Learning from Soul City

Earlier this year I took part in an online event focusing on “Visions of Black-led Communities.” One of the communities explored in the two days of panel discussions and documentary screenings was Soul City; and as quickly became apparent, most of those attending the sessions had never heard of the place and knew nothing about the extraordinary efforts of a leading Black activist, a veteran of the civil rights movement, to build a multiracial new town in the Piedmont region of North Carolina half a century ago.

The new book Soul City: Race, Equality, and the Lost Dream of an American Utopia is thus all the more timely. Thomas Healy, a law professor and author of an earlier book on free speech, has produced a riveting narrative that tracks the history of Soul City from its heady beginnings in the late 1960s, to its impressive progress in the ’70s, to its sorrowful and anticlimactic demise in the early ’80s. “Soul City,” he writes, “was one of the most ambitious and high-profile projects to emerge from the civil rights era. It was covered extensively by the local and national press, featured on NBC’s Today show, studied at Harvard Business School, and watched closely by university planning departments around the country.” Inevitably, then, the story of Soul City is not only about the place itself but also about its disappearance from cultural memory and historical record.