History

HISTORY A DREAM DERAILED

Charlotte native’s new book examines the bold plans and discarded promise of Soul City

BY GREG LACOUR

A NEW BOOK by Seton Hall University law professor and Charlotte native Thomas Healy, Soul City: Race, Equality, and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia, traces the e orts of lawyer and civil rights leader Floyd McKissick to establish a unique community on a former tobacco plantation in rural northeastern North Carolina. McKissick’s idea was a planned town, Soul City, open to anyone but speci cally intended to improve the lives and economic prospects of Black people. Its development, which began in 1969 and followed a master plan by a young architect and planner named Harvey Gantt, drew nancial support from surprising quarters, including the Nixon administration.

Soul City barely got off the ground, and the reasons—racism, paternalism, an ingrained reluctance of white institutions to invest in an endeavor by and for Black people—obstruct economic progress for racial minorities as thoroughly now as they did a half-century ago. We talked with Healy, 51, a Charlotte Catholic and UNC Chapel Hill graduate who started his career as a reporter for The News & Observer in Raleigh, and Gantt about the book, the project, and how they illuminate issues that remain fresh today. Answers are edited for space and clarity; read an expanded version at charlottemagazine.com.

THOMAS HEALY

What led you to write Soul City? Soul City had always been in the back of my mind since I rst heard about it ... I started reading more about it and realized that the reason that it didn’t succeed had a lot to do with my former newspaper and a lot to do with (the late U.S. Senator) Jesse Helms. It struck me as a very poignant story that had been forgotten. This is also right around the time of the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, a er the killing of Michael Brown (in 2014).

When I thought about Ferguson and the fact that the population was twothirds Black and yet whites controlled every aspect of the town, it reminded me a lot of what Warren County looked like when Floyd McKissick arrived and what McKissick was trying to achieve, which was to give Black people control over their own lives. I just thought the parallels between Ferguson and Warren County in 1969 were really interesting.

What makes this story relevant today? Essentially, what McKissick was trying to do back then was the same thing that the residents in Ferguson were trying to do in 2014—take control over their lives and acquire a measure of power. If you look at the economic situation of African Americans today, they’re, on average, not much better than they were in 1969. The average wealth of African American families is still about one-tenth of a white family’s, and the unemployment rate is

CHARLOTTE RALEIGH

Soul City was a planned community on a former tobacco plantation in rural Warren County, the brainchild of lawyer and civil rights leader Floyd McKissick (below). Designed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the project never got fully off the ground, and a new book by Charlotte native Thomas Healy explores why.

still double the white unemployment rate. There obviously have been success stories within the Black community, but on average, the economic gap between white and Black people has hardly budged.

McKissick’s view was that Black people would not have political independence until they had economic independence. If you’re vulnerable economically, you just don’t have the luxury of being free to choose what you want to do politically. … That’s still what a lot of people are talking about now: How do you shrink that wealth gap between African Americans and whites? Soul City was one attempt to try to do that, and I think looking at the forces that were arrayed against it and understanding why Soul City did not succeed can help us chart a path forward today.

What defeated Soul City? First, and most obviously, there was a lot of overt racism that Soul City faced from people like Jesse Helms and from people in the local community and throughout the state. … Also, there were a lot of white liberals who simply thought that Soul City was the wrong path to racial equality and who thought that this was a step away from integration. Claude Sitton, the editor of The News & Observer (from 1968 to 1990), is the most prominent example of someone who thought along these lines. I don’t think Claude Sitton was racist. But I do think that he was unwilling to defer to the judgment of someone like McKissick about what was best for Black people.

What lessons can Charlotte take from this history? I think one of the core problems is residential segregation, when you have communities that are segregated, both racially and economically. It means you don’t get that kind of cross-racial or crosssocioeconomic understanding that’s really important for a healthy, pluralistic democracy. A lot of resources just continue to ow into the communities that already have resources. … You see this in public schools. Upper-income families get more resources—if from no other source—from the school PTA. So those communities continue to thrive, and the economically disadvantaged communities, which are o en predominantly made up of racial minorities, continue to fall behind. HARVEY GANTT

(Ed.: As he launched his venture, McKissick hired as its chief planner a recent graduate of MIT’s School of Architecture: Harvey Gantt, who in 1983 became Charlotte’s rst Black mayor. Seven years a er that, he lost a U.S. Senate race to Helms, who defeated Gantt with tactics similar to those he used to undermine Soul City.)

Well, for me, as a 27-year-old, fresh-outof-school planner and architect, I went to Soul City with the notion that it was a reach, but it was something I wanted to be a part of. If I could help plan a new town, and … if it could sustain itself, we thought that would be a terri c example to the rest of the country. ...

The theory made sense: If we can attract an industrial company or two or three, and hire people who were once farmers, and train them in the technical schools of North Carolina, and we could give them jobs, and raise the economic level of Warren County and other places—for us, that seemed not to be an unusual thing that could happen. But in the back of everybody’s mind, we were saying that everything had to fall into place. And it didn’t.