Hey, TED Talks Daily listeners, I'm Elise Hu.
Today we have an episode of another podcast from TED, handpicked by us for you.
February marks Black History Month in the United States, and this week we're celebrating by sharing a classic episode of Far Flung.
From the wording of the Constitution to the ways some roads cut across cities, it's not a stretch to say that the U .S.
was not built with the interests of Black residents in mind.
So what does a place that centers Black culture actually look like?
In this episode, you'll hear about Soul City, a community built to give Black residents and other people of color the same opportunities as their white counterparts.
Though Soul City was short -lived, it's an important reminder of why places that honor Black culture are so vital and should be maintained today.
To hear more thought -provoking stories from history, listen to Far Flung wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn more about TED podcasts at audiocollective .ted .com.
Now on to the episode right after a quick break.
I thought I'd come to paradise.
Who does that with five kids?
I mean, in 1970, to come to a segregated place in Warrington, North Carolina, to build a new Black town.
I mean, controlled by Blacks.
Whoa! That's Jane Balgrume, one of the people who moved here to North Carolina to help create a city unlike any she'd ever been a part of.
I'm Salim Reshawwala, and from TED, this is Far Flung.
Each episode, we look at a different place and the ideas that flow from there.
Shout out to Marriott Hotels for sponsoring this week's episode.
And we'll come back to Jane in a bit, But you just heard her describe a place she thought was paradise, which is what this week's journey is all about.
We're going to be exploring utopias.
This idea that there's a perfect place that meets every need for a group of people.
I've been fascinated by utopias in general for a long time.
It's just this way that people lay out their ideals and dreams.
Blank slate. What do they want the world to be like?
It's a thing that pops up in the popular imagination again and again.
Maybe you've got some places that come to mind when you hear the word utopia.
There's the Shakers, a group of dissenting Quakers who began to set up their own communities with rules they believed would allow them to live in harmony in the late 1700s.
But this goes back even further.
In ancient Greece, for example, there was Plato's Republic, a fictional book which imagined an alternative set of rules for an optimal society.
It was hella problematic if you really look at it.
But anyway, in this episode we're going to search for the Black Utopia that you heard Jane talk about.
And it starts with a short road trip with my friend Charlotte.
I was trying to take the scenic route, which is what I normally do to avoid the highways.
Maybe because I'm country, but it would have made me late.
So, alas, I'm on 85.
Yeah, I'm about to be on 85 in just a second here.
And describing where we're going, it could be a little complicated.
You want to tell them?
Yeah, we're going to a place that some say currently doesn't exist.
Black Utopia, if you will.
We are going to a real place.
It's known as Soul City.
I've been interested in Soul City for a few years.
And, Charlotte, when I asked you if you had heard anything about Soul City, you said...
It's like they tried to build a Wakanda in North Carolina.
Right. You and I were both super interested in it.
We've been working on stuff for a while together.
We met when I was assisting on a music video.
I remember you were wearing cool sunglasses, and I took a photo.
I think I posted it to Instagram.
And then in the past couple of years, we have made a kind of ridiculous amount of stuff together.
I thought you'd be the perfect person to explore this story with because you're so connected to this area.
And you just get how rich North Carolina stories can be.
Yeah, I thought exploring Soul City was a cool idea from the jump.
I mean, I also thought the people we know would think is a cool idea.
And I really wanted to know if it's a black utopia, because being black in America is a 24 hour job and it's exhausting.
We're constantly surveilled.
Even when we're sleeping in our own homes or we're birdwatching or shopping or doing regular everyday things.
We're constantly checking our tone to make sure we're not perceived as a threat.
And sometimes you want to break from all that.
I mean, you seek out black spaces just so you can put your guard down for a minute.
So I wonder what would a Black utopia feel like and sound like, and where do you go if you're looking for it?
So, yeah, has a Black utopia ever existed?
And did one exist this close to our houses?
And being a mixed Indian, Japanese, white kid, I'm not fully qualified to do this story on Black utopia on my own.
Well, lucky for you, Saleem, I am totally qualified to lead this journey.
we're going to start our search in Soul City, which was created back in 1969.
The founders recruited people from all over the country to come to this chosen plot of land in rural North Carolina and build a town from the ground up.
And we knew a bit about it before we went.
We'd seen it described as, quote, a short -lived Black utopian society.
And when we found out that some of the first residents still lived there, we wanted to talk to them directly.
Because of COVID, we drove in separate cars and we were talking on the phone on our way out there.
For some reason, I'm teetering on emotional because maybe I shouldn't have, but I went to this website called Road Trip America or something like that.
Somebody described it in this way that it's sad to see it, just because it wasn't realized in this way.
So I'm kind of preparing myself to feel some kind of heaviness around it.
and based on things we'd read I can see why you felt that way yeah I was anticipating like an apocalyptic scene where you know black people were once there now they're not and the whole town is covered in ash or something just feeling like man black people can't have nothing in this country so here's
a little bit of background Soul City was an intentional project that was funded and developed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, under their New Communities Program in the late 60s and early 70s.
