The 1970s Black Utopian City That Became a Modern Ghost Town

What the demise of an experimental Black town reveals about the struggle for racial equality today

FEBRUARY 16, 2021

Thomas Healy
Professor at Seton Hall Law School

Visit soul city, north Carolina, today, and you won’t find much: an abandoned health-care clinic stripped by vandals; a pool and recreation center with a no trespassing sign; a 1970s subdivision with streets that are cracked and crumbling; and an industrial plant that has been converted into a prison. If not for the concrete monolith with the words soul city cast in red iron, you might not know this was supposed to be a city at all.

But that’s what the civil-rights leader Floyd McKissick hoped to create when he arrived here in 1969 with dreams of transforming an old slave plantation into a new city an hour north of Raleigh. The city would be dedicated to Black economic empowerment, McKissick envisioned, bringing money and opportunity to an area left behind by the modern economy and reversing the exodus of Black people to the northern slums. He projected that by the year 2000, it would boast 24,000 jobs and a population of 50,000.

Soul City never came close to those projections. When development stopped 10 years later, there were just 135 jobs and 124 full-time residents. In the four decades since, Soul City has quietly faded into oblivion, becoming a modern-day ghost town. Most people, even in North Carolina, have never heard of it.

That’s unfortunate. The history of Soul City is worth remembering as the country continues to grapple with the legacy of segregation and slavery. McKissick’s unrealized dream offers a window into the struggle for racial equality and the many forces—social, political, and economic—that continue to stand in the way.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/lost-dream-soul-city/618012/