Soul City

by Thomas Healy

  The irony was not hard to grasp. A building designed to promote Black economic freedom had become a prison. There was only one consolation, I thought to myself: at least Floyd McKissick didn’t live to see this.

  * * *

  SOUL CITY WAS not the first utopian venture to fall tragically short of its goals. It is the very nature of utopia that it can never be fully realized, and American history is littered with utopian experiments that began with giddy promise and ended in depressing failure, from the Shakers and other millenarian movements of the nineteenth century to the hippie communes and religious cults of the twentieth. America itself was once cast in utopian terms. It was there, the German philosopher Georg Hegel said, that “the burden of world history shall reveal itself,” while the Puritan lawyer John Winthrop described the Massachusetts Bay Colony as “a City upon a Hill,” with the eyes of all the world watching.

  Nor was Soul City the first attempt to build a predominantly Black town that could serve as a means for economic advancement and a haven from racial oppression. Almost from the moment enslaved Africans were brought to the New World they sought to create communities of solidarity and refuge, from the Maroon settlements of North Carolina’s Great Dismal Swamp, which sheltered thousands of people who had escaped slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to northern towns such as Brooklyn, Illinois, founded by free and fugitive Blacks in the 1820s. During the Civil War, the federal government aided these efforts, establishing freedmen’s camps on plantations seized by Union troops. At Port Royal, South Carolina, more than ten thousand formerly enslaved people were provided land on which to harvest cotton, while at Davis Bend, Mississippi, the estate of Jefferson Davis’s brother, Northern officers presided over a colony of freed Blacks that Ulysses S. Grant hoped would become “a Negro Paradise.”

  These camps were broken up after the war when Andrew Johnson granted amnesty to Confederate leaders and restored seized property to Southern landowners. And for the next decade, as Reconstruction temporarily brought the freedmen new rights and a prominent role in southern politics, the drive to establish separate Black communities stalled. But when Reconstruction ended in 1877 and a new era of racial terror dawned, Black people once again sought asylum from violence and economic subjugation. Between 1879 and 1881, more than twenty-five thousand Blacks fled to Kansas as part of the Great Exodus. Settling on barren plains, they attempted to scratch out a life for themselves in towns such as Nicodemus, an unforgiving scrap of land said to have been named after an African prince brought to America in chains before purchasing his freedom. Many settlers lived in earthen dugouts, with little food, little clothing, and little hope of supporting themselves. Gradually, as word spread that life there was grim and the future bleak, the stream of migrants to Nicodemus slowed. And when efforts to secure a railroad line failed, the flow reversed itself until hardly anyone remained in Nicodemus at all.

  It wasn’t long before another mass migration began, this time to the Oklahoma Territory. Spurred by the opening of land to settlers in 1889, Black promoters began planning new towns and selling lots to Black people across the South. The most famous of these promoters, Edward Preston McCabe, left Nicodemus to found the town of Langston. Situated on a hill forty miles northeast of Oklahoma City, Langston was one of the country’s few successful Black settlements, reaching a population of two thousand in 1891. But McCabe had grander ambitions than simply building a Black town. A prominent Republican and former Kansas state auditor, he wanted to transform Oklahoma into a Black state, with himself installed as governor. With that goal in mind, he traveled to Washington in 1890 and presented his plan to President Benjamin Harrison, who gave the idea serious consideration. But the numbers were not on McCabe’s side. In spite of his promotional efforts, Black settlers never accounted for more than a tenth of the territory’s population, and when statehood came in 1907 Oklahoma passed a series of discriminatory laws and voting tests that all but ensured the disenfranchisement of its Black residents and the slow demise of its thirty or so Black towns.

  Soul City had much in common with both the utopian and Black-town traditions. Like its utopian precursors, it was born out of discontentment with the world as it existed and a desire to start over, on a completely blank slate. McKissick wanted to build a new kind of city, one with a stronger sense of community, a deeper regard for the well-being of others, and a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. He also hoped to incorporate the latest innovations in social policy and urban design, boasting that Soul City would be “a showpiece of democracy in a sea of hypocrisy.”

  But while many utopian communities had an abstract, theoretical feel to them, Soul City was a practical, hard-nosed endeavor. McKissick was not trying to achieve spiritual transcendence or the perfect relationship between man and nature. Unlike many utopian leaders of the nineteenth century, he did not aim to regulate every aspect of life in the community he was building. He did not want to eliminate sex or private property (as did the Shakers) or encourage open marriage (like the Owenites). He did not promise lemonade seas and the extinction of mosquitos (see the Fourierists). And he did not propose to build an elaborate, palatial structure like the “parallelogram” designed by the reformer Robert Owen or the “phalansteries” sketched by the French socialist Charles Fourier—self-contained cities in which groups of precisely 1,620 people would live and work in perfect harmony.