It's in Warren County, which is a couple counties over from Durham.
And HUD was funding this kind of project because they were trying to solve the quote -unquote urban problem.
In some ways, the term urban problem refers to something that was really happening.
You know, there were real issues with poverty and violence.
But it's also this euphemistic, weird terminology that was used in very weighted ways.
Yeah, completely loaded.
I mean, basically, it was a polite way of saying housing is crumbling, white people will leave the cities for the burbs.
And at the same time, crime and policing in the city is rising, causing, bam, an urban problem.
Super loaded term. And what's so crazy is Seoul City is only about 45 minutes away from Durham, and that ain't nothing but a hop and a skip.
I've actually been in Durham since around 2010.
And you know, I grew up down the road in the suburbs for a big chunk of my life.
My parents are in Cary.
That's really the Burbs.
You can't get more Burby than North Carolina.
Basically, when immigrants imagine the American dream, that's like what's in their head.
I feel like it's Cary.
How'd you end up in Durham?
Well, I'm from eastern North Carolina, a tiny town called Bo Tankus, which is really outside of Mount Olive.
Pickles? Yep. That's what we're famous for, Pickles.
Anybody who knows anything about eastern North Carolina probably knows Mount Olive Pickles.
Very country. I grew up working in tobacco fields, digging sweet potatoes, picking pecans.
Those are like some of my first jobs, working outdoors, working on farms and fields.
And I've been in Durham now maybe about 15 years or so.
And as soon as I got here, man, I just immediately started finding my people.
And it felt like home really fast.
It's a very welcoming, creative scene.
Yeah. Yeah. And relevant to this episode, Durham's 40 percent black.
Yeah, that to me speaks to the soulful vibe that is kind of in the bones of this place.
It's artsy and hip, but there's also a really strong working class community that's been in Durham for a long time.
And to think there might be a, quote, black utopia just down the road is mind blowing.
And the cool thing about Soul City is that it was actually created in this very rural part of North Carolina that was expansive and wide open.
And a whole bunch of black people who are not from that area kind of sort of descended on this tiny town in Warren County to build what became known as Soul City.
That's the thing that it's it's hard to overstate.
It was just this empty land.
And, you know, coming from nothing, it was so optimistic to build and expect people to come there.
It felt almost like like Wild West Pioneer vibes to be like, hey, we will make it on our own.
And this was the only city from HUD's new communities program that was built by a Black developer.
And that developer's name was Floyd McKissick.
Floyd McKissick was originally from Asheville, North Carolina, but had been living in New York when he decided to move back to North Carolina, specifically Warren County, to build Soul City.
He was a lawyer and a civil rights activist in the 50s all the way through to the 70s.
Yeah, he was also a businessman and a real backer of Black power within capitalism.
And his idea was to build a town funded by HUD through their Urban Growth and New Communities Development Program Act back in 1970.
Initially, it was going to be a town built explicitly by black people for black people.
There were plenty of subtle ways to make that intention known without saying it overtly.
Yes, another way black people incorporate coded language into everything we do.
So Soul City was code for black people are welcome here.
And the Black capitalist agenda, for better or worse, is the primary motivator around creating what I imagine is this Black utopia.
So let's get back on the road, Selene.
I've used the term utopia to describe it, and it feels like it fits, like an attempt to make a Black utopia.
But it's kind of weird that it's considered a utopia, because it wasn't like they were necessarily trying to make, like, heaven, like, a paradise.
It's just a regular peaceful town that they're trying to make.
And it kind of says something that that's considered a utopia.
Does that make sense?
Let's say that, like, Seoul City, everything about it was the same, except there was going to be a majority white community.
But, like, I don't think we'd call that a white utopia.
I think we'd just call that a stubborn, right?
I don't know. Yeah.
Call it America. Yeah.
We started our exploration of whether a black utopia once existed so close to us by taking a tour of Soul City with Mr.
Lou Myers. Yeah, Mr.
Lou Myers is a huge part of building that place out.
Good morning, sir. How are you?
My name is Salim. Salim, Lou Myers, how are you?
Great to meet you. on the drive up there were a lot of clear metaphorical names i noticed i literally took a turn onto liberation road all of the streets here have significance matt turner liberation boulevard uh scott circle for uh yeah there's all these incredible street names and you look around
at some of them and some of the spaces that they were building and you see that there's a sense of trying to build a community that includes the very things that black folks were being excluded from.
So this was a recreation center.
This was Green Duke subdivision that we drove through.
And it was oversized because it was really a regional pool as opposed to just here.
We had lighted tennis courts, two basketball courts.
The only other tennis courts in the county were at the country club.
The only other swimming pool in the county was at the country club.
Yo, that is so dope.
I mean, you didn't have a swimming pool, so you built it.
You didn't have a tennis court, so you built it.
These things actually are things that we inherently associate with a particular class of wealth and whiteness.
So having a tennis court or having a public pool, at least where I'm from in eastern North Carolina, those things were preserved for a particular class of white people.
They were building it and saying, this is for everybody because that's simply the way it should be.
