The Man: Floyd B. McKissick Sr.
Floyd Bixler McKissick Sr. was born in 1922 in Asheville, North Carolina. His father was a bellhop; his mother was a domestic worker. He attended Morehouse College, served in the segregated Army, and in 1951 became one of the first Black graduates of the University of North Carolina School of Law — a full three years before Brown v. Board of Education. As a lawyer in Durham, he represented civil rights activists in some of the most significant desegregation cases in the state, including the successful challenge to segregation of the state's public schools.
McKissick became the national director of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) in 1966, replacing James Farmer. Under his leadership, CORE shifted focus from desegregation campaigns to economic empowerment — a move that reflected McKissick's conviction that legal equality without economic power was incomplete. He organized the "Freedom Rides" that brought national attention to segregated interstate transportation, and he was in the room when Black leaders debated the direction of the movement after the major legislative victories of 1964 and 1965.
In 1967, McKissick gave a speech at the First National Conference on Black Power in Newark. He argued that the Civil Rights Act had broken legal segregation but left economic segregation standing. Black communities had been systematically denied the ability to build wealth — not just access to lunch counters. The next phase of the movement, he argued, had to be economic. This was the intellectual foundation of Soul City.
"The Civil Rights Act gives us the right to sit at a lunch counter. It does not give us the money to buy the meal. Soul City was about the next step: building the economic base that makes the legal right real."
— Floyd B. McKissick Sr., paraphrasing his own argumentThe Idea: A City Built by Black People, for Everyone
McKissick's plan was audacious: he would build an entirely new city from scratch on 5,000 acres of farmland in Warren County, North Carolina — one of the poorest counties in the state, with a population that was 65% Black and a poverty rate exceeding 25%. The city would be economically integrated, targeting a population of 18,000 within five years and 50,000 at full build-out. It would have its own industrial park to attract manufacturing jobs, its own energy and water systems, its own housing stock at multiple price points, its own schools, and its own healthcare facilities.
In 1969, McKissick left CORE to pursue the project full-time. He incorporated Floyd B. McKissick Enterprises and began acquiring land in Warren County. The location was deliberate: it was rural, poor, and overwhelmingly Black — exactly the type of community that the Great Migration was draining of people and that no one else was investing in. McKissick believed that Black economic development could not happen only in cities; it also had to reach the rural South where millions of Black Americans still lived and where the economic devastation was most severe.
In 1970, the Nixon administration passed the Urban Growth and New Community Development Act, a bipartisan initiative to fund planned new towns as a solution to urban sprawl and economic stagnation. It was an unlikely source of support for a Black nationalist economic project — but the program was structured to fund projects based on feasibility, not ideology. McKissick applied. In 1971, Soul City was provisionally approved for $14 million in federal loan guarantees. In 1972, after an extensive review, the Department of Housing and Urban Development committed $18 million in guarantees — at the time, the largest federal commitment ever for a project led by a Black developer.
"It is our firm conviction that the new town must be a place in which the soul of man can grow, develop, and flourish. That is why we call it Soul City."
— Floyd B. McKissick Sr., 1972Breaking Ground: What Was Actually Built
Between 1972 and 1975, McKissick's team delivered what federal inspectors repeatedly described as a well-managed, on-schedule project. The infrastructure that was built included:
The industrial park was the centerpiece of the economic strategy. McKissick secured a commitment from Burlington Industries, one of the largest textile manufacturers in the country, to build a plant in Soul City that would employ 300 people — at a time when Warren County had one of the highest unemployment rates in the state. The plant was built before the residential community reached critical mass, creating jobs that could be filled by local residents immediately.
The housing development — known as "Soul City 1" — was completed. It consisted of 72 multi-family units and 36 single-family homes, with modern design by Black architects, built by Black contractors. The homes were priced to be affordable to working-class families while being high enough quality to attract middle-class residents. The water and sewer systems were built to serve a population of 18,000 — overbuilt for the early phase, as planned, to accommodate growth.
The health clinic provided medical services to an area that had been medically underserved for generations. The Soul Tech 1 building was constructed as a commercial and light-industrial space designed to attract small businesses. The road network was laid out. Street lights were installed. The city had a design, a plan, and a community of people who had moved there believing in what it could become.
By 1975, Soul City was functioning. The population was small — roughly 250 people — but the infrastructure was in place, the industrial park was operational, and the trajectory was upward. Federal inspectors from HUD rated the project "satisfactory" in every category.
The Attack: Jesse Helms, Dan Rather, and the Manufactured Scandal
In 1975, Jesse Helms — then in his second year as U.S. Senator from North Carolina — launched a sustained political attack on Soul City. Helms was one of the most powerful and explicitly segregationist senators of the post-Civil Rights era. He had opposed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and every other piece of civil rights legislation. He saw in Soul City an existential threat: a visible, successful, federally-funded Black-run project in the heart of his state.
Helms's strategy was not to attack Soul City as a Black project — he was careful about the language. He attacked it as a "boondoggle." He demanded that HUD investigate the project for financial mismanagement. He used his position as senior Senator to pressure HUD to withhold further loan disbursements pending an audit. The audit found nothing — the project was clean — but the delay in funding was enough to create problems. Soul City had been approved for $18 million in loan guarantees but was receiving the funds in tranches as development milestones were met. Helms's intervention froze the release of the next tranche for months.
