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Victoria Wolcott joins Stephanie and Michael on this episode of Nonviolence Radio to talk about her recent book, “Living the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement.” Victoria, a history professor at the University of Buffalo, explores the long history of utopianism in the U.S. and its relation to nonviolence, specifically nonviolence as manifested in constructive program, that is, the active building of a nurturing and supportive community as an alternative to a discriminatory and oppressive one. Much of traditional history doesn’t shed light on this ‘constructive’ aspect of the civil rights movement. In this, most histories of the movement have failed to reveal its much longer past and extensive roots, connecting it to early labor unions, to Gandhi, to experimental utopian communities, in both the north and south of the U.S.
One of the things that’s really interesting is that once you start looking, you start finding these [radical interracial] communities all over the place – including in places like the rural South, where you wouldn’t necessarily expect them to be. So that kind of communal experimentation, the interest in prefigurative politics, the constructive program…Usually, historians of the long civil rights movement really talk about it as dating to the 1930s. The relationship between the labor movement and the civil rights movement is really important to understand coming out of the radicalism of the 1930s. … some of the experimentations in radical nonviolence, radical pacifism, really emerged in the late 1930s. And then it goes through the 1970s.
Our capacity to see nonviolence as a viable choice to challenge injustice in the world grows in part from seeing its many facets (active resistance and constructive program) as well as the many times dedicated men and women have proven it to be a powerful and effective force. Victoria’s book, and this conversation, illuminate just that.
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Stephanie: So, good morning and welcome everybody to another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I’m your host, Stephanie Van Hook, and I’m here in the studio with my co-host and news anchor of the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. And we’re from the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California.
On today’s show, we will be speaking with Victoria Wolcott. She’s professor of history at the University of Buffalo. And in particular, we’re interested in her research that she’s put into this beautiful book, “Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement.” And as our listeners know, we’re very interested in this idea of constructive program as part of nonviolent action and as part of building a nonviolent world.
Before I bring Victoria on, Michael, I’d love for you to just say a few words about the relationship in nonviolence to constructive program, and how you imagine this conversation could go today.
Michael: Thank you, Stephanie. Well, I have always placed a lot of emphasis on constructive program because I think there’s less harm, less confrontation, less turmoil. And more practical achievement or accomplishment.
Stephanie: Well, in a lot of ways, the way that we define constructive program is building the kind of world that you want to live in while doing resistant, obstructive actions as well.
Michael: That’s right. I’d even put in this kind of formula, where you build what you want, up until it gets resisted. And then when you have to mount resistance, when you have to fight back, so to speak, you do. But theoretically, you could just sail right through and nobody would stand up and say, “Nay, you could build the kind of world you want,” but that is going to very rarely happen in the world we’re living in today.
So, however, a lot of people just go directly into protest without preparing the world that they want ahead of time. And I think they lose power, and they lose influence with the public.
Stephanie: Thanks, Michael. So, I’d like to bring in now our guest, Victoria Wolcott. Again, she’s professor of history at University of Buffalo. Welcome to Nonviolence Radio, Victoria.
Victoria: Thank you so much. And thank you both, to you Stephanie, and to Michael for inviting me.
Stephanie: We’re really happy to have you here. And this is really interesting research that you’ve done that’s gone into your book, “Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement.” And so, I’d love for you to set the stage for us. What prompted you to do this research on constructive actions that were considered utopian, but also were really living out the kind of society that, as you called the long civil rights movement, is trying to envision, embody?
Victoria: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll give you a kind of big picture answer and then a more narrow answer. The big picture answer is I’ve long been interested in the history of utopianism, utopian practice, and thought, in the United States specifically.
And probably the last 20 years or so, have taught a course, for example, on American utopianism. I’ve particularly been interested in a kind of parallel history of communalism and socialism, actually, in the United States.Many Americans think of the history of the US as being one of individualism, competition, capitalism.
But there’s this parallel history from the 18th century and moving forward, of experimentations in things like communalism and utopian communities, especially in California. California has long been a hotbed of utopianism. So, that’s the long, the sort of very, very broad answer.