Right. They didn't just give themselves an alternative to the country club.
They built the opposite.
Yeah, exactly. Lou connected us with Floyd's youngest daughter, Charmaine McKissick.
Let's see. You can't see the sign.
So we followed directions through her house.
It's easy to miss. It's on a stretch of road in between the large Soul City sign and a Purdue chicken plant down the way.
You can't see the house from the road.
I thought Lou was bringing you, so that's why I didn't give any.
You actually turn right at Floyd McKissick's mausoleum near the top of her driveway.
And Charmaine's a professor at North Carolina Central University in Durham, which is one of the state's historically black schools.
Her students call her Dr.
Mack. Some white people that came here had a little difficulty because they'd never been in an all black environment.
It's the first time they've had to flip.
And black folks, as a whole, we've all been in that situation at some time or other, we've been the only one.
And let's get real.
The boss is a black man.
When does that happen?
It happens now, maybe.
Back then, that was a rarity, especially a man that has all this money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Okay, and this old black power craziness.
There's a piece where he actually lays out just, I think it's seven or eight steps for black power and they're all still related to black economic development.
That's interesting.
We got to look that up.
So actually Floyd McKissick issued six steps to black power and they are one, the growth of black political power.
And what exactly does that mean?
I think that's what we were seeing at the time.
You know, black folks claiming our identity for the purpose of political power.
Like folks are not just spectators in the political process of civil rights.
And aside from just voting, they were running for office, all those kinds of things.
Two, the building of black economic power.
And that's kind of just getting money, right?
Yeah, I think money and property, that's what we're seeing in Soul City.
Three. The improvement of the self -image of black people.
And there are all these formal and informal ways that that was happening.
Right. The Black is Beautiful campaign, self -determination, the key parts of the black power movement.
Four. The development of black leadership.
I think this is probably where you start to feel a little bit of contention.
There are probably tons of different definitions about what black leadership should look like.
I mean, there are now.
Why wouldn't there be then?
So that's interesting because you have folks who believe system is kind of sort of operating outside of the peripheries of capitalism.
And then you have people like McKissick who are operating within the boundaries of capitalism.
Five, the attainment of federal law enforcement.
I feel like there was a bit of a pause in your voice on that one, Charlotte.
Yeah, man, I think anybody who hears that might have pause in this moment.
There's a lot of violence at the hands of the police that we're experiencing right now.
Of course, that's not a new thing.
We just have cameras to record it today.
And that's a huge difference.
But I think people sometimes confuse community accountability with law enforcement, and they're not synonymous terms.
So I'm curious about McKissick's desire for attaining federal law enforcement.
And it's hard to know exactly what McKissick meant by that line without chatting with him.
True. Number six. Mobilization of black consumer power.
It's interesting trying to think about the difference between economic power and black consumer power, but I think this one means conscious spending.
Yeah. Like spending your money in black businesses.
Right, right. I'm thinking FUBU.
Exactly. So those were McKissick's six principles and it took McKissick, Lou Myers, and everyone else years to go from taking that concept for a city built on those principles to actually breaking ground.
And one of those people who was there from the beginning was Jane Ball Groom, whose voice we heard at the top of the episode.
I said, what? Go ahead.
I'm sorry. What's your name again?
My name is Selene. Selene.
Okay. This is my oldest daughter.
She was - Hey, I'm Charlotte.
How are you? 8, 10 when she came here.
Nice to meet you. So she's, she gives it all still.
Talk it out, Liangel, tell them.
For a few minutes, because I got food cooking.
Okay, what are you cooking?
I'm serious. Oh, nothing, it's on sweet potato fries and a hamburger.
Okay. And we set up under the covered section of her driveway.
Yeah, and both Miss Jane and her daughter were super expressive.
It was like their memories of Soul City were tangible.
And when they talked, you could feel the spirit in the room.
I actually remember I had to keep adjusting the levels because they were getting so excited and speaking louder and yeah, there was a little church in it.
Yeah, man. You couldn't find better advocates for what Soul City was to them.
Help me see what this area looked like as it was getting built.
Okay, you came down the boulevard.
So you passed a fire department, I believe, and then you passed, then you had the pool on this side.
You come up the hill, there's Health Co., which I named, by the way, and then there's Assistive Living Center.
None of that was there.
That road, that Soul City Boulevard was all dirt.
It was all dirt. But the only thing that was here then is that old house up there, Green Duke House.
That's the only thing remaining of the old place.
When you came in from Health Go, there was an old hut with the Green Duke House.
There were slave cabins around the slave cabin.
We were looking at the moment because we were from New Yorkers.
New Yorkers don't know.
So that's it. You drive into this area, farm, cows, mules.
The Bulls would chase my kids to school.
They would have to walk up to the hill to get to the bus.
The bus couldn't come into these roads because it was all dirt.
and the tires would get caught in the, would get stuck in the mud.
We would have to go out and watch them walk to the stop so the bulls would jump the fence after them because they didn't know who we were.
After your kids? Well, my daughter was only chased by one one down there.
Oh my God. Yeah, so it was all of that.
