Producing a Republican Polity: McKissick's Soul City and Civic Equality

• In Event: African American Political Thought

Abstract

In the early 1970s, Floyd McKissick Sr., the former chair of CORE, founded a town in rural North Carolina named Soul City. McKissick promoted Soul City as a pilot case for the types of innovative solutions that would effectively eradicate racial oppression in the post-Great Migration United States. Grounded in the political and economic logic of Black Power, Soul City represented an ideologically oriented political community that was designed to provide solutions to the problems most prevalent in both growing urban ghettoes and shrinking parts of the rural south. Although McKissick believed the Constitution of the United States, if properly implemented, provided the legal and political means to secure freedom for Black Americans, McKissick thought political equality would remain an impossibility without economic empowerment. Particularly, McKissick asserted that until Black Americans became proportionate producers of goods and services in the economy, they would always be subject to the arbitrary influence of white American elites. McKissick, alongside Nixon, began to promote Black Capitalism as a means to pursue economic empowerment and avoid a looming violent revolution in the country. I argue however that McKissick did not envision the type of capitalist economic relations which facilitate exploitation and domination but instead sought to utilize markets to ensure Black people in the United States were not coercively made dependent on private or state actors. In this way, Soul City represents the sort of ideological and material arrangement necessary to ensure citizens are not subject to domination and exploitation. Leveraging the work of neo-republican thinkers such as Phillip Pettit, Richard Dagger, and Robert Taylor, I suggest that by engaging with McKissick's intellectual and historical legacy, we can further advance our understanding of the formal and informal institutions necessary to sufficiently promote anti-power and disrupt the emergence of relationships of domination. Moreover, by engaging simultaneously engaging the theoretical traditions of the Black Power Movement and republican political philosophy, we can design institutions that combat racial domination by adequately promoting antipower and rejecting the notion that the enjoyment of liberty is inevitably structurally dependent upon the goodwill of white American elites.

Author

• Allan Tellis