Black Modernity and Dys/Utopia in Resurrection City

This paper situates Resurrection City – an encampment built by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) on the National Mall in Washington DC during the spring of 1968 – in the long history of utopian place- and intentional community-making undertaken by Black Americans in the United States.

Home to roughly three thousand residents, Resurrection City brought the multiracial issue of poverty to the nation’s doorstep. In addition to serving as a base of activist operations, the encampment was designed as a mimetic and alternative response to Modernist Urban Renewal-era planning. Its purpose was to create an indelible image of American racial and economic inequality, however, lead architects John Wiebenson and Tunney Lee worked with the PPC to design Resurrection City according to a Linear City model, with a utopian lens that prioritized participatory urbanism, communal welfare, and the provision of social services.

This paper will place Resurrection City on a continuum of Black dystopian and utopian urban-architectural placemaking from the Maroon communities of the mid-Atlantic’s Great Dismal Swamp during the 19th century, through the latter 20th century with the development of Soul City in North Carolina in the mid 1970’s. In doing so, this paper opens new and underexplored avenues of inquiry into the intersections of Black liberation movements and architecture, and reclaims the value of Resurrection City itself, which extant scholarship generally disregards as a failure due to the PPC’s inability to achieve its ambitious anti-poverty policy goals.