It was in the wintertime, freezing because they had a little heat in the trailers and summertime, no AC.
You had the window ACs, which didn't really come through.
We had a little double, single wide trailer.
Myself and my husband and five kids.
But it was paradise.
Back roads, dirt paths, cow pastures, open fields, former slave cabins.
I mean, that's where I'm from.
That's how I grew up.
So I get it. But it's really hard to imagine a woman from Harlem thinking that's paradise.
It hadn't occurred to me that just a few years before you were born, these folks were trying to do this in a place that was very similar to where you grew up.
Yeah. The landscapes are the exact same.
same. The only difference really is the power structure.
What was the power structure like in the spot where you grew up?
Yeah. So till I was about 12 years old, we lived at route one box 80.
That was our address.
It was a route number.
And the house we lived in was essentially a shack with no indoor water or running water.
We had an outhouse and this is in the 80s.
And it was owned by the white family that lived up the street.
And then when I was 12, we moved to another house that had indoor plumbing, but it was down a dirt roads, surrounded by farmland that was owned by the white man up the street.
So the actual path we lived on, even now my aunt still lives there, is named after that white man who owns all that land around our home.
And that in and of itself, I think, illustrates that difference in power structure.
Really common thing in rural North Carolina for the street to be named after local landowners yeah what you really mean is white men like agribusiness big farmers so imagine being a black kid growing up on a dirt road named after a white dude versus growing up on liberation boulevard soul city it was never
incorporated and at one point there was a soul city sign off of right before the Manson exit on 85.
That flew again. I had a Volkswagen first time I came down, came over the railroad tracks because my wife, Floyd's daughter, and I, I was at Harvard.
She had just graduated, and so we drove down to New York and then Floyd said, you know, go down da -da -da -da.
When you get off at the Manson exit, come up, go over the railroad tracks.
And I called my mom and I said, Mom, I need to talk with you.
She said, what? I said, look, I'm in love with this girl.
She said, OK, what's wrong?
I said, well, I don't know if his daddy's crazy.
She said, what are you talking about?
I said, Mom, this man's talking about building the city.
She said, doing what?
I said, building the city.
We didn't own our own home.
We lived in what they call cardboard cities and projects.
So here's a man going to build a city?
Now, I didn't know much, but I knew that was a hell of an effort.
Man, love makes you do some crazy shit.
This is true. Living here in 71, it was just my wife and I, Jane Groom, and there were about seven in her family, Gordon Carey, three.
That was about it. I guess with all the Soul City companies, we might have been around 50 people or so.
It feels hard to overemphasize that this man is driving from Harvard to the south, which, you know, all the migration had been in the other direction.
And Jane is leaving Harlem.
I know. I mean, can you imagine all that blackness she left behind?
I mean, the blackness that she knew and trusted to come down south to all this unknown.
That's like faith at its finest right there.
it was 1968 i worked for mckissick in harlem new york as a secretary the harlem was harlem back in the late 60s i mean because we had you know black is beautiful and everything was it was accrued to us coming from the negro aspect of our lives to that of being a black person you know solidarity possession of pride
possession of self beginning of 1969 he started talking about a new town in Warren County, North Carolina.
And I said, well, that's a joke.
You know, come on. Down south?
I'm not going down south.
Not me. That's what I was curious about, because it sounds like Harlem like we're talking about utopia.
You have to understand that the period of the times you have to understand I was born a Negro girl.
I lived a Negro life.
I was told in the fifth grade that Abraham Lincoln freed us.
So can climb. He walks in one day and says, hello, my beautiful African flowers.
I mean, you're sitting up there with these people that are changing the world.
If you don't change your own mind, then something's wrong with you.
And then here comes this opportunity with to build a new town, to be a part of building a new town, to be educated at the feet of some pretty important people at that point in time.
I was going to come for two weeks to set the office up.
I had no idea I'd be here forever.
I came for two weeks.
Coming from New York, and you're out here and all this.
You don't know that this land is even available.
It's not in your scope of thinking.
There's so much land in New York.
You have this house and that house and that tenement and that tenement.
But here you have all this land.
Well, my kids were very small, and I thought I would come to paradise.
So, to me, in a sense, it was a paradise because they were safe.
We were living on 1 ,200 acres of land.
And it was about getting up in the morning and going to work and just building.
We drove down here from New York, and we had never driven this way before, and it's five children, my husband and I, in a car, this little Dodge station.
No, it was a Dodge compact car.
I had the baby on my lap.
She was 18 months old, and the four of you guys were in the back seat like this, you know, faces stuck to the window.
We got here at 2 in the morning.
We came to Manson, where the post office is.
Yeah. And there was nothing there.
No sound. A dog was barking.
And we stayed in that car all night because we didn't know where we were.
Wow, you just stayed in the car?
Because there were no signs.
Do you remember this?
Who does that with five kids?
I'm amazed. I mean, in 1970, it comes to a segregated place in Warrington, North Carolina, to build a new black town.
I mean, controlled by blacks.
Whoa. Was it super exciting or scary or both?
No, it was transformative.
