Victoria W. Wolcott, Professor, History and 2019-20 Humanities Institute Faculty Fellow. Photographer: Douglas Levere
Photographer: Douglas Levere

Join us at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center for our ninth year of Faculty Fellows talks! This lecture series brings current UB humanities research out into the community – with complimentary wine and hors d’oeuvres. Free and open to the public.

Historian Victoria Wolcott explores how utopian ideas and practices shaped 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 activists envisioned a future with full racial equality and economic justice.

Victoria is a Professor of History and received her Ph.D. in 1995 from the University of Michigan. She has published two books: Remaking Respectability: African-American Women in Interwar Detroit, and Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle Over Segregated Recreation in America. In addition, her articles have appeared in The Journal of American History, The Radical History Review, and the Journal of Women’s History among others. Her current book project, Living in the Future: The Utopian Strain in the Long Civil Rights Movement, explores the role of interracial pacifist communities in the civil rights movement.