This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

In the 1960s, American cities were in crisis.

Infrastructure was crumbling, traffic and pollution were terrible, crime was up.

Cities weren't particularly nice places to live.

White people were able to flee urban centers for the suburbs thanks to federal help with mortgages and new freeway

development. That process would come to be known as white flight.

Meanwhile, black populations in cities were dealing with housing discrimination and police brutality.

Riots were breaking out in cities all over the country, and this awful time was referred to

by scholars as the urban crisis.

That's our own Katie Mingle.

And the civil rights movement was happening

in parallel to the urban crisis,

but it wasn't really addressing the problems for black people in cities.

The overarching question was, you know, can the cities be saved?

How can we make urban life better for people, for all people?

That's Roger Biles, professor of history at Illinois State University.

And, you know, there were some folks who looked at the situation and just threw up their hands and

said, you know, we just can't salvage what's here.

The answer is starting over again.

In other words, urban planners thought maybe the problems facing cities were too big and too complicated to fix.

And it's within this context of the urban crisis and the civil rights movement that the federal

government would come to consider an idea like soul city.

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