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Tuatday, April 1S, 1S74
11
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F ze vision become reality?
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You read the brochure and immediately
visions of an ethereal, urban Camelot spring
to the imagination.
You wonder what a dream is worth, a
dream transplanted from past Utopias, to be
carved out of the. empty, rolling hills that
were once a plantation somewhere north of
Henderson and south of the Virginia
wilderness.
'Imagine,
A city without prejudice.
A city without poverty.
A city without slums.
A city tailor-made for industry.
A city with a booming economy.
A brand new shining city.'
Soul City brochure
You wonder about a place called Soul City
and whether it has as much hard reality as it
has the spirit its name implies..
And when you start driving off 1-85 into
Warren County, you begin to realize why the
dream and the spirit chose to join battle in a
desolate reality.
Warren County is 68 per cent black and 90
per cent poor. For those who slip out for
another dream, it has the holding power of
its own mud-slick roads. It seems to operate
close to its former plantation economy
without the plantations.
Soul City and the concept behind it are
both products of the 1960 civil rights
e
Daily
Tar Heel
In the summer of 1968, Floyd McKissick
quit his job as national director of the
Congress of Racial Equality to pursue his
long-held dream of providing a means to
achieve black economic independence.
Today, McKissick is president of Floyd B.
McKissick Enterprises, Inc. His brainchild is
Soul City, a multi-million dollar, 5,180 acre
community to be built on the site of an old
plantation in rural Warren County, N.C,
just south of the Virginia state line.
Soul City will become the largest black
owned, minority-controlled enterprise in the
nation, planned to eventually contain 50,000
residents, each having a share in controlling
the community through their own property
investments.
Irs tho heart cf tho impoverished blsck'bclt of North
movements. Where one stream of the
movement dammed up at black separatism
and the establishment of a black identity, the
other continued a slowed-down course of
political and legal franchisement. But
economic self-reliance is increasingly
becoming the drive-shaft that makes both
gears go.
As you travel along thickly forested back
roads, sign posts stoically proclaim that Soul
City is just around the corner, just past the
run-down corner grocery stores and railroad
tracks that run into the distance.
The man who wants to change all this and
maybe the world if he has time, is Floyd
McKissick, former Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE) director. The first black
student admitted to UNC and author of
Three-Fifths of a Man, McKissick envisions
a 5,000 acre, free-standing community of
50,000 black-owned and operated by
McKissick Enterprises and the Soul City
Company. But McKissick claims Soul City
will be a community in which all races and
- -- . .. . -. . . . - .-- - - . - a
KM
The totally planned city is to include
schools, an industrial center (Soultech),
shopping centers, a health care center
(HealthCo), and a variety of residential
areas. Planners are insuring that an acre of
land for parks and open spaces will be set
aside for every acre used for homesites.
Unattached to an existing urban area,
Soul City represents America's first privately
developed new town. It is the first such major
effort by a minority-owned company..
Soul City Co., recently formed as a
conglomerate to oversee the actual
construction of the project, estimates over
the next 25 years it will spend well over $ 100
million acquired from land sales.
Soul City's formative history has involved
three major stages. In July, 1972, the city was
given a $14 million bond guarantee by the
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD).
On May 23, 1$73, Soul City established
itself as a sanitary district, a voter-controlled
unit of local government with the power to
build and operate sewerage and water
treatment plants, handle garbage and solid
wastes, maintain a fire department, levy
taxes and issue bonds to meet its expenses.
The district is presently governed by three
commissioners and will soon begin
construction of a water system and sewerage
plant.
On February 22, 1974, McKissick
Enterprises formed the Soul City Company
to handle the project's financing. Within a
few weeks, the company built an equity of
$1.5 million and sold $5 million worth of
bonds backed by HUD.
In June of 1972, as an offer of
r "
creeds can live in harmony free of the
economic inequality that crushes the spirit in
traditionally stratified cities.
