Long before rapper Ice Cube met with the Trump campaign to discuss an economic empowerment plan for African Americans, there was Floyd McKissick, the Black civil rights activist who won over President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s with a similar plan for Black people. McKissick, the former executive director of the Congress for Racial Equality, wanted to build a city in rural Warren County, North Carolina, for Black people — a “spearhead for racial equality” called Soul City.
Dubbed in the press as a “Black city,” McKissick assembled a team of mostly Black urban planners, architects, engineers and designers to create a municipality where African Americans could live free of racial discrimination— sanctuary. The city was also available to any non-Black families to live in, so long as they didn’t bring racist attitudes along with them. The new book Soul City: Race, Equality, and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia, by Seton Hall Law School professor Thomas Healy, explores the history of how and why McKissick’s experiment came to be, and its unceremonious end.
