“I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.Ītlantic senior writer Coates ( The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract-which is precisely the point.Ī clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor-among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight-and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. “America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. It is to understand the forces that lead to its failure and the lessons it offers for the pursuit of racial equality today.” On that note, the author succeeds admirably.Īn engrossing and often heartbreaking look at a singular attempt to achieve some measure of racial equality in the U.S.Ī thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted. Charting this significant but overlooked piece of modern American history, the author’s intent “is not to assign blame.
#American utopia reviews series#
Healy ably delineates the complex process of creating a city from scratch, which involved promotion, fundraising, grueling bureaucracy and political attacks, and attempting to convincing people and businesses to relocate to the proposed city-not to mention the devastating series of articles in the Raleigh News & Observer alleging fraud and corruption on the part of McKissick. He also hoped to incorporate the latest innovations in social policy and urban design, boasting that Soul City would be ‘a showpiece of democracy in a sea of hypocrisy.’ ” 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, including McKissick, the government officials who opposed it (one was Jesse Helms, who “had little enthusiasm for the kind of federal programs supporting Soul City, and even less enthusiasm for the project’s goal of racial uplift”), the journalists who reported on it, and the people who lived there. Healy, a law professor and North Carolina native, provides a comprehensive history of the town, proposed for an area “in the middle of what one roadside billboard boldly proclaimed ‘Klan Country.’ ” Introduced in 1969 by civil rights leader Floyd McKissick (1922-1991), Soul City was meant to be “a new kind of city, one with a stronger sense of community, a deeper regard for the well-being of others, and a more egalitarian distribution of wealth.
An in-depth account of the rise and fall of Soul City, North Carolina, designed to be a new city focused on racial equality.
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