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The Lost Dream of Soul City


The Atlantic
What the demise of an experimental Black town reveals about the struggle for racial equality today
February 16, 2021
Greg Allikas
Visit Soul City, North Carolina, today, and you won’t find much: an abandoned health-care clinic stripped by vandals; a pool and recreation center with a no trespassing sign; a 1970s subdivision with streets that are cracked and crumbling; and an industrial plant that has been converted into a prison. If not for the concrete monolith with the words Soul City cast in red iron, you might not know this was supposed to be a city at all.
But that’s what the civil-rights leader Floyd McKissick hoped to create when he arrived here in 1969 with dreams of transforming an old slave plantation into a new city an hour north of Raleigh. The city would be dedicated to Black economic empowerment, McKissick envisioned, bringing money and opportunity to an area left behind by the modern economy and reversing the exodus of Black peopl ....

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