Freedom in the Here and Now Purchased

The efforts of 20th-century activists to achieve immediate freedom is the concern for Victoria Wolcott and Irvin Hunt. However, each scholar approaches the topic in drastically different ways, reflecting their respective disciplinary differences. In Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement, Wolcott, a historian of the 20th-century United States, traces the history of utopian communities, including worker education schools, cooperatives, and fellowship houses and churches, and spotlights their pivotal contributions to the long civil rights movement. In Dreaming the Present: Time, Aesthetics, and the Black Cooperative Movement, Hunt, a scholar of English and African American studies, reads Black cooperatives as an artistic practice that facilitated the creation of different temporalities of the present.

In Living in the Future, an elegantly composed and meticulously researched book, Wolcott invites us to reconsider utopian practices and ideas within the long civil rights movement. (The long civil rights movement views the struggle for racial equality as extending before the 1950s and past the 1960s. Within this framework, the civil rights movement, spanning from 1954 to 1968, represents a pivotal chapter in this struggle.) Utopian ideals were quite popular from the 1920s through the Second World War, declined in popularity after the war and as the labor movement deteriorated, and resurged in the early 1960s when a fresh wave of visionaries emerged.

But, as she points out, utopias have been largely belittled as “fantastical and out of reach, a world best left to fiction rather than lived reality” or entirely overlooked in extant historical scholarship (3). Wolcott argues, “slighting its significance in the long civil rights movement gives us an incomplete picture of midcentury activism and does little to explain the success of radical nonviolence both in the North and its most celebrated manifestation in the South” (15). The creative vision needed to conceive of a utopia, she reveals, sparked significant societal shifts by demanding “immediate change” and constructing the desired world in the present, rather than postponing it for a full societal revolution (2). In short, activists championed the concept of “freedom now,” a phrase that evolved into a widely recognized slogan within the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

Across five chapters, Wolcott adeptly weaves together a variety of utopian thinkers and their communities, which have traditionally been segmented into several distinct disciplines, and credits them for integrating interracialism into mainstream American liberalism. The utopian communities discussed in Living in the Future shared a commitment to three tenets: cooperatives, interracialism, and nonviolence. Cooperatives offered an alternative to capitalism and aimed to promote egalitarianism. Interracialism challenged racial segregation and discrimination, although it was practiced in three different ways: Liberal interracialism emphasized education and moral persuasion as the key methods to nurture racial understanding; labor interracialism promoted class solidarity to build strategic partnerships beyond racial divides; and utopian interracialism called for swift and profound transformation, adopted nonviolent direct action, and frequently undermined racial hierarchies. Finally, Mahatma Ghandi’s approach to nonviolence was the third tenet. It profoundly shaped the work of utopian socialists and radical pacifists; however, it was not fully embraced by those who engaged labor interracialism.

The collection of people, institutions, and organizations that Wolcott presents is quite extraordinary. The first chapter examines worker education programs. Brookwood Labor College and Highlander Folk School were champions of labor interracialism, playing a pivotal role in the formation of a potent industrial union movement and educating a generation of activists—including prominent figures like Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, and Pauli Murray—who would carry their broad vision across the nation and beyond. The Delta and Providence farms, producers’, and consumers’ cooperatives located in the Mississippi Delta are the subject of chapter two. These farms promoted cooperation and brotherhood, across racial lines and against the corrupt system of sharecropping, to manifest a socialist future.

The third chapter delves into the captivating story of the utopian interracialist Father Divine (born George Baker Jr.) and his International Peace Mission movement. Some readers may be familiar with Father Divine’s movement, which has often been labeled a cult both during its existence and in sociological and historical studies. However, Wolcott maintains and effectively substantiates that among the myriad utopian endeavors, this religious movement “was the most successful utopian community in the twentieth century” (88). Established in the 1920s, the Father Divine movement flourished through the 1950s with a series of urban and rural cooperatives. It actively participated in political initiatives ranging from antilynching efforts to employing nonviolent direct actions for desegregating public facilities. Over the course of its tenure, the movement evolved from focusing on labor and interracial liberalism toward adopting a completely utopian vision. This vision sought immediate change and aimed to erase the distinctions of race and gender in a cooperative society. Toward the end of his life, however, Father Divine embraced Cold War conservatism and adopted more traditional perspectives on gender (although he continued to fervently challenge racial segregation). Gone was the “fluidity and flexibility of earlier decades”; now, modesty and respectability among women was stressed (114). This transition, I believe, is noteworthy and could have benefitted from further exploration.

Fellowship House, along with YWCA and YMCA programs, are the subject of the fourth chapter. These organizations championed a form of liberal interracialism that emphasized education and morals. Living in the Future concludes with an exploration of pacifists and their endeavors, focusing on the communal experiments of Ahimsa Farm and the Harlem Ashram, as well as the Congress of Racial Equality. These groups were dedicated to utopian interracialism and the practice of radical, nonviolent direct action.