It made me feel personally for me that I was someone more than a Negro.
I was a woman with purpose, control, potential, and passion.
I began to really get this sense of, oh, this is something that's happening.
There's a vibration that takes place in a movement that you can't deny.
And so you begin to take on a sense of pride.
Yes, I belong to that.
Even though you're still not quite aware of the bigger picture, but you can't deny the movement.
I want it to be a fly on the wall.
I wanted to just hear and to see grown black men, white men, anybody just coming together with a common cause that believed in a project and they were all fighting for it together.
and they were passionate about it.
We had to get infrastructure here.
There was none. From HUD, we got a $14 million loan guarantee commitment.
That's where we went and sold bonds on the market, Wall Street, and the feds guaranteed them if we would default on them.
so this wasn't like hud was just giving soul city 14 million dollars to ball out it was a bond guarantee which is basically where a third party in this case the federal government will pay the debt security if the issuer in this case the developer floyd mckissick were to default and you could take a certain amount
from the total guarantee and so mr lou and the rest of the team drew $5 million and started building the infrastructure, which was mostly underground.
This was farmland, and as you can see, a lot of it is still farmland.
We were in basically the first phase of development, so there was literally nothing here when we came.
There was no water, no sewer, and so we had to build all of that from scratch.
They also built a couple of buildings, which stuck around that we could still see, they stood out really stark in all that farmland and greenery.
This was sort of what was going to be the town center where we are.
That was a health center, regional health center.
There was McKissick Assisted Living Center.
Everything you can see here, we owned.
We owned 5 ,000 acres.
So they owned 5 ,000 acres of land and anticipated that 50 ,000 people would come to live in Soul City.
The location is within 500 miles of most of the major metropolitan areas.
You know, the Chicago's, pretty much everything east of the Mississippi.
And you had Interstate 85, which I mentioned.
That is U .S. number one.
That's what they call the old Boston Post Highway.
It goes all the way from Boston down to Florida, all the way down to Key West.
And then you had the train that was the Seaboard Coastline Railroad.
So you had transportation, you had accessibility to the markets and you had a labor force that could be trained.
And that was important because people were leaving Warren County at a staggering rate.
And Floyd McKissick's plan, it was to get people to come here.
But it was also to get people to stop leaving, to just stay here and work here.
And it was predominantly Black?
Warren County, yes, Warren County was predominantly Black.
And Floyd said, economic development is where Black folk need to be because we're in a capitalistic system.
If you don't have capital, you're not going to be a player.
Was it fun at that point?
Oh, absolutely. No, no, no, no, no.
It was the most fun I ever had working.
I mean, seriously, I mean, because, no, I mean, where can you see stuff get done?
You know, particularly when you're planning, when they broke ground for the water system, and just, you know, building going on and that type of stuff.
Yeah, it was just thrilling.
So, Shalette, through all this, you were still trying to define Black Utopia and find ways to talk about it.
Yep. Sure was. Did you see Black Panther?
No. When you watched it, did you think, like, shoot, we did that.
No. That was fantasy.
That was Disney. No, this was real work.
So Lou shut that down pretty quickly, huh?
Yeah. He wanted nothing to do with a fictitious world.
Yeah. And it it seems like there's almost this recurring question of if a real black utopia can exist within a capitalist framework, which kind of needs winners and losers.
Yeah, I think you're right about that.
And unfortunately, black folks in America have historically been on the losing side of that history.
What are some places that people have come close to turning the tides?
Well, there was another potential Black utopia, this one right here in the Bull City, Durham, North Carolina, and it was created through a similar intention of carving out space for Black people within a capitalist system.
Yep. And it's a place we walk by every single day, Black Wall Street.
Many people knew about Tulsa, Oklahoma's Black Wall Street ever since the HBO series Watchmen came out, but not too many people know about Durham's Black Wall Street.
Durham's Black Wall Street was created in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and it was basically a spot where black folks actually owned banks and insurance companies and could give each other loans and had the way to start their own business.
Our friend Tobias has his own relationship with Durham's Black Wall Street and has his own business on Black Wall Street today.
So we talked with him about what he imagined the original Black Wall Street would have been like.
to me when i think about it i think about i think about my grandfather and i think about the way that he dressed when i was a kid i'm thinking like man why he's wearing that he always had his little hat on he always you wear a suit or you know spiners and everything and i guess in my head i'm like okay
that style came from somewhere that you know we're back then it was the 80s that came from somewhere so in my head i kind of rewind to when that was all hot and the old pictures and and them wearing the you know the pants and the clothes and the suits and everybody always dressed up and they're out
there on the street you know it's going here to go shopping you got the shoe the guy over here doing shoes over here or i didn't go to the bank and cast this check real quick or do this oh go make sure you pay on such and such as insurance because they're getting older and we need to make sure that we
have a place to bury them when they get older so make sure you pay the insurance down the street go down there to uh you know where to go Yeah, go down to the mutual.
There you go. I just feel like that's the way it was.
Like, that is so cool to me, just the community and the people doing it.
Go down to the mutual and do that.
