Book a Distinguished Lecturer from the Organization of American Historians for your next event.
VMI Photo by - H. Lockwood McLaughlin
This wonderful program affords us the opportunity to bring to our small campus a nationally known speaker and truly enhance the liberal arts experience of our students. Without this program we would have been unable to afford the cost of bringing a speaker of this rank to our campus.
Tonia M. Compton, Department of History and Political Science - Columbia College
Victoria W. Wolcott is Professor of History at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She has published three books: Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (2001), Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle Over Segregated Recreation in America (2012) and Living in the Future: The Utopian Strain in the Long Civil Rights Movement (2022). In addition, she has published articles in The Journal of American History, The Radical History Review, and the Journal of Women’s History among others. She is currently working on two book projects: an edited collection Utopian Imaginings: Saving the Future in the Present for SUNY...
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African American religious leader, Father Divine, founded the twentieth century’s most successful utopian community. By 1939 his Peace Mission movement was the largest property owner in Harlem, founded extensions throughout the United States and abroad, and had nearly a million followers. This talk seeks to recover the political power of the Father Divine movement. Early twentieth century black religious movements, including Father Divine’s Peace Mission, offered alternative political and racial identities through religious teaching. Father Divine also created a cooperative empire during the Great Depression that provided ample food and housing for followers and other community members. Like other civil rights pioneers Father Divine drew from Gandhi’s teachings on nonviolence and promoted cooperatives as a just alternative to competitive capitalism. And utopian visionaries like Father Divine rejected segregation and nurtured interracial fellowship.
"The Father Divine movement prefigured an egalitarian future without racial segregation or economic inequality. "