In 1969, Floyd McKissick did something no one in American history had done at such scale: he bought a 5,000-acre plantation in Warren County, North Carolina, and announced that he was building a city. Not a neighborhood. Not a development. A city — complete with its own industrial base, infrastructure, and governance — designed from the ground up by Black Americans for Black Americans.

McKissick called it Soul City.

The ambition was breathtaking. In an era defined by urban decline and white flight, McKissick proposed the reverse: a new American city that would attract Black residents, businesses, and investment, creating an economic engine independent of the systems that had historically extracted Black labor without return. He secured $14 million in federal loans through the Nixon administration and broke ground. Water pipelines were laid for surrounding communities that had never had running water. An industrial building went up. Housing followed.

Soul City was not a utopian fantasy. It was an engineering project — funded, permitted, and under construction. And that was exactly why it was destroyed.

The project faced relentless opposition from North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, who used his platform to attack the development as a wasteful experiment in separatism. Congressional hearings were convened. Federal funding was clawed back. By 1979, HUD foreclosed on the project after a decade of deliberate political strangulation. The buildings were repurposed. The dream was declared dead.

But Soul City’s blueprint survived. It proved that Black-led planning could secure federal funding, attract corporate interest, and deliver physical infrastructure — the three things critics claimed were impossible. The failure was not one of vision, or execution, or economics. It was one of political will, applied from outside with the specific intent of preventing Black self-determination from succeeding at scale.

Floyd McKissick is the Root of our urban sovereignty. He showed that the only limit on what Black communities could build was the willingness of the state to let it stand. Soul City was not a failed city. It was a successful blueprint that was shut down before it could be completed. “Economic power is the first prerequisite for political power.”