• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Soul City, North Carolina

OHC

deep green blue collar rainbow
Location
Little Beirut
Pronouns
they/she
In the 1970s, civil rights leader Floyd McKissick undertook one of the era's many fascinating failed experiments: he tried to build a city from scratch in rural Warren County, North Carolina, with a goal of Black uplift through entrepreneurial New Urbanism. The project was called Soul City.

As the name indicates, it was kind of a utopian dream, but very distinct from the hippies' intentional communities of the same era. First, Soul City was supposed to be a genuine, full-sized city, with civic institutions, shops, and a manufacturing base. It wasn't communal, either; McKissick promoted "Black capitalism" (which he said was a mixture of free enterprise and socialism - redistribution of wealth via targeted state investment in Black communities and businesses) and he wanted his residents to own their homes. The most important difference, though, was that Soul City was to be partially underwritten by the federal government under the New Communities Act. This law was supposed to respond to overcrowding in cities and the failures of "urban renewal," and promoted public-private partnerships to build new towns across the nation. As you might imagine its ambitious goals quickly dissipated in the malaisey economics of the 70s and several of the projects failed, leaving only a few suburban communities like The Woodlands, Texas, as its legacy.

Over the course of the 1970s, McKissick received a sputtering stream of funds from HUD as he purchased land (a former slave plantation), surveyed the site, and began building basic infrastructure. HUD did pony up a lot of money, but there was always a lot of hesitation around the project. McKissick was not an experienced property developer or urban planner, the idea of building a city from scratch in an isolated spot was a very risky investment, racists of both the quiet liberal and screaming reactionary varieties were opposed, and there was a general suspicion that the project was Black separatist in nature and that the government would be funding a segregated community. But this was the era of activist government, McKissick had an okay relationship with the Nixon administration, and the project did keep on ticking - until it just didn't, and died a drawn-out death after HUD cut it off in 1979. Today, the only remains of Soul City are one little housing development in the middle of nowhere, flanked by the city's factory building. In a brutal turn of events, the factory shell has been incorporated into the nearby state prison and now houses inmates making soap for 15 cents an hour.

The biggest reason Soul City didn't work out seems to have been a Catch-22 in attracting investors. McKissick and company talked to dozens of companies who were theoretically interested in locating factories in Soul City, but who wanted a guarantee they'd have enough infrastructure and enough of a population base to run those factories. Without anyone committing to invest, though, McKissick couldn't promise any of those things. The federal grants and loans weren't enough to support a city on their own, and as years went by and the economy worsened and nobody took the plunge, it became clear that it was never going to happen. Probably the best chance for Soul City to break the cycle was in early 1973, when the Morse Electro Products Corporation - manufacturers of sewing machines and stereos - agreed to build a plant employing 350 people. But HUD dragged its feet for a few months on restructuring the Soul City development corporation's debt, which was one of the issues Morse wanted resolved before signing the deal. After too long without a response, Morse pulled out.

It seems like Soul City was viable enough as an idea that a small POD like Morse investing could have broken the chicken-egg cycle and gotten some people and businesses moving in. Surviving the economy of the 70s would have been difficult, of course; Morse Electro ran into some financial trouble later on in the decade and other potential employers would have too. But what if it had made it through?

The plan was for 18,000 residents by 1989 and 44,000 by 2004. That's a little ambitious, given its projected economic base, although manufacturing towns have stayed viable and grown in the New South economy, so who knows. McKissick wanted both to provide jobs for local Black people (hence the city's location in an impoverished and sleepy county) and to attract residents from Northern cities in a reversal of the Great Migration. Soul City was supposed to be integrated, although in practice the only white people who ever lived there were some of McKissick's aides and I'd imagine a lot of white Americans in the 1980s would feel wary of moving to a "Black city" with a strongly political name and purpose. What would the political implications be here? Would Soul City inspire more entrepreneurial uplift projects? Worth noting that both Harvey Gantt and later-Representative Eva Clayton worked on the project at different points.

If you use Google Maps to look at what was built, you can imagine what it was supposed to look like: roundels of villages of single-family homes and apartments, with central hubs of businesses for each village. The plan was inspired by Jane Jacobs but also by James Rouse, the shopping mall mogul and suburban developer, and you can see some of both influences in the sprawly-but-community-focused design. If Soul City had worked, would planned towns on the New Communities Act model be revisited after the economy rebounded?
 
Even if it succeeded, I'd say it'd just be a footnote little different in practice from other attempts by localities (including majority-minority ones) to attract investment. But a fun footnote.
 
Interesting! I have to wonder how sustainable it was as a long term economic prospect, given the county itself tho. One large employer small rural towns are nervous places to live, after all

I think the idea was to have a more diverse set of employers than just the sewing machine guys - "Soul Tech I," the factory building now owned by the prison, was supposed to be chopped up into workshops for small artisan manufacturers, and the one successful enterprise they set up was a new county health clinic that employed most of the people who stayed. But even if that had worked out, a very manufacturing-heavy economy without a major urban center nearby would be vulnerable during recessions, yeah.

Something even a marginal Soul City could do tho would be provide a blueprint for urban reinvestment that blunts the 70s-early 90s nadir of the American city and maybe makes it "less gentrifiable" (or makes gentrification play out differently)

I was thinking, if future suburbs were built with this kind of focus on livability and mixed-use development, there might be less of a massive return to the cities and the gentrification crises of the 2000s onwards might not be as bad.
 
I'm interested in hearing more about this New Communities Act, can't seem to find something of that name from the correct era.

The idea that struck re: employers is that if the big ones do pack up and leave there might be a chance we see something akin to the Mondragon Corporation arising centred on Soul City.

Of course, the real dream is both EPCOT and Soul City exist as polar opposites of each other.
 
I'm interested in hearing more about this New Communities Act, can't seem to find something of that name from the correct era.

I didn't have the name exactly right - in full it was the National Urban Policy and New Communities Development Act of 1970.

The idea that struck re: employers is that if the big ones do pack up and leave there might be a chance we see something akin to the Mondragon Corporation arising centred on Soul City.

That's an interesting idea and one that would fit with the kind of radical pragmatism that seems to have been McKissick's style. (The book I got this idea from, Soul City by Thomas Healy, doubles as a decent biography of the guy.) He was focused on Black economic advancement by any means, calling himself a socialist and a capitalist to different audiences, campaigning for Richard Nixon in the hope of a quid pro quo, etc. Could definitely see him going for a totally different model of self-sufficiency if his project seems about to decline.

Also ties in nicely to another of the very AH moments of the era - the Youngstown steel workers' plan to take over their vacant factories.
 
I was thinking, if future suburbs were built with this kind of focus on livability and mixed-use development, there might be less of a massive return to the cities and the gentrification crises of the 2000s onwards might not be as bad.

That kind of happened with Greenbelt MD (and I'm not sure continued disinvestment in urban cores was either sustainable or possible) but yes
 
Bloody hell, this is a weird thing to learn about. A capitalist black Milton Keynes! It does seem a thing that would've worked, though with the obvious problem that it has to survive the 70s economic crap (and the longer it exists, the more demographics may shift and cause 'fun' awkwardness)
 
Bloody hell, this is a weird thing to learn about. A capitalist black Milton Keynes! It does seem a thing that would've worked, though with the obvious problem that it has to survive the 70s economic crap (and the longer it exists, the more demographics may shift and cause 'fun' awkwardness)

This is why the 70s is such an interesting time to study - so many false starts and dead ends.

I ought to read some more about MK and the New Towns, I've seen some pictures and they look really strange
 
Back
Top