PETER: In the late 1960s, American cities were plagued by pollution, crime, and crumbling infrastructure. Tens-of-thousands of whites fled to the suburbs, with the help of federally backed mortgages available only to them. But if you were poor and black, you were stuck.
FLOYD MCKISSISK: Black people feel rejected, they feel like they have been pushed into a corner. It's a matter of hopelessness, it's frustration.
PETER: This is a recording of a civil rights' activist, turned businessman, named Floyd McKissick. His solution was to make white-flight available to black citizens to, but not to the nearest suburb. McKissick wanted them to resettle in a black-built, black-owned community in rural North Carolina. It would be constructed on 5000 acres that had once been home to 75 slaves. Its name said it all, Soul City. Here's McKissick on a CBS Evening News report in 1969 promoting his plan.
FLOYD MCKISSICK: In this new town, persons will be able to control their own destinies. Black people want to have the choice to live where they want to. If black people want to live in Mount Vernon, New York, or New Rochelle, or New York City on East 67th Street, they can. They too can live in Soul City.
PETER: McKissick described Soul City as an economic, as well as social experiment. To him, utopia meant affordable housing, healthcare, a safe environment, and jobs that paid a living wage. All things unavailable to black citizens in American cities. But it was incredibly ambitious, you might even say, utopian.
CHRISTOPHER STRAIN: Trying to build a city from scratch is enormously daunting.
PETER: This is Christopher Strain, a historian who has written about Soul City. We spoke to him about this story a few years back.
CHRISTOPHER STRAIN: McKissick had a way of making it sound very simple, but if you think about everything that was involved, it was just an enormous undertaking. He needed to get land, he needed to secure industry, to support this new city that he was planning. He needed to get people to come, and live there, and work there. He needed to get political backing at the national, state, and local levels. He needed to do a lot.
PETER: McKissick and his small team spent a year designing the town. They mapped out the industrial areas, town center, and residential areas with a pool and health center. A wide boulevard, Opportunity Drive, would be lined by an office complex, shopping centers, a manmade lake, a high school, bike trails and gardens. Once they finished the design, they just needed to attract investors.
BRIAN: That's when McKissick turned to an unlikely ally, Republican President Richard Nixon. Partnering with Richard Nixon was a shocking move, McKissick was a prominent civil rights leader and head of the Congress on Racial Equality, CORE. It was part of the Black Power Movement. Here's McKissick on Meet The Press in 1966.
FLOYD MCKISSICK: Two little bitty words in the English language, one black, everybody that goes to the 6th grade knows what black means. Power, everybody that's going to the 6th grade knows what that means. I get a letter from a professor at Harvard, it says, "Explain Black Power." That means putting power in black people's hands. We don't have any, and we want some.
BRIAN: McKissick had been an outspoken critic of Richard Nixon, but just six years later, he spoke in support of Nixon's reelection at the Republican National Convention.
FLOYD MCKISSICK: I became a Republican primarily because I like the thrust of this administration. It has started some things forward, it hasn't completed them, that's the reason we need to get out and campaign, so the president can stay in there four more years to get the job done.
BRIAN: Though a stunning turn to his former allies, Strain says the partnership paid off.
CHRISTOPHER STRAIN: He in turn got support of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, which provided Soul City a $14-million dollar federal bond to back the project's initial development phases in the summer of 1972.
BRIAN: With a $14-million dollar loan guaranteed from HUD, construction began. On November 9th, 1973, the first shovels of dirt were turned. North Carolina's Republican governor showed up and gave a rousing speech, "Let Soul City be a lesson for all of us that man can go as far as his dreams can take him." Next, residents, black and white, began to move in.
CHRISTOPHER STRAIN: People bought into this vision, the idea at least was very appealing. This integrated community where people could live and work in the same space, this promise of a better life that was promoted through brochures and pamphlets drew them in.
BRIAN: But homeowners knew they were taking a big chance, Jane Ball-Groom was one of the first people to move to the town. Here she is in a new documentary film, Soul City.
JANE BALL-GROOM: Even with the groundbreaking, there was a sense of fragility. We're here, the shovels are in the ground, but there's still a long way to go. There's still the enemy at the gate.
BRIAN: The enemy she's talking about were all the locals who didn't want them there. Remember, this black-run, black-built town was taking shape in the middle of heavily white rural North Carolina.
PETER: The project also caught the attention of the newly elected Senator Jesse Helms, a politician who was openly and unapologetically racist. After Helms was elected, Floyd McKissick sent him a letter congratulating him on the victory. They were in the same party, after all. But Helms wrote back, "Thank you for your kind words, one of my first acts will be to try to close you down."
JANE BALL-GROOM: Soul City has a short, but controversial history, criticized by Senator Jesse Helms and others as mismanaged.
CHRISTOPHER STRAIN: McKissick had no luck in befriending Jesse Helms. Helms was very critical of the entire project, he felt that it was a prime example of overblown federal spending.
PETER: The senator's actual words were that Soul City was the most massive wasteful boondoggle anyone in that area can remember. At Helms' request, Congress spent millions investigating the project. Reporters began looking into the finances too, but they found nothing. No malfeasance, no fraud.
BRIAN: Nonetheless, in 1979, the feds announced that they would no longer fund Soul City. This was after just six years, even though it was supposed to be a 30-year project. The city had failed to reach its population and employment goals, only 200 people had moved in, far short of the 2000 residents McKissick had projected by 1978. But Christopher Strain says other factors contributed to Soul City's demise, as well.
CHRISTOPHER STRAIN: The timing was inauspicious. In the midst of national recession, the air of oil embargo, the stagflation of the 1970s, it was a difficult time to build a brand new city anywhere, let alone in rural Warren County.
BRIAN: Strain points out that race was clearly a factor, not only for politicians like Jesse Helms, but for private investors.
CHRISTOPHER STRAIN: The name evoked Black Power, which to some folks in the early 1970s, many folks in fact, it had nationalistic or aggressive overtones. I think people think of wild-eyed revolutionaries when they hear that term, though I think what McKissick meant by it, and I think what many civil rights' activists meant by it, was simply economic empowerment and self determination. I'm not sure if the South was ready for Soul City, I'm not sure if the United States was ready for Soul City. This multiracial, multicultural, black-led enterprise. I don't know if the United States is ready now for such a thing. In that sense, maybe Soul City is utopian.
HARVEY GANTT: The plan did not fail because there was some innate problem with the planning.
BRIAN: This is Harvey Gantt from the film, Soul City. He was one of the town's early architects, and a resident. He later went on to become the first black mayor of Charlotte, and two-time Senate candidate against Jesse Helms.
HARVEY GANTT: Our weakness was there weren't many African-American developers, even as the people at the very top, President Nixon on down, were trying to make a case that they were very supportive. The reality is that there were not enough white investors, if the money is in the white community, that were going to put their money into a project like that. But we were driven and stayed on it, because
Floyd McKissick believed so much in it. We all wanted to pursue the dream with him.
PETER: Soul City still exists. If you pull off Interstate-85 in Warren County, you'll find a quiet predominantly African-American community with a Baptist church, a healthcare facility, and about 75 houses. There's industry in Soul City too, in the 1990s, the county converted the town's central office complex into a state prison. It's now the largest employer in the county.