Soul City, North Carolina

Soul City, North Carolina
Planned community
Soul City sign at the entrance to Green Duke Village
Soul City Show map of North Carolina Soul City Show map of the United States
Coordinates: 36°24′31″N 78°16′13″W / 36.40861°N 78.27028°W / 36.40861; -78.27028
Country	United States
State	North Carolina
County	Warren County
Established	1969
ZIP code	27563

Soul City is a community in Warren County, North Carolina, United States. It was a planned community first proposed in 1969 by Floyd McKissick,^[1] a civil rights leader and director of the Congress of Racial Equality. Funded by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, Soul City was one of thirteen model city projects under the Urban Growth and New Community Development Act. It was located on 5,000 acres (20 km²) in Warren County near Manson-Axtell Road and Soul City Boulevard in Norlina.^{[2][page needed]}

After the 1968 Civil Rights bill was passed, many civil rights activists focused on the economic development in black communities so African Americans could take advantage of the resources they had recently won.^[3] Following his departure from CORE, McKissick founded McKissick Enterprises in August 1968, a company which was supposed to "create and distribute profits to millions of black Americans" by investing in and providing technical advice to black-run businesses.^[4] It invested in a variety of projects.^[5] Following the promulgation of the New Communities Act, McKissick tasked his staff with drafting a plan for a new city in the South,^[6] figuring that new planned community there would attract more interest if it was located there rather than elsewhere.^[7]

Wanting to improve conditions in his home state and feeling that it was more politically and economically progressive than its other Southern contemporaries, McKissick settled on locating the community in North Carolina.^[8] He tasked former legal colleague T. T. Clayton with discreetly searching for potential sites.^[9] After rejecting a property in Halifax County as too small for his ambitions, McKissick took interest in a 1,800 site in Warren County. Named the Circle P Ranch, the land was a cattle and timber farm owned by Leon Perry, who was losing money and eager to sell.^[10] Once a tobacco plantation, it contained woods, pastures, creeks, old agricultural buildings, centered around a historic manor house.^[11]

Warren County was a majority black rural area facing economic downturn.^[12][13] It was the third poorest county in the state and was experiencing the largest population decline in the state.^[14] Educational attainment rates were low.^[15] Services and utilities in the area near the ranch were minimal. The house was serviced by electricity and the site had several wells and septic tanks, but there was no centralized water or sewage access and only one proximate paved road.^[16] Despite these problems, McKissick felt optimistic about the property's potential owing to low regional labor costs—which were beneficial to attracting industry, its geographic centrality relative to major urban centers within 500 miles, and its proximity to U.S. Route 1 and the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad. There were also adjacent tracts amounting to—in Clayton's estimation—5,000 acres which could be further acquired.^[17] Kerr Lake, several miles away, was well placed to serve as a reservoir for a city.^[18] He also felt that establishing a planned community to help blacks on a former plantation once owned a by a segregationist legislator would have symbolic resonance.^[19]

Clayton negotiated with Perry to purchase the land for $390,000. On December 19, 1968, Clayton paid Perry $4,000 for a 60-day option to purchase his ranch. Clayton and McKissick, with Perry's assent, subsequently assigned the option interest to McKissick Enterprises.^[19] On January 13, McKissick held a joint press conference with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman to announce his intent to build a planned community called "Soul City" in Warren County.^[20][21][a] McKissick argued that the project would help ameliorate issues of black outmigration from the South and urban decay in major American cities by "helping to put new life into a depressed area" and "helping to stem the flood of migrants to the already over-crowded and decaying cities".^[23] While insisting that Soul City would "be open to residents of all colors", he emphasized that the town would generate "new careers for black people" and that it would "be an attempt to move into the future, a future where black people welcome white people as equals".^[23]

McKissick's announcement generated a significant amount of media attention, with the Big Three television networks each covering it on their evening news programs and The Washington Post reporting on it in a front page story.^[24] Some outlets, such as The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer, expressed skepticism at the economic viability of the project, while others such as the Greensboro Daily News and journalist Claude Sitton feared that it would manifest itself as an experiment in black separatism and clash with the integrationist goals of the civil rights movement.^[25] McKissick, though continuing to emphasize the role blacks would play in the project, was incensed by the characterization of his project as separatist, telling one newspaper, "This is neither integration nor segregation, but letting black people do what ever they damn please, and go where they please."^[26] Some progressives, such as Elizabeth Tornquist of the North Carolina Anvil, attacked the plan for relying too much on capitalism, which they considered exploitative and predisposed to enrich the project's leaders while unlikely to provide any long term benefit to poor blacks.^[27] Response from black newspapers was generally optimistic, and McKissick received some favorable correspondence from blacks around the country.^[28] Several black leaders and activists expressed skepticism at the proposal, such as National Urban League director Whitney Young.^[29] Reactions in Warren County were mixed, with many locals surprised by McKissick's announcement.^[30][31] Perry received death threats for offering the sale to McKissick and briefly fled to Florida.^[32]

In the weeks following his press conference, McKissick retained architecture firm Ifill Johnson Hanchard to design Soul City and a consulting firm to provide economic analysis. He focused most of his efforts on securing the financing necessary to purchase Perry's ranch.^[33] After making unsuccessful entreaties to several institutions, he met with executives of Chase Bank and asked them to lend him $390,000. They eventually agreed to loan him $200,000 out of an affiliated bank in Lumberton.^[34] Unable to secure an additional bank loan, McKissick agreed to purchase the land with a loan from Perry for the remainder of the balance with the promise that he would pay it off within a year. He officially received the deed for the property on February 21, 1969.^[35] Securing some additional funding from Rhode Island businessman Irving Fain, McKissick then reluctantly sought out grants from the federal government.^[36] A few months later the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development granted $243,000 to the state of North Carolina which, with the quiet support of Governor Bob Scott, forwarded over half of the money to McKissick's newly-established Warren Regional Planning Corporation. Chase Bank also extended McKissick $200,000 in additional credit.^[37]

