Floyd McKissick recalls how bias derailed his father’s vision for NC’s Soul City

A few years ago, Floyd McKissick Jr. got a call at his Durham law office from an employee at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. She had come across old records about a community McKissick’s father, a Black civil-rights leader, had tried to create in North Carolina and she wanted to know: Was there really a place called Soul City?

Yes, McKissick assured her, there was such a place created in the 1970s under the federal New Communities Act. It was his father’s dream, and it became a dream deferred.

The idea was for a Black developers to use federally backed bonds to create a predominately Black city, although all races were to be welcomed and whites were also involved in launching the development. Soul City would be a place where Blacks could shape the culture and economy and some who had left the segregated South for the North might even return to a new city built where slaves once worked on a plantation.

But after the infrastructure was put in place, the vision fell apart. The federal government reneged on its commitment. The press, especially The News & Observer, portrayed Soul City as a boondoggle. North Carolina politicians from both sides – Republican Sen. Jesse Helms and Democratic U.S. Rep. L.H. Fountain – opposed it

Along with overt racism, what stymied Soul City, McKissick said, was implicit bias on the part of normally supportive whites, a bias that the Black Lives Matter movement has forced even liberal whites to confront. “People didn’t realize that they had biases related to the name or the concept,” he said. “It’s not overt, but it’s there.”

Now, McKissick, a Durham lawyer who served 13 years in the state Senate, is spending part of Black History Month discussing the story of the community his father announced on Lincoln’s Birthday in 1969. What has brought it all back is a new book by Thomas Healy, “Soul City: Race, Equality and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia.” Healy, a North Carolina native and former News & Observer reporter, is a law professor at Seton Hall University.

Healy’s book is a well-researched and well-written corrective for much that has been reported about Soul City, but its title skews its subject. McKissick Sr. wasn’t seeking a utopia. He was seeking a practical reality – a chance for Blacks to fully share in American capitalism.

“He was intrigued by the idea of building new towns and communities,” McKissick said of his father, who died in 1991. “He was for promoting entrepreneurship, for giving people an opportunity to be involved in a new town.”

To launch the project, the development company issued bonds and purchased 3,600 acres in Warren County, 55 miles north of Durham. The proposed city was to be home to 35,000 people. But HUD, cooling to an idea born under President Lyndon Jonson’s Great Society, pulled out of the project in 1979, as it had with other towns founded under the New Communities Act. Today, the vestige of Soul City is about 60 homes.

McKissick, 68, who has a master’s in planning from the University of North Carolina and served as Soul City’s planning director, said many whites wrongly saw Soul City as an attempt by Blacks to segregate themselves. It actually was an attempt by Blacks to integrate themselves more fully into the economy, he said.

Planning experts and government officials who toured the site were impressed by the plan and the progress being made on the roads, water systems and recreation facilities, McKissick said.

“Those who came to Soul City left virtually 100 percent of the time feeling like it was a very special place that was unique and aspirational,” he said, “a place where perhaps they might like to live one day.”

Perhaps one day, but, as the McKissicks learned, not in that day, and likely still not in this one.