Victoria W. Wolcott is a professor of history at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, where she teaches urban, African American, and women's history. She is the author of Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (2001) and Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America (2012). Her current book project, "Living in the Future: The Utopian Strain in the Long Civil Rights Movement," focuses on the emergence of experimental interracial communities in mid-twentieth-century America and their influence on the long civil rights movement. She is also researching the life of African American pacifist and civil rights activist Eroseanna Robinson.
This lecture provides an overview of how the new scholarship on the long civil rights movement has changed our understanding of the scope and range of civil rights. It focuses on how a northern perspective adds a broader temporal scope to the movement, from the Great Migration to Black Power. And it highlights previously overlooked topics such as redlining, unionization and white flight.