Adam Fairclough on Victoria Wolcott’s *Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement*

It is generally acknowledged that the “classical” civil rights movement—the protest movement that began with the Montgomery bus boycott and faded away after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.—drew considerable strength from pre-existing ideas and organizations.  Indeed, as reflected in the title of this work, it has become fashionable to refer to a “long civil rights movement,” with the activism of 1955-68 pictured as one phase of an historical process that began in the 1940s, 1930s, or even earlier.  The foundation of the NAACP in 1910 is one obvious starting-point.  But the origin story that has found most favor among historians finds the roots of the “classical” movement in the left-wing activism of the New Deal era, with the Communist Party and the Congress of Industrial Organizations leading the way.  In fact, many advocates of the “long civil rights movement” thesis regard these leftist precursors as more truly radical than the movement associated with King; the Cold War and anti-communist repression, they argue, produced a more cautious kind of activism, one that substituted nonviolence for class struggle, and prioritized racial integration over economic equality.

This elegantly written study offers a different perspective.  In emphasizing the importance of the Marxist-influenced Left, Victoria Wolcott contends, too many historians have overlooked or belittled the significance of “utopian socialists and radical pacifists.”  Lest the word “utopian” suggest naïve and ineffectual idealism, Wolcott argues that such pacifists were not mere dreamers: “They put their bodies on the line” with a view to establishing peace and justice in the here and now.  Working through a variety of organizations, most of them based in the North, they shared a commitment to nonviolence, interracialism, and socialist cooperation.  The ideas and practices that they pioneered helped to shape the civil rights movement; without appreciating their influence, Wolcott insists, we cannot explain “the success of radical nonviolence both in the North and in its most celebrated manifestation in the South.”

Some of the individuals that Wolcott treats are well-known to students of the civil rights movement; pacifist and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, for example, is the subject of several biographies.  Some of the organizations that she includes, such as the Congress of Racial Equality and the Highlander Folk School, also have their historians.  But many of her examples are not so familiar.  Brookwood Labor College in upstate New York trained hundreds of union members and civil rights activists between 1921 and 1937.  The college enrolled blacks as well as whites; women comprised forty per cent of the students.  The Delta and Providence cooperative farms in Mississippi, founded in 1936 by two white southerners who had served as Chistian missionaries in Japan, not only housed families of both races but also attracted “hundreds of white and Black students [who] spent hot summer months building and improving the . . . farms.”  A score of organizations and communities, both  well-known and obscure, are usefully brought together between the covers of a relatively compact book.

One organization to which Wolcott devotes a chapter might strike the reader as an odd fit.  Under the name of “Father Divine,” a black Marylander called George Baker created an interracial church, a “Peace Mission,” that recruited tens of thousands of adherents—one third of them white people—and built dozens of cooperative businesses and farms.  Abjuring tobacco, alcohol and sexual relations, the Divinites found physical pleasure in music and lavish banquets.  But the church was not an apolitical cult designed to enrich an unscrupulous founder.  “Father Divine spoke openly and often about leading civil rights causes during the 1930s and 1940s,” Wolcott notes.  “In their housing, property ownership, transportation, and small businesses, Divinites . . . had an absolute and uncompromising commitment to full racial equality.”  During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Peace Mission might well have been the largest truly interracial organization in the country.   And as its name suggests, nonviolence was central to its belief system.

Wolcott’s study is more than a compendium of like-minded organizations.  It also demonstrates that this array of  “labor colleges, folk schools, ashrams, interracial churches, and urban and rural cooperatives” was greater than the sum of its parts.  The fact that they shared the same basic values and often collaborated meant that, collectively, they exercised disproportionate influence.  Wolcott credits them for helping to bring interracialism into the mainstream of American liberalism, an argument nicely illustrated by Frank Sinatra’s visit to Philadelphia’s Friendship House in 1945, the same year that the singer released The House I Live In, a short film that pleaded for racial and religious tolerance.  This broad “Christian Left” also constituted a training ground for men and women who later gained prominence as civil rights activists.  The best known example is Rosa Parks, who attended a workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee shortly before her bold act of defiance on a bus changed the course of history.  As the civil rights movement swept across the South, a matrix of existing organizations not only furnished institutional support but also “situated utopian interracialism and radical nonviolence at the center” of that insurgency.

Wolcott is careful not to overstate her case.  Few of these predominantly northern groups had believed that nonviolent direct action could be deployed against southern Jim Crow—in the 1940s they considered such action to be suicidal.  It took the Montgomery bus boycott to prove that a nonviolent protest movement–buoyed by mass support, organized through black churches, and inspired by a charismatic leader–could indeed confront and defeat segregation.  Nevertheless, the conclusions of this splendid study are persuasive.  The radical nonviolence that guided the civil rights movement “grew out of relatively small groups of activists committed to utopian interracialism.”  And far from being a milquetoast ideology that posed no challenge to the capitalist order, the utopianism espoused by these groups, and bequeathed to the civil rights movement, sought both racial equality and economic justice.