I'm gonna be over at Mechanics and Farm.
So Mechanics and Farmers Bank became operational in 1907, and it played an important role in helping Black businesses survive during the Great Depression because it was financially stable enough to remain standing through the financial crisis at the time.
And they were specifically catering to Black people and Black business owners.
So when these very same people were rejected from other banks because of segregation, they had their own community to look to.
Yeah, yeah, it was necessary because we couldn't do business with white people.
And so that was necessary.
John Merrick was a barber, and he cut everyone's hair.
He had Black barbershops, white barbershops, smart dude, incredibly smart, and decided to start his company, which was North Carolina Mutual.
He was a barber, but knew the importance of being buried with dignity.
All right. And that was part of the reason why he started a life insurance company, because back then, coming out of slavery, we were in reconstruction.
So there's really no framework for what to do with black dead bodies.
So a lot of us were being thrown in places that we didn't want to be, that we didn't want our families to be.
So necessity. And other people, like doctors, there were a lot of other people who went into business and built this legacy.
So they did that because they knew that their community needed it.
They knew that this was something that they were filling voids.
Again, it came out of necessity.
It was partially a dream and it was partially necessity.
Like you can be oppressed and still dream.
No doubt. People forget that.
OK, so Black Wall Street, this spot that we walk by almost every single day.
Would you say that it was a black utopia?
So, yeah, Tobias brings up interesting elements of what could potentially be a black utopia, this marriage of necessity and dream.
You don't sound totally convinced.
Well, Saleem, I'm not really.
I mean, I just wonder how long black people can sustain this kind of insular space in America without it being co -opted.
And on top of that, every black man couldn't afford insurance in a suit.
Derek Beasley, who's a local artist who is trying to figure out ways to have little pieces of that utopia in Durham, also brought up a similar point.
You know, the idea of a Black utopia to me is, it's kind of an abstract.
One of those things that I think when I first came into my consciousness of whatever you want to call it, you know, my wokeness, when I first started reading books and thinking about my Blackness in a certain way, like, you know, that concept of a Black utopia, like, oh, I'm about some land and we just
gonna move out there and we gonna start a new society.
And I'm not saying that in just like it's so ridiculous, but I think some of my ideas around what freedom looks like have evolved and I censor blackness, but I don't necessarily envision the future, a liberated future as being exclusively black, even though I've created lots of exclusively black spaces.
So one of the spaces Derrick co -founded is called Black August in the Park, and it happens every year in Durham in August in Central Park.
It's a beautiful day carved out to celebrate and center Blackness.
There's music, there's great vibes, delicious food, and of course, the electric slide.
So when you're coming down the hill that is Foster Street in Durham, looking down that hill, you'll see a 15 foot high scaffold.
It says Black August in the park.
It's anchored by different signs and placards as you walk up that are black affirming.
So you might see a sign that says your blackness is welcome here.
As you get closer, you hear the bass and it's like you hear the music thumping and like, damn, like what's that?
You know, it's and then you see people kind of pouring in and out.
It's just like a sea of people, black folks of all ages, orientations, just getting down and loving on each other.
I find it to be an obligatory stop on that day.
I mean, black people, as far as I can see.
And you really put your black card in jeopardy if you don't at least pop by.
Do you see a black audience in the park as a grandchild of Black Wall Street?
I think it's that legacy that emboldens us to even think about taking up space like that, right?
I would own that as a grandbaby.
We all got grandparents that we'd be like, that was my granddaddy.
But I don't necessarily agree with everything he did or he said, but he did make a way for me.
Derek had a few specific things he actually did like about Black Wall Street.
I think there is something about Black Wall Street that is self -determining, that is revolutionary in its own right.
But it's not quite his utopia.
There is also a part of Black Wall Street that's elitist.
There's a part of Black Wall Street that's classes.
There's a part of Black Wall Street that's really deeply invested in a capitalist agenda, which is inherently exclusionary.
And so when I think about Black August in the Park, and for that matter, any Black thing that I'm trying to be a part of, we're thinking about all Black folks, right?
We want to envision a future where all Black people can get free and feel liberated.
So, you know, I think that's the core difference.
We're not equating freedom with financial gain.
Now that's Derek's opinion, and I ain't mad at it.
And maybe that's one of the problems with black spaces created within a capitalist framework.
The benefits are short lived.
And Tobias had some interesting thoughts on this.
The problem is when integration happened, those businesses were not taken care of.
They did not have the support that the other companies had.
And so a lot of them have died.
Let's look at North Carolina Mutual.
That's a great example.
North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance.
They don't have the products and we're in 2020 They don't have the products that some of their their competitors have And they don't have them because they don't have access now We're not in the same situation that we were in before but man That's a lot of catching up that you you have to do if you
do decide that you want to catch up Like we still need to own land.
We still need to own businesses We still need to own property.
We still need to invest our money and we need to track that because there is power in the black dollar Look at where we are in our real estate No one can get into that unless you got money.
Who's got money? The people who have money are probably the ones that benefited when they said that now black people can do businesses with white people around 50s and 60s.