Wolcott presents a compelling argument, unveiling the achievements, evolution, and significance of utopian ideas and communities and showing how the civil rights movement’s mix of idealism and pragmatism was deeply anchored in a profound utopian desire. Simultaneously, she candidly addresses the limitations and flaws of the utopian communities and institutions explored in Living in the Future. For example, although the Delta Cooperative Farm championed racial equality in its voting and labor practices, it complied with Mississippi’s segregation laws during social gatherings and in housing. This led to a contradiction that eventually sparked racial tensions, thus eroding the solidarity and equality it aimed to establish. Through her exploration of both the triumphs and challenges of these utopian endeavors, Wolcott imparts valuable insights for future movements seeking racial and economic justice.

Dreaming the Present also examines cooperatives. It asks, “What might a movement look like freed from the dictates of progress?” (5). In the book, Hunt shifts the starting point for studying social movements away from the where and instead focuses on the when. Hunt emphasizes that social movements were not intended to be permanent and instead aimed to be and change the present. Dreaming the Present focuses on the importance of the present moment, advocating for a reflection on the actions, thoughts, and words of activists aimed at improving the lives of Black individuals in their immediate reality, rather than dwelling on the echoes of the recent past or the speculations of a far-off future.

Hunt concentrates on three Black cooperative movements: the Negro Cooperative Guild founded by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1918; the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League, the creation of George Schuyler and Ella Baker in 1930; and Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm. Unlike Wolcott’s book, Dreaming the Present does not trace the history of these cooperatives and their attempts to provide alternatives to or disrupt capitalism. Instead, this book focuses on cooperatives as presenting alternative temporalities. Hunt is concerned about the “aesthetic choices and sensibilities that made some of the most radical cooperatives possible” and “allowed them to exceed and confound adaptive structures of an abiding anti-Blackness.” Hunt continues, “My authors’ claims to being first might very well look like facts plucked from the air, a dismissal of the historical record, a willful forgetting (they all knew each other, after all), a presentism” (10).

The opening chapter presents an argument that views Du Bois’s advocacy for cooperative economics as the foundation of a social movement primarily focused on the beginning. Hunt insists that Du Bois practiced sustained incipience, “a nondialectical embodiment of time in which continuously beginning a movement in the end goal” (17). Hunt considers the concept of sustained incipience as a vital approach to life, seeing it not merely as a location, a physical establishment, or a diasporic network of such places, but as a practice aimed at democratizing time.

Schuyler and Baker’s movement, the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League (YNCL), is the subject of the second chapter. Hunt insists that the YNCL exemplifies Schuyler and Baker’s practice of planned failure. Hunt defines planned failure as “the performative codification of strategic anarchy.” It “designates the intended demise of the original plan” (92). In other words, Schuyler and Baker’s cooperative naturally reproduced the problems—the unequal distribution of wealth and racial discrimination, for example—that they sought to alleviate. Their goal then was not to “transcend these defects so much as disassemble them until they cease to cohere” (92).

The final chapter examines civil rights activist Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative and interprets it “as a reclamation of nowhere, not an escape from it, not even a marginal escape from it” (138). Hunt argues that, as a Black woman striving to safeguard her personal space, maintain her bodily autonomy, and uphold Freedom Farms, Hamer required a certain degree of private property. However, she also sought to dissociate the concept of private property from its traditional Lockean roots. Hunt calls “her production of mutually exclusive property rights and its embodied traversal pluripresence.” Hamer, Hunt concludes, “forged a social movement as a mode of stillness, a movement based on refusing to move” (19).

Hunt presents a unique and thought-provoking perspective on Black cooperatives, time, and social movements. The author writes, “I am less interested in historical fact than in the making of history at moments of its emergence, uncertain, unset” (10). As such, Hunt adopts an interdisciplinary approach, utilizes crucial theoretical concepts, and interprets primary sources as literary texts, analyzing them down to the sentence level. This method marks a significant departure from conventional historical analysis. Historians and others, thus, may find themselves longing for more detailed insights into the lived experiences, social structures, and cultural practices of the individuals and communities involved, which could provide a deeper understanding of the subject.

Hunt’s characterizations of Du Bois, Schuyler, Baker, and Hamer as artists is both intriguing and challenging. Hunt argues that this approach enables us to challenge the gendered reasoning that has limited our full appreciation of them because they, except for Du Bois, did not communicate their ideas in written form but instead through institutional action. Hunt views institutional action as novelistic. For example, in seeing Hamer as an artist, Hunt attempts to counter narratives that have effectively sanitized and misrepresented her, reducing her to gendered stereotypes of being merely transparent and “intuitive” (161). However, the reason why framing Hamer as an artist helps us move past the simplistic view of her as just a poor Black woman from Mississippi remains ambiguous. Also, scholars of the civil rights movement and gender have shown that Hamer’s contributions are multifaceted, including her activism for voting rights, civil rights, and gender equality. This broader acknowledgment aligns with the ongoing academic effort to provide a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of Black female activists.

Both Living in the Future and Dreaming the Present are well-researched works that significantly deepen our understanding of 20th-century social movements. Wolcott’s Living in the Future is ideal for readers interested in the history of utopian activists and communities, particularly Black cooperatives, and their influence on the mid-20th-century civil rights movement. In contrast, Hunt’s Dreaming the Present will appeal to those fascinated by the temporal dynamics and aesthetics of Black cooperatives.