The more specific, kind of route to this specific book was actually from my previous book. So, I wrote a book called “Race Riots and Roller Coasters,” which was about the history of segregated recreation. And when I was researching that book, I kept running across these groups of radical pacifists, particularly in the late 30s and early 1940s, so quite early in the middle of the century, who were living communally in ashrams in some cases, in group houses, and were beginning to experiment with nonviolent direct action. Which is, of course, a sort of quintessential constructive program in some ways.
And they were doing this kind of work before the Montgomery bus boycott, kind of before the classical stage of the civil rights movement. And yet, they’re not really written about very extensively. So, they were sort of my in to the book project.
Stephanie: Yeah. That seems really exciting to have put all of that together and those threads that you’re weaving together are really coming into something quite beautiful, a story that hasn’t been told enough. We’re obviously very interested in ashrams – Michael’s lived in an ashram for over 50 years, for example.
So, we know both the strengths and the weaknesses of these kinds of living situations and how they can evolve into spaces that are not healthy and are no longer fulfilling the goals that they began with. And I think that your research can point to that as well.
Michael: Victoria, if I may. The civil rights movement is usually – correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the civil rights movement is usually looked upon kind of negatively as a protest movement that arose because of injustices. And you are supplying a missing dimension to that, that really it also grew out of longings. Longings for a more livable future and actual experiments in living that kind of future, as you say – performatively, prefiguratively. I’ll also now go from a general to a specific. And that is, have you looked into the town of Pacifica here in California?
Victoria: No, I haven’t. I’m sure it’s absolutely fascinating. As I suggested, California, really, from the early 20th century on has been one of the focuses of utopian thought and practice. But if you want to tell me a little bit about it, I’d certainly be happy to respond.
Michael: Just one thing for now. And that is, it is one of those communities which came together around pacifism, around nonviolence and war resistance. I’m not sure how many remnants of that remain. It’s a flourishing city now on the coast but it was formed out of exactly the same kind of impulse, I think, that Oneida and many other communities that you describe, in the south and in the north came about.
Victoria: One of the things that’s really interesting is that once you start looking, you start finding these communities all over the place – including in places like the rural South, where you wouldn’t necessarily expect them to be. So that kind of communal experimentation, the interest in prefigurative politics, the constructive program, etc., you know, is something that is very much part of the American – both historically, even to some extent culturally as well, which I think people have been surprised by.
Stephanie: Yeah. I would love to help share with our listeners some of the research that you’ve done about the kind of radical constructive program side of what you’re calling the long civil rights movement. First, can you tell us about what that means, the long civil rights movement?
Victoria: Yeah, absolutely. So, the way I think most people have been taught, the Civil Rights Movement, you know, maybe back in high school, kind of classically taught, is that it’s a movement that was centered primarily in the South. The sort of idea of the South as a problematic region, of Jim Crow, that it was sparked, in particular, with the Montgomery Bus boycott following Brown vs. Board of Education, so 1955. And then it sort of culminates in this moment of glory with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That’s the kind of classic narrative.
Stephanie: Yeah, that sounds about right.
Victoria: So, the idea of the long civil rights movement, what that does, that kind of, makes us sort of rethink the movement. First of all, it’s a national movement, right? It’s not just about the South. Segregation, racial violence, pogroms, essentially. race riots where you have whites who are attacking groups of African-Americans, that’s a national phenomenon. That happened in my town of Buffalo – City of Buffalo. It happened in Chicago. It happened throughout the country. So, that’s one really important intervention.
And then, as the phrase suggests, “long,” it also shifts the chronology. Usually, historians of the long civil rights movement really talk about it as dating to the 1930s. The relationship between the labor movement and the Civil Rights Movement is really important to understand coming out of the radicalism of the 1930s. And that’s certainly true. I mean, I mentioned that some of the experimentations in radical nonviolence, radical pacifism, really emerged in the late 1930s. And then it goes through the 1970s.