Okay. Excuse me, the 60s.
This is what systemic racism looks like.
We're in these positions because of generations of issues.
Yes, Alim, you remember how Lou said you can only play the game if you got capital?
Yeah, that's exactly what I remembered when Tobias said this.
Same thing, there's just not equal access to capital.
Well, since Sol City's capital was loan guaranteed by HUD, when your state representatives change, that could affect your access to the money that you were depending on.
So with one election, things started to fall apart.
Here again is Charmaine describing what happened.
I really think we thought we could get there Yeah I do I think we thought we could get there Even with Senator Helms Who was our biggest thorn I mean, when does a senator tell his state not to get money?
I mean, that just doesn't happen When he got elected, my father wrote him a note and congratulated him And he wrote us back and told us Well, you know, good luck Because the first thing I'm going to be doing when I get there Is to try to make sure that you guys are closed down, basically And he kept
his word on that Oh, hell yeah Jesse Helms was a conservative senator who came into office in 1973 and remained in that position until 2003.
He earned the nickname Senator No for being an obstructionist who strongly opposed what he considered liberal ideas.
Things like civil rights, disability rights, feminism, gay rights and affirmative action, among others.
He was not popular with people we talk to in Soul City.
They say the good die young.
He lived a long time.
That's a whole sentence.
They did an investigation and that's when you get concerned because it's the thing about Black folk and the money.
And Helms was suggesting that McKissick was using this to pad his pockets.
And you couldn't see any evidence of what was built.
So eventually, Sol City ran out of funding and had to stop operations, even though no one was ever charged with illegitimately spending money.
And most of what they built, it was underground, like the city's sewer system.
That's part of the reason why you go to Sol City and you see this beautiful land, but you don't see the city that you might be expecting.
When you start building a city on fresh land, the first things you build are infrastructure, almost all underground.
And that's what got built.
And today, well... Unfortunately, Flood McKissick was always right.
We knew he was right anyway, but where is all the economic development in Warren County right now?
Right here. Right there.
The prison. The prison.
Next door, you saw it.
Purdue. And then the other, the manufacturer and the corrugated pox company, they're all right within what Soul City would have been.
So... What do you do with that information?
I mean, it seems like, you know, that could be a little disheartening.
Here's Leandra, Jane's daughter, again.
And it does bother me, like my mother said, when people say, oh, it failed.
But it didn't fail.
See, I remember what it was when we first got here.
And to see it now. So my hope and my dream is that the younger generation, once they get an understanding of the foundation.
See, we came as foundational builders.
and once they get an understanding of the foundation that was built that they won't disregard it but they will come with their new visions and their new dreams and build on because my prayer has always been revitalized I don't care where they are there's somebody that has a seed to revitalize and when you
come here and you get in this area you get in touch with the soul the soul the heartbeat of this place you can't help but catch a hold of a vision and want to begin to build catch a vibe that's it it's it becomes contagious contagious wow that's beautiful we had to ask lu how he felt when you think
about soul city now do you feel like you've mentioned a few times this the cycle of the problems and how some of the issues are the same and just new names and some of the techniques the same just new names i was curious like when you think back on soul city do you feel hopeful?
Do you feel what's your emotion now?
I forget how much money was put into this area for the regional water system, all that other stuff.
Lou wasn't sure how much money they put into the water system, but we found sources that stated the water system cost anywhere between nine and 12 million dollars.
So my concern is with all of this investment and the proximity to RTP, it couldn't happen.
Lou Myers is referring to Research Triangle Park.
It's in North Carolina, and it's one of the largest industrial parks in the entire U .S.
I don't think it didn't happen because black folk were developing it.
I mean, this was just a rough road to hoe if you can't, you needed to sell land to get money to continue.
We couldn't sell land, particularly the industrial tracks, without the industrial tracks and the jobs, It was hard to attract people to come because these folk that were living in Warren County couldn't have afforded one of these homes that you see over here.
So I believe in reparations until black folk get reparations.
Nothing's going to change because at the end of the day, it's about money.
Mr. Myers is referring to the fact that Soul City had all this land to sell for housing, but it was a cycle.
You couldn't sell this land to businesses or residents without jobs.
It was hard to get people to come there because, you know, it was Warren County.
No one knew anything about it.
It was just the middle of nowhere to most people.
And I think it's also important to note that they're moving from a historically agrarian model to a desire to be like a tech hub.
That's a great point because it's a hard sell to be like, hey, the right spot for your tech industry, it's in this open field.
It's a hard sell, but an even harder grind.
You know, they're building this thing from scratch.
And I think there's at least two forces here.
There's race, clearly.
And then there's the other, that it's just hard to make a new city, period.
And at the end of the day, cities need money to survive.
So even though they didn't get to live out the full dream, I wondered if Leandra and Jane felt like they were building a black utopia.
You talk about it as a utopia, and I wonder if you ever thought about that.
And if so, what makes it that for you?
For as long as I can remember, I don't think I've ever mentally or even emotionally framed it as a utopia.
For me, it was history in the making, and I was a part of it.
