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Soul City: Race, Equality, and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia
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65
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
69/100Critics
60/100Scholars
Author:
Thomas Healy
Publisher:
Metropolitan Books
Date:
February 2, 2021
This history of Floyd McKissick's 1969 plan to build a Black city in North Carolina examines the story of the idealists who settled there, the obstacles that derailed the project, and what Soul City's saga says about Black opportunity, capitalism, and power then and now.
What The Reviewers Say
It's an excellent chronicle not just of McKissick's project, but of an America in the 1970s still influenced by anti-Black racism.
Today, a crumbling ghost town, Soul City is hard to find. What happened? In this sympathetic, deeply researched, and heartbreaking account, Healy, a professor at Seton Hall Law School and author of The Great Dissent, details the innumerable obstacles that blocked the way for a bold venture in racial equality..
... stirring.
Healy’s greatest strength is his eye for the procedural details — the who, what, when and where of the Soul City story. Yet his book is a lost opportunity.