So, it incorporates black nationalism and black power into that narrative in ways that are pretty interesting, rather than simply kind of sidelining them. And so, it offers us all sorts of new perspectives on what civil rights actually was and how it played out.
Stephanie: Yeah. Thank you for giving us that basis to start from in this conversation as well. And so, can you help us draw out some of the ways that in the 30s the labor movement was beginning to pull together a different vision.
Victoria: Yeah, absolutely. So again, the 1930s are an absolutely crucial decade. Those of us who are interested in the history of US radicalism are probably most familiar with experimentations with the US Communist Party and the Socialist Party during the 1930s. And that helps to lead to some of this experimentation.
I’ll just give one specific example, which is the Highlander Folk School, which again, is probably an institution that some of your listeners are familiar with. And that really emerges in the early 1930s as an institute in the South that is going to focus on the question of labor and essentially organizing labor unions. But they become increasingly interested and sort of understand that in order to achieve those goals, in order to achieve a really powerful labor movement, a socialist future, they’re going to have to deal with the question of race and particularly in that region.
So, they began to work with African-Americans in the South by the late 30s and into the 1940s, bringing them into Highlander, doing all sorts of really interesting radical education, kind of bottom up pedagogy with folks to talk about what are the strategies that will most effectively achieve racial equality, as well as a strong labor movement and economic justice.
So out of that, for example, come things like the songs of the Civil Rights Movement. “We Shall Overcome” and other music actually emerges from Highlander, taking some older spirituals and also combining them with some of the labor songs that had been developed in that region, kind of recreating that into the Civil Rights Movement. So that’s one specific example.
And many African-Americans, including Rosa Parks, who spent time in Highlander before she makes the decision to not, you know, allow a white person to take her seat on the bus, she was at Highlander like six months before that. She writes about the fact that that was the first time that she’d ever experienced living fully equal with white folks and being served by white women. That’s one thing that she writes about, right? So, that experience, that kind of radical interracial experience at Highlander, that sort of prefigurative experience is very, very, foundational to her politics that she brings into her activism.
Michael: Victoria, you have described the whole movement as an American phenomenon, and quite, quite accurately. But I’m also interested in some inputs that start happening in the 30s from India and from Gandhi in particular, and the whole idea of nonviolence. My entrée into this was the book Raising Up a Prophet by Sudarshan Kapur, where he showed that actually American activists went to India and vice versa. I’d like to hear you talk about that.
Victoria: Yeah, absolutely. There’s another great book. Negroes, Slaves, Colored Cosmopolitanism, on a similar kind of topic. There is absolutely an international dimension here that’s really, really significant.
So, if you’re thinking about the context of African Americans, they are absolutely focused on what’s happening in South Asia. As early as the mid-1920s, you start seeing the black press covering the movement for independence led by Gandhi. So, there’s a lot of interest within the black community within the United States in these international movements.
I write a bit about in the book, about the great black theologian, Howard Thurman, who is the first African American to actually travel to South Asia to meet with Gandhi one on one in the mid-1930s. And he comes back to the United States and helps to spread those ideas around. And there’s, you know, a global movement of pacifism, certainly in the middle of the 20th century.
There’s other individuals, sort of liberal Protestants, like Sherwood Eddy is one example, who had been a missionary. And he takes radicals in the US to Europe, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. And they travel around and look at different kinds of forms of experimentation – workers education, communes, and also economic cooperatives. They’re very, very interested in kind of cooperatives.
So, there’s a lot of circulation of those ideas. But also, of kind of practical knowledge and even some sort of, you know, you could call it sort of ‘utopian tourism’ in a sense, that is circulating in that middle section of the 20th century.
Stephanie: That’s really interesting, Victoria. And I wonder about this term. Let’s go back again to terms – utopia. How do you define utopia?
Victoria: Well, there’s a classic definition. That the term utopia is coined by Sir Thomas Moore in 1516. And it quite literally means “no place,” right? So, it combines the Greek word for a good place utopia with a U, which means no place. And that term brings a lot of issues with it, because if it’s no place, then it can’t actually exist. And so, that’s a sort of interesting tension in the field of utopian studies.