Past the railroad tracks you hit the first
sign indicating the dream has not yet become
reality; the red-clay road to Camelot isn't
paved. And at the end of the road there is no
gleaming city of hope, only the sign,
"Welcome to Soul City: A Planned New
Community" overlooking 5,000 acres of
chopped-out, grassed-over wilderness.
According to plans, those acres will
eventually contain Soultech, an industrial
center, Healthco, a general purpose health
care center tq serve the needs of Vance and
Warren Counties; a non-discriminatory
school system and a planned residential area
that will eliminate the clustering of
neighborhoods into rich and poor.
Anyone can build or invest in Soul City
but only under the standards imposed by the
master plan. In the blueprints, at least,
equality of opportunity means that some
may actually no longer be more equal than
others.
As you turn down another dirt road into
what has become the Soul City compound,
you begin to wonder whether the eroded hills
will ever be anything more than monuments .
to another human dream. 1
The compound consists of an old red barn,
restyled Foundation House, several trailers
housing Healthco and Soultech offices, a
learning lab, the executive suites of
McKissick Enterprises, various project
workers, a heavy equipment shed and a
sheltered bulletin board neatly surrounded
with gravel that honors one of Soul City's
citizens for outstanding contributions to the
community.
Inside Foundation House, the visitor sees
an operations center resembling the
nonchalance and ease of an old plantation
parlor rather than the deliberate chaos of a
major corporation on the verge ofhitting the
committment to the new town, HUD
guaranteed a $14 million loan.
The last major financial arrangements
prior to the start of construction were made
on March 19, 1974. McKissick, as president
of Soul City Co., announced that $27 million
had been made available by selling Jheir
HUD-backed bonds.
Most of the money will be used to build a
regional water system serving Soul City and
surrounding communities and to build
utilities and service facilities within Soul
City. Construction is scheduled to begin in
60 to 90 days.
At present, Soul City's administration and
planning is divided among six principal
agencies.
The Soul City Foundation conducts
overall planning for community social
activities, from the development of industry
to the creation of cultural programs.
Cultural arts, education and social advocacy
programs are now in operation. Plans'
include ideas for legal services, drug abuse,
programs, industrial training programs,"
historic preservation and an Afro-American
Park.
The Social Advocacy Project is
developing programs and services to meet
the needs of early residents, particularly the
poor, in coordination with social and welfare
programs of federal, state and local agencies.
The nucleus of Soul City's Future School
System, ' the Learning Lab, conducts
supplementary educational programs for
students not achieving their full academic
potential "to compensate for past cultural
and educational disadvantages of minority
and low-income white youth."
-At -
7
Ccrolirta cro the beginnings ofen envisioned community now
Sign off
market with a revolutionary idea.
While waiting to speak with the public
affairs director, you browse along a table
covered with pamphlets, press clippings and
a mammoth study of Soul City's future
political structure prepared by UNCs
Institute of Government, in September 1971.
The offices themselves hardly fit the image
of corporate affluence: windows covered
with plastic to keep out the cold winds,
prefabricated veneer walls that
compartmentalize operations rather than
divide the staff into hierarchies of labor and
the functional cement floor that tells a visitor
work is in a beginning stage.
At one end of the table is a clipping of an
Stories by
Bob Jasinkiewicz
Photos by
Bill Wrenn
Still in the planning stages, HealthCo,
originally funded in June, 1972 by an Office
of Economic Opportunity grant, will
provide health care to the residents of Soul
City, as well as of Vance and Warren
Counties. HealthCo will eventually occupy a
three-quarter million dollar facility
scheduled to be completed by this summer.
Operating on the philosophy that "all
inhabitants of the town should have a piece
of the economic action," the Soul City
Investment Corporation (SCIC) raises
money and makes investments. SCIC now
has over 50 stock-holding members and is
implementing community-wide profit
sharing plans.
Finally, the Warren Regional Planning
Corporation, a four-year old non-profit
organization, is responsible for developing
Soul City's industrial potential. It has
primarily been working on general planning
for the new town and studying its economic
impact on the region as a whole".
