It's an excellent chronicle not just of McKissick's project, but of an America in the 1970s still influenced by anti-Black racism ... The Soul City project was a fascinating one, and Healy does a wonderful job explaining how and why it ultimately failed. The book is meticulously researched, and Healy expertly provides ample context; he paints an excellent, and accurate, picture of America in the 1970s, a country still in denial about the racism that was poisoning the nation to its core. He also manages to craft a deft, readable narrative out of the ups and downs of the Soul City project. Government grants and bank loans aren't topics that typically scream 'page-turner,' but Healy is a natural storyteller; the book is difficult to put down, even if you know how it ends. Most importantly, Soul City succeeds because of Healy's trenchant analysis.
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 ... Building on historian Robert O. Self’s work on postwar Oakland, Healy shows how economic empowerment and community building formed a key tenet of Black Power ideology ... Like many good authors, Healy sometimes overstates the pioneering nature of his work ... Like many good authors, Healy sometimes overstates the pioneering nature of his work ... nd Healy’s insistence on including detailed sketches of even minor figures can lead to unexpected shifts in tone, with languid biographical anecdotes unfolding mid-chapter. Yet McKissick’s efforts deserve to be recounted at length, and Healy’s passionate and humane account restores Soul City to its place in histories of civil rights and urban renewal alike ... Soul City makes a case for the importance of space to the project of Black emancipation—space to dream, space to grow. The book’s final chapters, which recount McKissick and his staff’s desperate attempts to save their city, are deeply moving. McKissick had imagined that Soul City’s streets would reflect the project’s visionary spirit, with roads named for Nat Turner and Dred Scott. Now Turner Circle and Scott Circle lead only to dead ends.
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 ... One part of the problem is Healy’s reluctance to contextualize the case of Soul City. He acknowledges racism generally but presents the slow and inevitable collapse of the project as though it were separate from the wider phenomenon of institutionalized inequality ... Smaller problems abound as well. Though Healy early invokes the fact that Soul City was located near Klan country, he only ever vaguely signals that the city faced local racial resistance. And though he energetically describes a minor player in the Watergate scandal as a 'dirty trickster,' somehow the segregationist Senator Jesse Helms, who promised McKissick that he’d “kill Soul City,” is never called what he was: a racist. There is much to be learned in Soul City about the facts of the case. But if we want to know what the project meant at the time and what it should mean for us today, Healy’s book provides more of a reason to move on from rather than linger on its pages.
Healy engages with issues of race and segregation and provides insightful analysis of the project's successes and failures. Included are occasional photographs of prominent figures involved in the development ... An absorbing account of a visionary project that will engage readers interested in Southern history.
... wistful and well-documented history ... Full of incisive character sketches and thought-provoking insights into the politics of Black empowerment, this is a worthy elegy for what might have been.
Throughout this deft historical narrative, the author provides useful context and perspective about the civil rights movement and the lives of the key players in the venture ... the author succeeds admirably ... An engrossing and often heartbreaking look at a singular attempt to achieve some measure of racial equality in the U.S.