But it also kind of offers a sense of play and imagination. That’s really important for utopian history. The definition of utopianism that’s most often used by Lyman Tower Sargent is his name. He talks about utopianism as a form of social dreaming that allows communities to envision a radically different society than the one in which the dreamers lived.
So, I think of utopianism in that sense, as a form of social dreaming. And you can see that obviously in literature or science fiction, speculative fiction, right? But you also see it in the lived experiences of actual individuals, whether it’s Oneida or the Shakers, you know, sort of thinking about the earlier period. And then the sort of 20th century experimentation and ashrams and communes all the way through to today.
Stephanie: And how do utopian communities keep themselves from becoming walled off from actual politics? From getting themselves walled off so that they’re no longer relevant to the political situation?
Victoria: Right. I mean, that’s another tension, ongoing dynamic, in the history of utopian communities. And there are utopian communities that are quite walled off. I mean, the Shakers are to some extent. But even the Shakers do allow folks to come in and observe some of their religious practices and buy their various products that they’re actually making. So, that is a tension.
So, I would say that there’s a spectrum between some of these communities that are quite actively politically engaged, and that’s actually their reason for existing, this sort of prefiguritive politics, to those who want to create something fully, you know, walled off, where they can be separate from society entirely. Sometimes you see some of those in the 1970s, for example, those kinds of communities. So, it was a spectrum.
But I guess what I would reject is the stereotype that utopian communities are inherently walled off. I don’t think that’s the case. And if you look at the writings and, you know, memoirs, etc., of individuals who lived in ashrams in the northeast, for example, they’re talking about this all the time. They’re like, “We need time for meditation. We need time for study. We need quiet time.” You know, all of that. “But we’re also engaged in the world.”
And sometimes they do that, like Highlander does, where they bring people into their community through this sort of radical pedagogy that they practice. Sometimes they are, you know, actually developing protest strategies in a careful way that Michael beautifully laid out in the beginning of this conversation. Not just jumping in, but going through the necessary steps – studying the problem, reaching out. I’m just thinking as an example here of the Congress of Racial Equality, who starts doing this work as early as 1942 and 1943. They’re not going directly to a sit in, they’re contacting the business owners. They’re engaging in negotiations. They’re talking to people. They’re kind of living this prefigurative of politics.
And then when they hit that place where there’s just no way that desegregation is going to happen unless you take the next step, that’s when they develop these really, really powerful tactics.
Stephanie: Yeah. It’s so cool the way that your research really helps to tell this story in a different way. And it really highlights that the lunch counter sit-ins or the freedom rides look like prefigurative politics. It’s just telling a different story and I really appreciate that about what you’ve done with this research.
I’m really interested in these ashrams that you’re talking about, these early ashrams in the United States. Can you give us more information about who started them and what they were like?
Victoria: Well, the ones I’m mostly focused on, probably I don’t know how well known it is, but one of the most significant is the Harlem ashram which was developed in the late 30s and 40s, as a lot of its history does. And various people circulated through the Harlem ashram. But it was deliberately set up in a majority black community, obviously in Harlem, and from the very beginning, wanted to do experimentation and training in Gandhian nonviolence.
And so, you have lots of folks who are circulating through there. People like Bayard Ruskin might be a name that people are familiar with, a very important, essential civil rights activist involved in CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. So, he’s living there from time to time. Pauli Murray, the great civil rights activist, lawyer and actually minister is circulating through there. Visitors from South Asia who are doing tours in the United States are spending time there as well.
There’s a parallel one, an ashram in Newark, New Jersey, also in a majority black community, which is doing similar work. Another one I look at a bit is Ahimsa, which is, meaning peace, in Pennsylvania, which is in a more rural community, but is also engaging in this kind of nonviolent direct action work in places like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
And there’s more of these places. That’s just sort of what I would say suggesting before you start looking, you start seeing more and more of these experimentations. There’s also fellowship houses which spring up around the country, which are also are deliberately interracial and sometimes create real communities as well. So, there’s different kinds of names – peace cells, communes, ashrams, fellowship houses.
