Soul City

by Raymond Gavins

From Encyclopedia of North Carolina edited by William S. Powell. Copyright © 2006 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. For personal use and not for further distribution. Please submit permission requests for other use directly to the publisher.

Soul City, a small town located one mile off U.S. 1 between Warrenton and Manson in Warren County, is a symbol of black economic aspiration fueled by the civil rights gains of the 1960s and 1970s. McKissick Enterprises, headed by civil rights activist Floyd B. McKissick (1922-91), financed the development of an African American community mainly with federal loan guarantees, grants, and contracts totaling $31 million from 1971 to 1978. With completion of the infrastructure, including a water treatment plant, hope abounded for the community's success. However, job-creating industries did not come, and housing construction dragged. The developer also faced damaging federal audits and political opposition, eventually defaulting in 1980.

Although the federal government foreclosed on the Soul City project, the community continued to grow. In the mid-1980s the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation gave a grant of $20,000 to renovate the historic Green Duke House and turn it into a Jobs Link Center. By the early 2000s Soul City was a 5,000-acre development with a few hundred occupants and assets that included a fire station, a janitorial supplies manufacturer, a poultry-processing plant, the Healthco Clinic, the Floyd McKissick Assisted Living Center, a Head Start preschool center, and recreational facilities.

References:

Jason Alston, "Soul City's Dream Is Unfulfilled, but Not Dead," Durham Herald-Sun, 30 Aug. 2003

Osha Gray Davidson, The Best of Enemies: Race and Redemption in the New South (1996)

Floyd B. McKissick, Three-Fifths of a Man (1969).

Additional resources:

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Image Credit:

Soul City advertisement originally appeared in the June 1977 issue of Black Enterprise. Accessed via Google Books, July 2010.