Then came CBS News and Dan Rather. In 1976, CBS aired a 60 Minutes segment on Soul City. Rather, then a CBS correspondent, framed the project as an empty, failed dream — showing footage of the open fields, the modest housing, the low population, and interviewing local white residents who expressed skepticism. The segment did not mention that the project was on schedule, that the infrastructure was built, that the industrial park was operational, or that federal inspections had rated it satisfactory. It presented a two-year-old project as if it should have been a finished city.
"It was the most distorted piece of journalism I had ever seen. They came looking for a failure. They found a construction site, and they called it a ghost town."
— Floyd B. McKissick Sr., on the 60 Minutes segmentThe consequences were immediate. After the CBS report, other news outlets (including the Washington Post, Newsweek, and the Raleigh News & Observer) ran critical stories. Burlington Industries, which had committed to building the textile plant, pulled out of its commitment — publicly citing "uncertainty" about the project. Potential residents and businesses stayed away. The narrative of failure became self-fulfilling. The project that federal inspectors had rated satisfactory was now described in the press as a multimillion-dollar mistake. The story of Soul City's failure was written — not because the project had failed, but because powerful people needed it to fail.
The Pullout: When the Government Walked Away
In 1977, Jimmy Carter — a Southern Democrat — became president. For Soul City, this should have been better than a Republican administration. Carter had campaigned on support for civil rights and economic development in the rural South. But the political damage from the Helms/CBS narrative had changed the calculation. Supporting Soul City was now politically risky. The narrative of "failure" was already in the air, even though the project had not failed.
HUD, under the Carter administration, commissioned a new evaluation of Soul City. The evaluation found that the project was fundamentally sound — and that it needed approximately $12 million in additional funding to reach the critical mass needed to become self-sustaining. At that point, the project had received roughly $10 million of its original $18 million commitment. The extra $12 million was within the original scope of the New Communities program. HUD declined to provide it.
Instead, in 1979, HUD announced that it was terminating the loan guarantee and taking control of the project. The government — which had committed $18 million, had disbursed roughly half, and had been asked for a reasonable additional investment to reach viability — instead walked away and foreclosed. McKissick lost the project. The land, the infrastructure, and the incomplete city reverted to HUD. The federal government that had funded the project also killed it, then used the resulting "failure" to justify not funding future projects like it.
"They funded us enough to get started. Then they funded us enough to almost get there. Then they cut us off. And then they pointed at the empty fields and said, 'See? It doesn't work.'"
— Floyd B. McKissick Sr., 1979The pattern is recognizable across Chain's threads: the same government that created the Black-white wealth gap through the GI Bill's exclusion of Black veterans, the same government that redlined Black neighborhoods out of existence, the same government that built the highway system through Black communities — that same government funded a Black-run economic experiment just enough to begin demonstrating what was possible, then withdrew support at the critical moment and called the result a failure. This is not incompetence. It is a structural ceiling on Black economic self-determination.
What Remains: Soul City Today
Soul City was not completely abandoned. The community that had already moved there stayed. Today, Soul City is a community of roughly 400–500 people. The water tower with "Soul City" painted on it still stands — visible from the highway, a landmark for locals who know what it means and a curiosity for everyone else. The streets bear plan-compliant names: Soul City Boulevard, McKissick Street, Unity Street. The houses from Soul City 1 are still occupied. The water and sewer systems still serve the community. The health clinic became a rural health center that continues to serve Warren County residents.
But the industrial park never reached critical mass. Without the Burlington plant, without the population to attract new employers, without the federal commitment that was promised and withdrawn, the economic engine never turned over. Warren County remains one of the poorest counties in North Carolina — consistently ranking in the bottom 5% of all U.S. counties by median household income. The same poverty rates that McKissick set out to address in 1969 persist today. The city he imagined was never finished. But it was not delusional.
"Soul City exists. You can go there. You can stand under the water tower. But it is a seed that was watered just enough to sprout and then left to survive on what little rain fell from the sky."
— Thomas Healy, Soul City: Race, Equality, and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia (2022)In 2023, a PBS documentary titled Soul City revisited the story, interviewing surviving residents, the McKissick family, and journalists who covered the project. The documentary reframed the narrative: not as a failed Black project, but as a successful project that was politically killed by a segregationist senator and a credulous national media. The water tower still stands. The question the documentary leaves open — the question McKissick was asking in 1969 — is whether the United States is willing to let Black people build things at the scale that was withheld from them for centuries.
Soul City in the Chain: Black Wall Street, Rosewood, and the Ceiling on Black Wealth
Soul City belongs to a category of American history that is hard to see as anything other than a pattern: the systematic destruction of successful Black economic communities, sometimes by violence, sometimes by the state, sometimes by both. The pattern includes:
The difference between the earlier destructions and Soul City is that Soul City was not burned. It was starved. The mob in Tulsa used fire bombs and rifles. Jesse Helms used the Senate floor and the national press. Both produced the same outcome: a viable Black economic community that no longer exists at scale. The ceiling on Black wealth is maintained by whatever instrument is available in the era — violence in the 1920s, structural withdrawal in the 1970s, and both simultaneously if needed.
"The story of Black America is not the story of failure. It is the story of success after success being systematically dismantled by a society that could not tolerate what it proved."
— Thomas Healy, Soul City (2022), paraphraseSoul City was not an isolated story. The destruction of Black Wall Street was not ancient history.
What connects Tulsa (1921), Rosewood (1923), urban renewal (1950s–70s), and Soul City (1979) is a single pattern: American society permits Black economic communities to exist only up to the point where they prove that Black people can build wealth at scale. At that point, the society dismantles them — by mob, by highway, or by Senate floor. The instruments change. The ceiling does not.