Within the Nineteen Sixties, Floyd B. McKissick, a prolific civil rights activist, launched into an formidable thought: What if Black Individuals may construct and lead their very own metropolis? A spot centered on the concept of racial equality and financial energy, the place everybody, particularly folks of colour and the poor, may thrive? That concept become Soul Metropolis, North Carolina: the Black-led capitalist utopia that nearly got here to be.
On the time, the federal authorities was encouraging the concept of latest cities. The US Division of Housing and City Improvement opened up a course of to finance new cities constructed by non-public builders. McKissick took the chance to pitch his thought and hoped to safe federal funding to lastly make his dream a actuality. However to do it, he additionally made an unlikely ally: Republican President Richard Nixon. By 1972, Soul Metropolis was authorised for funding, and McKissick broke floor on a whole lot of acres of former tobacco plantation land in Warren County, North Carolina.
Designs have been drafted. Land was cleared. {An electrical} grid and water system have been constructed. Infrastructure was constructed, like roads, a public pool, a well being clinic, and a large industrial constructing referred to as “Soul Tech One,” meant to be a producing hub. However inside simply seven years of breaking floor, McKissick’s dream of Soul Metropolis was reduce quick. Within the piece above, we discover what occurred to this experimental city. With the assistance of McKissick’s son, former Sen. Floyd B. McKissick Jr., and one in all Soul Metropolis’s first residents, Jane Ball-Groom, we have a look at what obtained constructed, what stays in the present day, and the forces that got here collectively to trigger its finish.
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