There’s different terms for, you know, usually between 10 and 20 people, sometimes smaller, sometimes larger, sometimes rural, sometimes urban. So, there’s some diversity between them, but they’re all kind of trying to practice this prefigurative form of politics.
Stephanie: And is it always associated with a more socialist, political persuasion? I’m thinking too of like, Dorothy Day, Catholic Worker Movement as well as also a continuation of this.
Victoria: So, if I had to label them, I would say there are more anarchists than socialists, particularly the Catholic Workers. The Catholic Workers are doing incredibly important, impactful work about poverty. They’re doing less around civil rights and race. If there’s any criticism, it’s more of a description. But they become an important model for some of the civil rights activists, as well.
But the Catholic Workers, the Father Divine Movement that I look at, and some of these other groups, the ones that come out of the labor movement and workers education are more on the socialist side of things. So, they want to see that – they’re looking for the state to be involved in helping to create some of the solutions to inequality.
But many of them are more of the anarchist persuasion. The Catholic Worker movement is often categorized as an anarchist movement. So, setting up these small communities that are sort of self regulated and to some extent self-governed, many of them are tax refusers as well. So, they’re trying to live below the poverty line so they’re not paying taxes to give to the military industrial complex.
Anarchism is another really powerful kind of ideology strand all the way through radical pacifism more generally. And sometimes the two can be a little bit in tension, which is sort of interesting to see in the actual archives: people getting into arguments about where priorities should be and how much one should engage with the state at all, or act separately from the state.
Stephanie: And just in case you’re interested, I know that Gandhi’s ideal form of politics, he said, was enlightened anarchy.
Victoria: Yeah. Yes. And I think that’s like they’re all reading Gandhi, so – and Gandhi’s interpreter. So yes, I think that was very much, you know, very much on their minds. But again, you know, those who, who are at Highlander and who are part of the CIO, Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 30s, were also trying to create socialist organizations, very powerful labor unions, and influencing, you know, the federal government as well. That’s happening. But these smaller communities are very much influenced by that anarchist legacy.
Stephanie: And that even dips into Christianity, for example. You talk about the influence of Christian pacifism. And within the Civil Rights Movement, as we know, Martin Luther King was a Baptist preacher. So it’s using, also redefining, in a way, or retelling the story of Christianity and the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven as a kind of utopia that we can live here on earth. Can you speak to that vision?
Victoria: I think part of what’s happened is that – and this is true among historians as well, there’s been so much focus, particularly in the history of Protestantism, on the emergence of the Christian right, the emergence of Christian conservatives and to the right of that in the postwar period. That there’s been a kind of, I think, in the public imagination, erasure of how powerful – particularly I’m thinking of ecumenical and Protestant movements – were on the left. You know, starting with the progressive era and the Social Gospel and then really moving into that interwar, and then into the 1940s.
The ways in which many of the leading pacifists and radicals in that period – A.J. Muste is a great example. He led the Fellowship of Reconciliation, was a minister himself, and probably one of the best-known radical pacifists of that part of the 20th century, but also a Protestant minister.
I mentioned Howard Thurman, the great African-American theologian before. There’s just another book recommendation for people who are interested. There’s a great book by Vaneesa Cook called Spiritual Socialists, which really, really gets into some of the theology of socialism. This is very much a more global movement as well.
And the fellowship houses were engaged in this. In San Francisco, there’s a church that was in part started by Howard Thurman called the All People’s Church, which is ecumenical. Everybody’s invited, all races are invited, all ethnicities. And they kind of try to create these religious services that are very open and meditative. They bring in, you know, Eastern practices, yoga, etc., into the church as well.
And for a lot of folks in the 30s and 40s that’s what religion was for them. It was not this sort of more right-wing Christian right that emerges a little bit later.
