The Utopian Strain in the Long Civil Rights Movement

FAIN: FA-232475-16

Victoria W. Wolcott
SUNY Research Foundation, Buffalo State College (Buffalo, NY 14222-1004)

A book-length study of the long civil rights movement.

"Living in the Future: The Utopian Strain in the Long Civil Rights Movement" explores the contributions intentional utopian communities that practiced interracialism, cooperative economics, and nonviolence made to the long civil rights movement. As early as the 1920s there were significant experiments in interracial communalism at labor colleges, folk schools, and urban and rural cooperatives. By the 1940s members of the Congress of Racial Equality and the Fellowship of Reconciliation living in interracial utopian communities began to actively train activists in radical nonviolence. By living cooperatively and communally they were creating a new reality that would serve as a model for civil rights activists. More pragmatically, these communities’ members trained activists and created real change in the economic and political fortunes of African Americans. Their vision of a future with full racial equality and economic justice fueled the utopian strain in the long civil rights movement.

Associated Products

Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement (Book)
Title: Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement
Author: Victoria W. Wolcott
Abstract: Utopian thinking is often dismissed as unrealistic, overly idealized, and flat-out impractical—in short, wholly divorced from the urgent conditions of daily life. This is perhaps especially true when the utopian ideal in question is reforming and repairing the United States’ bitter history of racial injustice. But as Victoria W. Wolcott provocatively argues, utopianism is actually the foundation of a rich and visionary worldview, one that specifically inspired the major figures of the Civil Rights Movement in ways that haven’t yet been fully understood or appreciated. Wolcott makes clear that the idealism and pragmatism of the Civil Rights Movement were grounded in nothing less than an intensely utopian yearning. Key figures of the time, from Martin Luther King Jr. and Pauli Murray to Father Divine and Howard Thurman, all shared a belief in a radical pacificism that was both specifically utopian and deeply engaged in changing the current conditions of the existing world. Living in the Future recasts the various strains of mid-twentieth-century civil rights activism in a utopian light, revealing the power of dreaming in a profound and concrete fashion, one that can be emulated in other times that are desperate for change, like today.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: http://https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo130984902.html
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780226817255
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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