Qualla: Soul City, North Carolina

Soul City, North Carolina: Introduction

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit unknown, United States General Accounting Office, Public domain. "This is neither integration nor segregation, but letting black people do whatever they damn please, and go where they please." When Floyd McKissick spoke those words in January 1969, he was announcing something no one had attempted before: a planned city in the rural South, built from scratch on a former tobacco plantation, designed to prove that Black Americans could create their own economic destiny. He called it Soul City. The land he chose -- 1,800 acres of woods, pastures, and creeks in Warren County, North Carolina, the third poorest county in the state -- had once been the Circle P Ranch, a cattle and timber farm centered around a historic manor house. McKissick, a civil rights lawyer who had led the Congress of Racial Equality, saw profound symbolism in transforming a segregationist legislator's former plantation into a beacon of Black self-determination.

Image: unknown, United States General Accounting Office | Public domain

Soul City, North Carolina: A Plantation Reborn

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit unknown, United States General Accounting Office, Public domain. McKissick's legal colleague T. T. Clayton quietly scouted sites across North Carolina before settling on Leon Perry's Circle P Ranch in Warren County. Perry was losing money and eager to sell, but when McKissick's plans became public, the rancher received death threats and briefl...

Image: unknown, United States General Accounting Office | Public domain

Soul City, North Carolina: Blueprint for a Village Republic

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Indy beetle, CC0. McKissick hired architect Harvey Gantt to design Soul City, and Gantt drew inspiration from Columbia, Maryland, one of the era's most celebrated planned communities. His vision called for a collection of villages, each with its own unique character and activity center, orbiting a...

Image: Indy beetle | CC0

Soul City, North Carolina: A City Tested by Hurricanes of a Different Kind

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Indy beetle, CC0. By 1974, pioneering families had moved in. Water and sewer lines were laid. Roads were paved. A health care center and day care center opened. Soul Tech I, a 52,000-square-foot industrial building, began construction. A community lake was completed in 1977. But Soul City launched...

Image: Indy beetle | CC0

Soul City, North Carolina: The Dream That Wouldn't Die

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. HUD pulled its funding in 1979. Lawsuits and investigations followed, though a Government Accountability Office audit eventually cleared the Soul City Company of wrongdoing. McKissick never left. He remained in Soul City until his death in 1991, buried on his family's property in...

Image: Public domain