Michael: Boy, you have brought up so much. You should see the page of notes. I hardly know where to begin. Since I’m speaking to you from this region out here in California, there was this very interesting movement in the 30s. It was written about in a book called Comrades and Chicken Ranchers. It’s about, well, communistic – if I may fudge a little bit on that word – communistic communities of mostly Jewish farmers who were raising chickens and whose plan was to go back to Israel. And they were not nonviolent at all.
Something you said triggered this in my mind right now, Victoria, because it came apart in a very sad way. And it was about a conflict between should we cleave loyally to our communist roots? Which became a very fraught question, of course, in the 40s and with the anti-communist hysteria in this country. It broke apart over that because some people wanted to stay loyal to the core and others wanted to survive.
Victoria: There are these Jewish cooperative agrarian communities. I don’t know the ones in California as well. There’s a bunch of them in Michigan – the Sunrise Farm, I believe, is one – that were sponsored in part from European Jews prior to WWII. And it was partly like a way to disperse the Jewish community, which was associated primarily with urbanism, right? And living in cities and all the sort of stereotypes.
One way you could address that was to have them create these agricultural communes, essentially. And of course, this is all attached to Zionism too. I don’t write about this in the book. This is more from my teaching. So, that’s related to Zionism. And of course, everything changes with the war.
But the point about communism and how that can fracture communities is really important to understand. I think there’s a lot of romanticism about the radical left. But the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939 just was just an earthquake among radical movements.
That was the moment where some subset of the American communist movement just said, “That’s it. That’s enough.” Drew the line there. And then you have really, following ‘39, a very powerful, sometimes called the non-communist left, right? So, they’re not pro Red Scare, but they’re very suspicious of the USCP, the United States Communist Party as being too attached to Moscow and being too authoritarian, and actually actively doing damage to organizations. A. Philip Randolph is a great example, the great labor leader, African-American labor leader who was part of this non-communist left.
So, the politics, the sectarian politics, in the interwar period and then, of course, going forward could be really destructive. And as you’re suggesting with that one example, to tear apart communities, to tear apart friendships, and certainly, organizations as well. So, it’s a complicated and messy history.
Michael: I have two very different things to bring to the table. Now, when I was at Berkeley teaching, I had several students who had come from The Farm in Tennessee. And one thing that impressed me very much about these kids was how happy and secure they were, and how you never heard from them. And this seems to be quite genuine – you never heard the kind of complaints about their upbringing that other young people quite legitimately had.
That was a very, very successful children-oriented experiment there. That’s about all that I knew about it. But what I knew about it was very positive.
Victoria: Yeah. So, The Farm, you know, is more part of coming out of the counterculture, New Age culture from the late 60s into the 1970s. I don’t write about it because it’s a little beyond my chronology, but just knowing something about that period. And of course, the groups that grow out of that moment, you know, vary in how successful they are.
And of course, you have terrible examples of things like the Manson Family, which is part of that larger movement. But The Farm is one of the most successful. And people in utopian studies do a lot of sort of examination about which communities do better, which do less well, how long do they last, that kind of thing.
And part of it is a flexibility that The Farm seemed to be able to handle. That is, as they got bigger and more people joined, they had to kind of rethink some of their policies, their communalism. They have to make decisions about, how much do you want to engage with the capitalist economy, right, to make it actually work. How do you supply health care? Can you be completely walled off, or are there ways to both maintain your values but interact with the larger world, you know, in ways that are practical?
And The Farm seems to have that – and again, I’m not an expert on this, but I think they had that ability. The leadership there, seems to have some of that flexibility as they moved forward. And I believe it still exists. I think that’s – I think I’m right about that.
Stephanie: I’m cheering in the background as you’re saying this because I recently left a community that is trying to continue the same structure that they had when their founder was alive. And it just isn’t working. It’s quite stifling.
Victoria: Yeah, it’s hard.
Michael: Victoria, I have dragged you a little bit out of your time frame. Now I have your professional interest, so I’m going to take a plunge and go way, way, way back in history. Because we mentioned Jewish communities. And of course, in 1948, we had this Bedouin kid who discovers the documents that are now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, that showed that just before, unfortunately, tragically ending with the Second Revolution and the Roman destruction of Jewish institutions in Palestine, there was this community at Wadi Qumran, which we now call the Dead Sea community.
