The Time Republicans Helped Build an All-Black Town Called ‘Soul City’

The hip-hop radio ads coming out of Ben Carson’s presidential campaign this week, to much laughter and derision, represent what Republican outreach to African Americans often looks like these days. But there was a time when Republicans took diversifying their base much more seriously. In the early 1970s, even President Richard Nixon’s administration, with its uniquely conservative, “law and order” bent, experienced what Ohio State University professor Devin Fergus calls “paroxysms of progressivism.” Such progressive spurts from the Nixon administration were responsible for producing the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Water Act—and Soul City.

Soul City was a project dreamed up by the civil rights activist Floyd McKissick. The fact that it went forward with financial assistance from Nixon represented one of the disgraced president’s “lapsed moments of liberalism,” as Fergus calls it in his 2010 Journal of Policy History article, “Black Power, Soft Power.” The idea was a city built for African Americans (though not exclusively), steered by black interests, and funded upfront by the federal government. It was, in essence, a request for the federal government to make good on the unrealized 40 acres and a mule promise made to African Americans emancipated from slavery. And President Nixon was all for it.