We Spend a Lot of Time Destroying Dreams

Soul City, North Carolina

Photo tken in Spring 2006 by w:User:Tijuana Brass. Released in the public domain.

I felt a little silly making everyone ride with me 20 minutes off the highway to an overgrown cul-de-sac with a crumbling curb. “Where are the houses?” my buddy asked. The once-cleared lots were slowly being taken back over by scrub trees. “They were never built,” I say. We stand there a minute, someone points out a fire hydrant covered in kudzu, and we get back in the car to leave.

Soul City was the mecca of lawyer and civil rights activist Floyd McKissick’s mind. In the 1960s, Warren County, North Carolina was among the poorest places in a poor state with a median household income of $1,958 (far below the national average of $6,691). The county was 60 percent Black, but virtually all of the elected officials of the time were white.

Soul City would be multiracial, but with Black leadership, Black business owners, and Black opportunity at its center. The plan was bold, ambitious, and allegorical: The 5,000 acres McKissick secured for Soul City had been, just a few generations before, a plantation.

Soul City would offer security and unfettered opportunity, away from the entrenched patterns and power of the old South. McKissick wanted to reduce the out-migration of Southern Blacks from North Carolina by designing a city with family-supporting employment…