Fifty Years of Soul City: Lessons of a Black Utopia

Abstract

In 1972, the U.S. government granted Floyd McKissick, the renowned Civil Rights activist, a $14 million bond guarantee to build Soul City, an entirely new predominantly Black city in rural North Carolina. McKissick, the former National Director of the Congress for Racial Equality, envisioned a city built on the premise of Black economic and political autonomy, one that could serve as a model for socially progressive planning and Black empowerment for the post–Civil Rights era. By the end of the decade, however, the government withdrew its support for the fledgling city, forcing it into bankruptcy and freezing it in its half-made—or half-abandoned—state. Attempts to explain the series of catastrophes that prevented Soul City’s success dominate the literature on McKissick’s project. Such analyses importantly reveal the persistent and insidious racism of U.S. housing policy, the broken promises of the Nixon era, the failure of the government to respond appropriately to the urban crisis of the 1970s, and the impact of this history on mass incarceration today. But these investigations also eclipse an analysis of this project’s radical potential. This chapter proposes a reexamination of Soul City through what Italo Calvino identified as the constructive capacity of utopic thinking, a methodology underpinning Invisible Cities. Through an analysis of the manifestos, proposals, brochures, and site plans that constitute Soul City’s paper trail, this chapter considers the constructive utopianism of Soul City and what happened when McKissick attempted to move his utopia from paper to land.