Confronted with Ifill Johnson Hanchard's lack of expertise in urban planning, McKissick hired Harvey Gantt to plan Soul City. Heavily influenced by the layout of Columbia, Maryland, Gantt envision Soul City to be a collection of villages oriented around a core area.^[38]

Soul City was intended to be a new town built from the ground up and open to all races, while placing an emphasis on providing opportunities for minorities and the poor.^[1][39] It was also designed to be a means of reversing out-migration of minorities and the poor to urban areas; the opportunities Soul City provided, such as jobs, education, housing, training, and other social services would help lessen the migration.^[40]

The city was planned to contain three villages housing 18,000 people by 1989. Soul City was projected to have 24,000 jobs and 44,000 inhabitants by 2004.^[40] It was intended to include industry and retail development for jobs, as well as residential housing and services. The plan was for residents to work, get schooling, shop, receive health care, and worship in town. Soul City was the first new town to be organized by African-American businesses. McKissick envisioned Soul City as a community where all races could live in harmony.^[41]

McKissick believed the way to improve the economic situation of African Americans at that time was through black capitalism. He said, "Unless the Black Man attains economic independence, any political independence will be an illusion.^[42] Richard Nixon supported Black capitalism, and McKissick backed Nixon in his 1972 re-election in efforts to get more funding from HUD.^[42] In 1972, the city received a grant of $14 million from HUD based on plans of attracting industry as well as developing residential housing and by the late 1970s, the city had received more than $19 million federal funds with an additional $8 million from state and local sources.^[3]

The U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, repeatedly attacked the project as a boondoggle and a waste of taxpayer money. A series of articles in the Raleigh News & Observer falsely accused McKissick of fraud and corruption and a congressional audit of the development stalled progress for nine months, only to clear Soul City of the charges leveled against it.^[43][44]

By 1974, pioneering families moved to Soul City and steady progress was apparent in the laying of water and sewer lines, construction of roads, a day care center, a health care center, and early construction of "Soul Tech I" (with 52,000 square feet of industrial space).^[45]

Soul City's decline was caused by several factors, such as the local economy of Warren County, the national economy, and negative press coverage. Warren County had over 40% of people not graduating high school. The shortage of skilled laborers and lack of industrial experience deterred some industries from moving to Soul City. The US economy had a major downturn in 1974 as inflation hit double digits in 1973 and 1974. For the rest of the decade, the country went through "stagflation", "the simultaneous burden of inflation and unemployment."^[3] The state of the national economy made many industrial companies cautious of expanding. The Soul City Company (SCC) reported that CC Grander, a utility company and Burlington Industries, a textile company both had plans to move to Soul City but halted their expansion during the economic uncertainty of the country.^[3] The HUD's new town programs were signed and launched during the country's economic downturn. Some argue that Soul City as well as other new town programs would have succeeded if there had not been an economic recession. Michael Spear, the former general manager of the new town of Columbia, Maryland, commented that "launching a new towns program in the early 1970s was like asking the Wright brothers to test their airplane in a hurricane and then concluding, when it crashed, that the invention did not work."^[3]

The negative press coverage of some media companies deterred not just industries but also white homeowners. The press covered Soul City as a "new black town", which made it unappealing for white residents to move in. The Wall Street Journal, which had significant credence in the business community, negatively portrayed McKissick as a lawyer with a lavish lifestyle. The Journal damaged McKissick's name and identity, which negatively impacted his efforts in bringing in new industry. The city failed to reach its initial ambitions. Lawsuits and investigations into the use of funds by the Soul City Company, the city's developers, resulted in foreclosure in 1979 despite eventually being cleared by a Government Accountability Office audit.^[46]

Since that time, the city has grown somewhat, but not to the size originally planned. The former Soultech 1 building was purchased by the adjoining Warren County Correctional Institution for expansion. A number of new homes have been constructed. The lawsuits, negative media coverage, and mainly the lack of industries moving into Warren County eventually caused HUD to pull its funding for Soul City in June 1979.

Soul City has not reached the ambitions McKissick planned for. However, there are still some positive outcomes from the project. Soul City brought the first health care facility to the residents of Warren County, a three-county water system, and a sewage disposal system. There was significant out-migration of African Americans from the south to northern cities. However, after Soul City was created, more African Americans moved to North Carolina than out in the 1970s, and this was the first time since the Reconstruction Era.^{[relevant?][3]} In 1980, 35 housing units, a clinic, a tennis court, and a pool had been developed.^{[citation needed]} About 150 people were employed in the city.^{[citation needed]}

• Mound Bayou, Mississippi

• Healy, Thomas (2021). Soul City: Race, Equality, and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia. New York City: Metropolitan Books. ISBN 9781627798624.
• Minchin, Timothy J. (2005). ""A Brand New Shining City": Floyd B. McKissick Sr. and the Struggle to Build Soul City, North Carolina". The North Carolina Historical Review. 82 (2): 125–155. ISSN 0029-2494. JSTOR 23523505.
• Strain, Christopher (2004). "Soul City, North Carolina: Black Power, Utopia, and the African American Dream". The Journal of African American History. 89 (1) (Winter ed.): 57–74. doi:10.2307/4134046. JSTOR 4134046.

• Floyd B. McKissick. Soul City North Carolina, 1974 on Hathi Trust (14 pages).
• Amanda Shapiro. "Welcome to the Soul City." Oxford American, A Magazine of the South 80 (Spring 2013). online version from April 4, 2016.
• Soul City - A dream. Will it come true? Dan Hull, The Chronicle, Duke University, March 1, 1974