Segregating Usonia: The Racial Politics of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fisher Housing

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In April 1956, Jesse C. Fisher Jr., a white businessman, wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright proposing a residential development for “a group of better-type colored people” in rural Whiteville, North Carolina. Over the next two years, Wright’s office developed a scheme for Fisher’s tract based on a type of quadruplex Wright called a “cloverleaf.” This paper examines the design and development of this obscure project by putting its small collection of architectural drawings and correspondence in dialogue with relevant historical scholarship, detailed attention to the town of Whiteville, and other aspects of Wright’s work and thought. This varied approach sheds light on the contradictions—including expressions of racial tolerance masking deep-rooted prejudices—that shaped Fisher’s proposal and Wright’s designs. Lastly, the project’s obscurity within the literature on Wright raises questions about historians’ unwillingness or inability, until recently, to reckon with the racialized complexities of Wright’s work.