  Nor was McKissick interested in providing a sanctuary for those who wanted to “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” in the words of the psychedelic guru Timothy Leary. The people he recruited to build Soul City were not hippies or beatniks. They were, for the most part, professionals—architects, engineers, project managers, accountants, doctors, and nurses. And if they were not professionals, they had to have some skill, some concrete contribution they could offer the budding community. One young man, recently discharged from the air force, rode his motorcycle from Raleigh to Soul City in the spring of 1973 looking for a job, only to be told he needed a college degree. Returning a year later with degree in hand, he was once again rejected for lack of relevant experience. Not until his third attempt did someone take pity on him and find him a position in the office of the city planner.

  In short, although McKissick wanted to build a new kind of community, he also wanted to provide something vastly more straightforward for the residents of Soul City—a chance at the American dream. There was a reason Black people were absent from the socialist utopias of the nineteenth century, and it wasn’t just because they were being held in bondage. Even in the North, and even after the Civil War, most Blacks were indifferent to the message of the Shakers and Owenites for the simple reason that they couldn’t take for granted the very things those movements sought to escape: materialism, ownership of private property, and middle-class respectability. The same was true a century later when white suburban dropouts flocked to communes in California and New England. McKissick mocked what he regarded as the frivolousness of white culture, telling the graduating class of a historically Black college in 1969, “I thank God that black kids today aren’t swallowing goldfish or squeezing into phone booths or stealing panties and bras.” Blacks had more pressing concerns, and so did McKissick. He wanted to take the American dream—the dream of opportunity, upward mobility, and self-determination—and make that dream available to a group of people to whom it had been denied. McKissick wasn’t trying to create a place that didn’t exist. The place he had in mind existed all around him. It just didn’t exist for Black people.

  In that sense, Soul City was closer in spirit to the tradition of Black towns. When Edward McCabe founded Langston, he wasn’t attempting to create a community for starry-eyed transcendentalists. Like McKissick, he hoped to build a town that would attract hardworking residents with traditional, even Victorian, values. Nor did Black-town developers shy away from the dictates of commerce, believing, again like McKissick, that manufacturing was the key to economic progress. The founders of Mound Bayou, a celebrated Black
town in Louisiana, pinned their hopes for success on a cottonseed-oil mill, while officials in Boley, Oklahoma, invested in a brick factory and a carbonation works. In Langston, the L. L. C. Medicine and Toilet Factory manufactured blood remedies, cough balsam, and magic liniments and powders.

  The Black towns and Soul City had something else in common. Both grew out of a larger vision of Black independence and Black Nationalism. This vision was as old as slavery itself. It inspired Paul Cuffee’s attempt to colonize Sierra Leone in 1811, Marcus Garvey’s “back to Africa” movement in the 1920s, and the so-called Republic of New Africa, a group of Black Power advocates in the late 1960s who demanded that the federal government hand over five southern states—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina—along with $400 billion in cash. Often, the vision was about separation, about withdrawal from white society and the creation of a distinctive and self-sustaining Black nation. That was the message of a song about Boley, which at one point had a population of seven thousand and was the largest Black town in America:

  Oh, tis a pretty country

  And the Negroes own it too

  With not a single white man here

  To tell us what to do.

  Sometimes, though, the vision entailed a reversal of fortunes, where black was white and up was down, where those who had been high and mighty were brought down to size and those who had been oppressed were cast in the role of oppressor. This was the world described by Langston Hughes in his sardonic poem “Cultural Exchange”:

  Comes the COLORED HOUR:

  Martin Luther King is Governor of Georgia,

  Dr. Rufus Clement his Chief Adviser,

  A. Philip Randolph the High Grand Worthy.

  In white pillared mansions

  Sitting on their wide verandas,

  Wealthy Negroes have white servants,

  White sharecroppers work the black plantations,

  And colored children have white mammies:

  Mammy Faubus

  Mammy Eastland

  Mammy Wallace

  Dear, dear darling old white mammies—

  Sometimes even buried with our family.

  There was certainly an element of this vision in McKissick’s dream. By establishing his city on a former slave plantation, by taking ownership of the “big house,” by naming the whole enterprise Soul City, he signaled the satisfaction he took in turning the tables, in flipping the script of American history. But he also made clear that he wanted Soul City to be more than an inversion of white supremacy. As his good friend the author John Oliver Killens wrote in Black Man’s Burden, a collection of essays published in 1965, Black people were not simply “waiting for the day we can assume the role the white man played for centuries.” Instead, McKissick hoped to set an example of how one race, finding itself in a position of power, could treat another race with respect and fairness. “We do not intend to adopt the white man’s racism,” he told the press in describing his venture. “Soul City will be an attempt to move into the future, a future where black people welcome white people as equals.”

