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How the Collapse of 'Soul City' Fired Up the Environmental Justice Movement [CityLab.com]

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The Soul City experiment initiated by civil rights leader Floyd McKissick in the 1970s to right racial urban ills ended in disappointment. It did not become the “spearhead of racial equality” that McKissick envisioned. Nor did it flower into a bouquet of black businesses to form a new southern economic engine, as he had hoped. Instead, Soul City’s goals were diminished by a relentless attack from journalists and conservatives criticizing McKissick’s motives, and a damning economic depression that decade that further suffocated the project.

It wasn’t a complete wash, though. Some saw it as a solid display of African-American driven urban planning, even if those plans didn’t pan out. Of the small population of people Soul City was able to draw, some still live there today (as did McKissick until his death in 1991, and as some of his family members still do). Filmmakers spoke with some of Soul City’s survivors for an upcoming documentary and found there is still some keeping of the flame in the town’s small corridors.

“There are people living there today for whom Soul City was and is their everything,” Soul City documentarian Sherea Delsol tells CityLab. “Talking to these people and seeing their faces light up when describing how proud they are to be a part of it is a huge part of the city’s legacy.”

 

[For more of this story, written by Brentin Mock, go to http://www.citylab.com/politic...ice-movement/415530/]

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McKissick may have benefitted from a "close watch" of the founding of a Community Development Credit Union in [the Anacostia area of] Washington, D.C., in the late 1970's/early 1980s, in which over 85% of the members were on welfare, unemployment, or social security. Within 1 1/2 years, they had over $1 million in assets, ... bought a building on a streetcorner, partnered with the Building Trades Unions-which offered apprenticeships to unemployed neighborhood members, rehabbed the apartment housing up to code in the upstairs of the building, and rehabbed the street level storefront into a day care center-which also provided jobs in a "red-lined" [by banks] neighborhood with high unemployment rates. Then they bought the building next door....... 

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