In 1969, an activist set out to build an African-American metropolis from scratch. What would have happened if Soul City had succeeded?

By Kelefah Sanneh @ NewYorker.com, Feb. 1 online (Feb. 8 print)

In the fall of 1968, Jet, the Black weekly magazine, devoted a special issue to the upcoming election. On the cover was a cheerful headline: “how black vote can elect next president.” Inside, the editors were less upbeat, reproaching the candidates for not doing more to “woo actively” the Black vote. In an effort to do some last-minute wooing, both of the major candidates had taken out two-page advertisements in the issue. Hubert Humphrey, the Democrat, was popular with Black voters, and sought to remind readers of something he felt they should already know. “Vote for Hubert Humphrey and you’ll help elect the right man President,” his advertisement said. “Don’t vote and you’ll help elect the wrong one.” The “wrong one”—Richard Nixon, the Republican contender—had a more specific pitch. His ad showed a Black man in a letterman sweater, beneath the exhortation “This time, vote like Homer Pitts’ whole world depended on it.” Pitts, it seemed, was a fictional college student facing an uncertain future. And there was a Presidential candidate who wanted to help him:

A vote for Richard Nixon for President is a vote for a man who wants Homer to have the chance to own his own business. Richard Nixon believes strongly in black capitalism. Because black capitalism is black power in the best sense of the word. . . . It’s the key to the black man’s fight for equality—for a piece of the action.

This was the heart of Nixon’s outreach to Black voters in 1968: “Black capitalism,” an ideal of independence that promised to unite militants and moderates, Black nationalists and white centrists. This sales pitch does not seem to have been a big success. Although Nixon won, narrowly, polls and voting data suggest that Black voters went predominantly for Humphrey. And yet the notion of “Black capitalism” gained influence, prompting an ongoing debate about what it meant, and whether it represented progress. The Black Panther Party often denounced capitalism [....]

Arguments about Black capitalism were often rather theoretical. But there was one place in America where a group of pioneers tried to build a community devoted to it, upholding both Nixonian free enterprise and Black self-determination. The place was Soul City, a settlement in rural North Carolina, near the Virginia border, which was founded in 1969, and which is the subject of a new book by Thomas Healy, a law professor and a former journalist [....]