  If Soul City was an heir to the tradition of Black towns, however, there were important differences. Most Black towns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were little more than agricultural service centers and trading posts, dusty little settlements that grew up haphazardly, with little forethought or outside involvement. Soul City was a meticulously planned, thoroughly vetted endeavor that was supported by a number of prestigious universities, including the University of North Carolina, Howard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It also had something few other Black towns could claim: the financial backing and organizational assistance of the United States government. Aside from Port Royal and a handful of other settlements established during the Civil War (and, later, the Great Depression), the federal government had never before supported the creation of a predominantly Black community. It had certainly never backed a minority project on the scale of Soul City. As McKissick liked to boast, at the time of its development Soul City was the largest government-funded Black enterprise in American history.

  * * *

  SO WHAT HAPPENED? How did a project that once held such promise and potential fall so depressingly short of its goals? Was Soul City an impossible and misbegotten dream from the beginning, or was it a brilliant idea that was thwarted by racism and ignorance? And how might history have been different if Soul City had succeeded? Would it have led us down the road of separatism and division, as its critics said they feared? Or would it have reinvigorated the civil rights movement, as McKissick believed, giving Black people the economic independence to match the political freedoms they had won in the 1960s?

  These are among the questions I set out to answer when I traveled to Soul City that first time in 2014. It was a return home of sorts: born in North Carolina the same year McKissick launched his dream, I grew up just a few hours down the highway from Warren County and had often ridden past the exit that leads to Soul City. But it was not until the spring of 1991, when I was a young reporter at the News & Observer in Raleigh, that I first heard of the town’s existence. Working at my desk one day, I was approached by my editor, who relayed the news that Floyd McKissick had died. I knew the name but little else, so my editor filled me in, recapping McKissick’s career as a lawyer and civil rights leader. At one point, he referred offhandedly to the “all-black city” McKissick had attempted to build in the 1970s. Back then, it wasn’t possible to research a topic with a few clicks on a computer keyboard, so I filed the information in the back of my head and forgot about it. Not until many years later, when I was living far away and no longer working as a reporter, did I remember Soul City and begin to research its history. When I did, I learned that my editor’s description had been inaccurate; Soul City was never meant to be all Black. I also learned that the News & Observer had played a significant role in fostering that misperception—and in bringing about Soul City’s demise.

  Since my first trip to Soul City, I have been back many times, to interview the residents who still live there, to picture the land as it was when McKissick arrived in 1969, and to imagine what it might look like today had things turned out differently. In the process, I have learned much not only about Soul City but about race, inequality, and the structural and political forces that tie the two together. I have also learned about the power of dreams, a power that can inspire people to greatness and result in crushing disappointment.

  The disappointment of McKissick’s dream resulted from many factors. Like all utopian projects, Soul City was in part a victim of its own ambition. Although McKissick’s goal was modest—economic self-sufficiency for Black Americans—his method of achieving that goal was not. Attempting to build a city out of nothing but the red clay of the Carolina piedmont was a massive undertaking that would have daunted the most experienced and well-financed white developer. For a Black man without deep pockets or corporate backing, battling opposition from all sides, and facing one of the worst economic downturns of the century, it was a highly improbable venture.

  But not impossible. Had it been that, the lesson of Soul City would be limited. It would tell us something about the longings and aspirations of Black people, but little about the forces standing in their way. Soul City could have succeeded, though, as evidenced by the fact that other new cities of the period did survive—cities that faced many of the same challenges as Soul City, with one primary exception: they were built by white developers, financed by white corporations, and populated largely by white people. What doomed Soul City was not just the size of its ambition but, at least in part, the color. Like nearly every other effort to improve the lives of Black people, it was subjected to a level of scrutiny, second-guessing, and outright hostility that other ambitious ventures rarely encounter. Some of this scrutiny was motivated by blatant prejudice, but some of it is simply embedded in our social structures. If a project is designed primarily to help Blacks, it is automatically held to a
higher standard of justification.

  This is not to suggest that racism alone doomed Soul City. Again, that would be a simple story, and its lesson would be equally simple. Instead, the story of Soul City’s demise is more complicated and more confounding. It is a story not just about white prejudice but about white power, about the control of white society over the lives of Black people. Many of the whites who opposed Soul City were not overtly racist; they were integrationists who simply thought Soul City was the wrong path to racial equality. But although not bigots, they failed to see that their opposition denied Blacks the one thing they desired most: self-determination. As one Black preacher presciently observed in 1973, “It’s white folk, not black folk, who are going to decide whether Soul City will be a reality. It will come into being only if white folks want it to come into being.”

  The federal government deserves its share of the blame, too. After encouraging Soul City’s development, it failed to offer needed resources and support. Moving at the pace of bureaucracy instead of business, it was responsible for costly delays and missed opportunities. Wary of public scrutiny and cowed by political opposition, it imposed conditions on Soul City that were not imposed on other new towns. And when the scrutiny and opposition intensified, the government lacked the conviction to stand by McKissick.