When Floyd McKissick replaced James Farmer as head of CORE on January 3, 1966, the organization completed a 180-degree turn that saw it change from an interracial integrationist civil rights agency pledged to uphold nonviolence into a militant and uncompromising advocate of the ideology of black power. McKissick and Roy Innis, who at that time was the head of the Harlem chapter of CORE, were close allies, and when McKissick left CORE in 1968, Innis took over.
After leaving CORE, McKissick launched a plan to build a new community, Soul City, on Warren County North Carolina farmland. McKissick saw Soul City as an integrated community with sufficient industry to support a population of 55,000. For his venture, he received a $14 million bond issue guarantee from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and a loan of $500,000 form the First Pennsylvania Bank.
Soul City, however, ran into difficulties and despite the best offers of McKissick, the project never developed as he had anticipated. Finally, in June 1980, the Soul City Corporation and the federal government reached an agreement that would allow the government to assume control the following January. Under the agreement, the company retained 88 acres of the project, including the site of a mobile home park and a 60,000 square foot building that had served as the project’s headquarters.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development paid off $10 million in loans and agreed to pay an additional $175,000 of the project’s outstanding debts. In exchange, McKissick agreed to drop a lawsuit brought to block HUD from shutting down the project.
http://www.ils.unc.edu/~rothj/exhibit/but.htm
http://www.ils.unc.edu/~rothj/exhibit/lic.htm