Thus what started as only one man's idea
to turn around and stop the economic
stagnation of the nation's urban and rural
poor has come close to achieving reality.
McKissick now owns the land. He has the
financial resources. And the human
resources working for. him are laboring for
an idea they apparently strongly believe in.
But whether Soul City will become only an
interruption in the cycle of stagnation will
depend on both the residents yet to come and
on the nation's acceptance of new types of
economic interaction.
"The development of black economic
power," McKissick says, "is white America's
last chance to save the Republic."
... .f
folks
I-C5 directs motorists to Soul
editorial from the June 30, 1969 Roxboro
Courier-Timer. "How terribly tragic it
would be should all civil rights roads cut in
the last 20 years lead inevitably to Soul
.City a Camelot built on racism."
Staff people, mostly black, wander in and
out with a relaxed anxiety. They may be on
the verge of owning the plantation their
grandparents once worked for in servitude.
Then you meet Dorothy "Dar" Webb,
director of public affairs. One can see she has
obviously met reporters before from the
number of press clippings tacked on the
walls. Dorothy is white.
"All systems are go," she says. "We'll have
our first housing going up in a couple of
months, but we need jobs first, then people.
So we'll begin building Soultech fairly
soon."
Soultech, the million dollar industrial
center, will be built primarily from a $5
million bond issue recently floated with the
aid of HUD (Housing and Urban
Development), which has taken Soul City
under its wing by providing financial
backing, contacts and staff planning help.
The rest of the labor is being done by private
enterprise, sweat and leg work, mostly legs
belonging to McKissick.
"The idea behind the project is to provide
absolute equal opportunity for all," Dar
continues. "At first we thought we'd have a
black-white ratio of 90 to 10, but from the
applications and inquiries we've gotten so
far, it looks as if it will run more like 50 to
50."
Neatly tacked to her office wall, amid
filing cabinets containing stacks of
information concerning Soul City, is an
engraved quotation from Frederick
Douglass: "Those who profess to favor
freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men
who want crops without plowing the ground;
they want rain without thunder and
lightning; they want the ocean without the
awful roar of its many waters."
And then you begin to realize what the
mud and the plastic covered windows are all
about.
Out of curiosity and a little knowledge of
past Utopian failures on the American plains,
you ask about Soul City's political structure.
i
s. f -
boasting only few houses, trailers
j !
5 i
i f
City, N.C.
Once the factory managers and merchants
move in, won't the city become just another
void filled with the quiet desperation of
economic competition?
"We have to find people of good will to
move in," Dar says with a low. soft optimism
which dispels any doubts that these people
can be found. "Our social mandate is to work
with low income people, but we are not a
town for poor people or a company town.
We have to have a full range of
opportunities for all people."
The opportunities will come from on-the-job
training offered by Soultech, and by such
innovations as the learning . lab where
"students learn about all the facets of urban
life as they develop from the ground
up . . . and in the process acquire a sense
of the interrelatedness of learning and work
in the real world."
In other words, Soul City is spurring a new
urban migration among rural peole. These
people are not forced to leave their farms to
enjoy it.
Soul City now has $27 million available
from government and private sources,
enough to move Camelot a little closer to the
construction equipment parked in the open
sheds. The Soul City Co. is a conglomerate
of the National Housing Partnership of
Washington, D.C., Madison-Madison
International, Inc., and McKissick
Enterprises, but, Dar adds, it will be owned
primarily by those who live and work in it.
The city, Dar says, will not be reserved
only for blacks or the urban and rural poor.
It will consist of people who may have
refocused but not forgotten the idealistic
visions of youth.
You say good-bye and on the way out take
one last look around wondering if anyone in
Foundation House doubts the outcome of
all this.
Then you stand outside near the
wilderness. The only sound is the wind
roaring across the fields, and you can't shake
the pioneer spirit from your mind.
Walking back along the old rutted farm
road, Soul City's main thoroughfare, you
wonder how anyone, including yourself,
could have ever doubted all this in the first
place.
1
and unpaved roeds.