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Traci Parker, Freedom in the Here and Now, The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 342–344, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae494
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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.
