 100 degrees. But the heat did not faze those in attendance, who were there to contemplate the future, not complain about the present. They listened in rapt attention to a speech by Robert J. Brown, a Black Nixon aide and longtime friend of McKissick who had played a key role in obtaining federal backing for the project. Praising McKissick for his vision and Nixon for his willingness “to put money where mouths and promises had been before,” Brown assured the crowd that, together, they were “about to transform a nineteenth-century slave plantation into a booming American city.”

  So as McKissick led the Times reporter across the grounds on that scorching July day, he had every reason to feel optimistic, even playful. His dream was finally coming to fruition. Soon construction crews and bulldozers would arrive to clear trees, pave roads, and build houses, shopping centers, schools, churches, and factories. There would be hospitals, hotels, parks, art galleries, theaters, golf courses, and a college. There was even talk of building light-rail and an airport, connecting Soul City directly with the major commercial centers of the country. And if projections held true, within three short decades a city of fifty thousand people would populate this once forsaken land.

  “Yes sir,” McKissick said once more, smiling to himself as much as to his guest. “I wonder what ‘ole massa’ would have to say now.”

  * * *

  THIS IS THE story of a lost dream, so it should come as no surprise that Soul City does not have a population of fifty thousand today, that there are no hospitals or schools, golf courses or hotels. There is certainly no light-rail or airport, which means it is not especially easy to get to Soul City these days. In fact, without planning and a little effort, it can be hard to find at all.

  I first made the trip in the summer of 2014, on a day nearly as hot as the one on which the Times reporter visited four decades earlier. As was the case then, the closest city is still Durham, an hour away, so I landed at the Raleigh-Durham airport and headed north on Interstate 85. As I left the city behind, the highway narrowed from ten lanes to four and the landscape changed quickly, with car dealerships and budget hotels giving way to the dense woods of the Carolina piedmont. About eight miles south of the Virginia border, where at one time a large green sign marked the exit for Soul City, I took the off-ramp and followed a country road past an abandoned service station and an old farmhouse. Coming to an intersection with a tin-roofed shack and another shuttered gas station, I turned left, then veered right over a single set of railroad tracks.

  The area had not yet been mapped by Google, so without realizing it I followed a back route, past soybean fields and mobile homes. As I approached Soul City the first thing I saw was a squat brick-and-concrete building, brown on the bottom, tan on top. The sign read “HealthCo Medical and Dental,” but I knew from my research that it had closed years earlier and was now empty inside, vandals having stripped it of copper and anything else of value. Next door stood an assisted living center, also vacant and vandalized, so I kept driving and turned onto Liberation Road, once intended to be a major thoroughfare but now just another rural highway. I passed the First Baptist Church of Soul City, a small white structure with a peaked roof, and a cluster of one-story apartment buildings before I found what I was looking for: the entrance to Green Duke Village, the first and only completed neighborhood in Soul City. It could have been the entrance to any subdivision in America: a two-lane road divided by a wide, grassy median with a wooden marker planted in the middle. But out here, amid pastures and pine groves, it looked out of place, like the set of a movie that had been left behind. And there was something else that marked it as unusual. Beyond the first sign loomed another, a concrete monolith twenty feet high with the words “Soul City” engraved beneath a large, swooping S cast in red iron and repeated three times, one above the next. Originally erected several miles away, at the entrance to the city itself, the monolith had been moved to its present location in the 2000s, years after the building of Soul City had abruptly ceased. The iron had long since rusted, leaving brown streaks on the gray concrete, while inside the O of Soul City were two pockmarks that appeared to have been made by bullets.

  Just inside the entrance to Green Duke Village stood the old mansion, still shaded by the same stand of cedars, its white paint chipped and peeling, its burgundy shutters in need of repair. I turned right and followed a loop road with short cul-de-sacs radiating off both sides. There was Turner Circle, Brown Circle, Scott Circle—seemingly generic names until one remembered that this was Soul City and these roads were named for Nat Turner, John Brown, and Dred Scott. The houses were modest but pleasant, a mix of split-level and ranch styles, some with carports or garages, a few with front porches or porticoes. Dogwoods and red maples that had been planted almost forty years ago were now full-grown, giving the neighborhood a lush, tranquil feel. But the roads, which had not been repaved in decades, were badly cracked, with long strips of grass and weeds pushing up through the sun-bleached asphalt. And although there were cars in the driveways, the streets were empty, and no signs of life could be seen outside the houses.

  The entrance to Green Duke Village, the first of eight planned residential neighborhoods in Soul City.

  Halfway around the loop, I came to the Magnolia Ernest Recreation Complex, a pool and sports center named for McKissick’s parents, Magnolia and Ernest McKissick. The nets on the tennis courts were in good shape, and the water in the pool was crystal blue, but the gate was locked, and a “Keep Out” sign was posted on the chain-link fence. Parking the car in an empty lot, I walked down to a small lake and picnic area just beyond the pool. Named after McKissick’s mother-in-law, Daisy B. Williams, the lake had been formed by damming a nearby creek and was one of many natural spaces included in the Soul City master plan. Bordered by a tall thicket of pines and oaks, it had the makings of a pretty scene, but the brush was so overgrown and the shor
eline so littered with bottles and trash that it felt forlorn instead.

  Back in the car, I completed the loop and left Green Duke Village. Turning onto Liberation Road again, I found the entrance to Pleasant Hills, a subdivision that had been laid out with roads and lots but never developed. If Green Duke felt neglected and lonely, Pleasant Hills was positively eerie. The roads here were in even worse shape, the cracks and fissures forming an endless maze across the pavement, the woods creeping in from both sides. On some streets, it was nearly impossible to get through, and I could hear weeds and fallen branches scraping against the bottom of the car. As I drove deeper into the woods, I began to lose my bearings and worried I might not find my way out. At one point, I came to a dead end that had been turned into a makeshift dump. The ground was strewn with used tires, car seats, garbage bags, clothing, furniture, and a broken TV. Leaving the engine on, I stepped out of the car briefly to snap a few pictures, then got back inside and made my way quickly to the main road.

  Over the next few hours, I explored the rest of what remains of Soul City—a boarded-up shopping center, a volunteer fire department, a barely used cemetery. Eventually, I found the other landmark I had been looking for: Soul Tech I, a seventy-two-thousand-square-foot manufacturing plant that had been built in 1975 in the hopes of attracting industry. It was located near the main entrance to the city, which I had missed earlier. Discovering it now, I turned onto Soul City Boulevard, a winding, tree-lined avenue that looked like the approach to any of the hundreds of industrial and office parks that had sprouted up across the South over the past half century. As I crossed the railroad tracks again, I saw Soul Tech I on my left. It was a long, low building made of concrete and glass that had probably seemed state-of-the-art in 1975 but that looked rather ordinary today—with one exception. It was surrounded by two twenty-foot-high fences, each topped by coils of barbed wire. The fences were not designed to keep criminals out; they were designed to keep them in. In 1997, eighteen years after the federal government pulled the plug on Soul City, the state built a medium-security prison down the road from Soul Tech I. A few years later, prison officials converted the abandoned plant into a soap factory. It is now the Correction Enterprises Janitorial Products Plant, a $6.5 million-a-year business staffed by inmates earning about fifteen cents an hour.