And that, to me, was everything.
I mean, to know that you're in the midst of history being made, and you are part of that history, it takes on a whole nother stature in your spirit, you know, so that when there's a passion that comes forth when we talk about it, that basically alludes to the fact that we're very proud.
Listen, when I was on my school bus And I had to walk from here Way down on the muddy road We're still on a school bus Driving on dirt roads But because of Soul City Other roads became paved Because we were the place Where everything was happening So other people, other areas Began to benefit Because
of what we were doing right here There was a wave So that's Soul City was the nucleus for all this other radiating.
Exactly, that's a good way to put it.
Yes, yes. That's amazing.
So I feel like, you know, you have some kind of, correct me if I'm wrong, but utopia feels kind of, to use that word, feels like it takes away from the actual work of building, and it's not a fantasy.
Right, right. Okay.
Right, right. Utopia is a place that I would define as perfect.
It was never a utopia.
it was the answer solution to building a better lifestyle for blacks and future generations to come what made it great was that it wasn't perfect what made it great was because we had the challenges so every time we could overcome another challenge either with HUD or something else that's what makes
it stand tall that we had the challenges that we had to overcome but we persevered we kept going through because the vision was in action it's one thing to build Just say you have a vision that's all on paper.
But we took the paper and we began to make the vision come alive.
And that right there, to be in the middle of that.
That's the spiritual utopia.
Utopia spiritually is possible.
That's when you feel so good about a given thing.
That transformative sense that I was saying about earlier.
That's my utopian spirit right here.
I'm feeling great about this.
I feel good. So in a sense, it's a mental thing.
But a physical utopia.
No, unrealistic. I love that distinction of a spiritual utopia.
Yeah, it was what Leandro's defined.
That's where the soul comes in.
The soulful utopia.
Can I just mention this quote from Nikki Giovanni that's kind of like my mantra.
Please. It's like a phrase I live by.
So she says in this poem, Nicarosa, I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me because they never understand that black love is black wealth.
And I feel like that's kind of sort of the point that Jane and Leandra are making when they talk about the spiritual utopia, our ability to be resilient and find wealth, even when we don't have this material wealth.
It's not necessarily about tangible and tactile or financial wealth.
It's the ability to access joy for the sake of our own survival.
Of all the conversations we've had, what do you feel will stick with you?
I think Jane and Leandra, frankly, their energy.
I mean, I was just so moved by sitting in their presence, how much they still believe in the original vision.
Although they're not nostalgic in any way, their joy is very much alive.
They don't feel stagnant at all.
It's an act of hope.
I love that phrase, active hope.
Yeah. Did you feel that?
When I heard them, specifically the daughter, I 100 % felt like I want to live feeling this energy.
It's kind of cliche, you know, we're never going to find a utopia.
No one's ever going to find a utopia.
But that state, that active hope, that phrase you just said, it's really interesting to me.
Like, if you feel like you can maintain active hope, then you can be both good within yourself and trying to make sure that you're doing good in the world at the same time.
And to me, the fact that they found that, that's all just how I want to live in this world.
Right on. I absolutely agree.
And just in the news, on the good side of it, I feel like we're seeing people who were inspired by movements like Soul City, and they're using that inspiration to build things now.
Right. There's Freedom Georgia, where 19 Black families bought land to take care of folks who look like them.
There's Akon City in Senegal, which some folks have actually compared to Wakanda.
That's the place you could go and not have them laugh when you compare their project to Wakanda.
So basically what you're saying is this understanding, like moving beyond the measure of our own worth outside of the white gaze is the parallel.
when Soul City is that as is Roots as was Black Wall Street in its own way as is Wakanda in its own way yes absolutely I agree you satisfy me I can let it go now okay I could feel the atmospheric pressure change you Serlet has been satisfied that was weighing on me kind of heavy yeah I'm coming back
I want to spend more time out here this beautiful lush Carolina land familiar to me in that way I mean reminds me of eastern North Carolina where I grew up only thing missing was black ownership which is a big omission but yeah I'm moved I'm coming back Far Flung with Saleem Reshimwala season 1 it's
over for now thank you, thank you, thank you for journeying with us and if you want us back, let us know leave a review on Apple Podcasts and tell us where we should go next Shilette, thank you for leading us through this story Oh my pleasure Salim, thanks for inviting me along for the ride Far Flung
with Salim Rushamwala is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsom of Magnificent Noise for Ted Our production staff includes With the guidance of Our fact checker is Ad stories are produced by Transmitter Media Extra special thanks to Alan Thompson who recorded the saxophone music in this episode on Parrish
Street on Durham's Black Wall Street Also thanks to Nicole Bodie, Valentina Bohanini, Sammy Case, Micah Ames, Brian Green, Will Hennessey, Dion Lofton, Anna Phelan, Sarah Jane Souther, and Peter Zewifel.
This episode was mixed and sound designed by Kristen Muller.
Our executive producer is Eric Newsom.
Special thanks to our sponsor Marriott Hotels and Women Will, a Grow With Google program.
I'm Salim Reshamwala.
