num_pages: 448
description: In 1969 with Americas cities in turmoil and racial tensions high civil rights leader Floyd McKissick announced an audacious plan: he would build a new city in rural North Carolina open to all but intended primarily to benefit Black people. Named Soul City the community secured funding from the Nixon administration planning help from Harvard and the University of North Carolina and endorsements from the New York Times and the Today show. Before long the brand-new settlement  built on a former slave plantation  had roads houses a health care center and an industrial plant. By the year 2000 projections said Soul City would have fifty thousand residents.But the utopian vision was not to be. The race-baiting Jesse Helms newly elected as senator from North Carolina swore to stop government spending on the project. Meanwhile the liberal Raleigh News &amp; Observer mistakenly claimed fraud and corruption in the construction effort. Battered from the left and the right Soul City was shut down after just a decade. Today it is a ghost town  and its industrial plant erected to promote Black economic freedom has been converted into a prison.Was it an impossible dream from the beginning? Or a brilliant idea thwarted by prejudice and ignorance? And how might America be different today if Soul City had been allowed to succeed?
language: None
title: Soul City: Race, Equality, and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia
publisher: Metropolitan Books