And they’re fascinating documents about their theology and some glimpses that, gosh, we wish we knew a little more about how they were organized and how they actually lived out the day. But it’s the proportion. We don’t have the social structure. We do have the theology. I think that’s correct.
But they’re wonderful documents. It was almost over like 200 little scraps of papyri. And these poor people have to struggle to put them together. But there was an obvious utopian community outside of – 70 miles outside of Jerusalem.
Victoria: You know, it brings up the sort of the issue I started with, about the history of communalism versus competition. The last book that David Graeber wrote – I’m going to talk about a book that I haven’t read so this is a little bit embarrassing in some ways.
But from my understanding in that particular – that last work, which he co authored, he talks about the deep history of communities that are more about cooperation, communal living, more kind of socialistic values, you know, in deep time, in deep history, flourishing, right?
This sort of idea, that the march of civilization, the kind of teleological progress of “mankind” or humankind is that you have cities and, you know, are competitive with other cities, and you have warfare, and you have agriculture, and all these steps until you get to modern civilization.
So, there are certainly anthropologists, sociologists, others, who have begun to really challenge that very kind of civilization idea timeline. So, I think, yeah, that sounds like what you’re talking about as part of that deep history.
Stephanie: I want to toss a couple questions in here. I hope you have a few more minutes to talk with us.
Victoria: Sure.
Stephanie: Okay. We’re having fun and so we’re just going to keep going. I want to go back to the conversation about anarchism and these utopian communities and just ask the question about leadership. Because I’m really trying to point toward lessons that we can learn. But before we talk about that, what about the relationship between leadership in these utopian communities and anarchist politics? And how does leadership emerge with a vision of a utopian world or even practices? To what extent is that leadership – does it seem necessary or needed or…?
Victoria: Yeah, it’s a very tricky issue. But it’s absolutely a central kind of question. And it also kind of reminds me of the question I most often get from students, which is, you know, when does a utopian community become a cult, right? That’s a sort of a question that one often gets.
And I think that if you’re looking, I mentioned A.J. Muste, you know, an amazing visionary thinker, a radical pacifist. And he established Brookwood Labor College in the 1920s, a really amazing institution, a kind of workers education institution. But he was very much in charge, you know. So, he’s a white man with multiple degrees, and he’s very much in charge of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and of Brookwood Labor College. And so, there is a hierarchy there.
So again, we’re sort of talking about a spectrum. There are places like Highlander that were experimenting fairly early, trying to be less hierarchical, trying to be, you know – again, kind of practicing this radical pedagogy where they were listening to people, doing workshops where the curriculum, if you would, is coming from the people and not from the leadership, not from the “teachers.” So, there’s that kind of move.
But really, they can’t live fully outside of their time. So, I think particularly, the women in the radical pacifist movement, in particular, often felt shunted aside. There was a lot of focus on the sort of heroism of the men within the movement. And then with the more overtly religious organizations, like I mentioned briefly, the Father Divine Movement, you also have a very clear leadership kind of structure.
So, the real experimentation with a more cooperative vision comes a little bit later. But I would argue that the Congress of Racial Equality and some of these other groups that emerged in the 1940s are setting the stage for, for example, SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and similar organizations in the early 1960s that are part of the new left in the student movement, that are looking for more non-hierarchical – they necessarily succeed, but they’re looking for more non-hierarchical modes of decision making and priority setting than they’re getting that from that earlier generation.
So again, it’s sort of a spectrum, but it’s always an important question to ask. And it is a place where sometimes groups fragment, fall apart, or are challenged.
Michael: Remember the Occupy Movement, one of their slogans was they were leaderless and horizontal. That did not work out too terribly well. And there’s a wonderful book called The Starfish and the Spider about what form of leadership is appropriate and non-oppressive.
Victoria: I’ve certainly read about and heard about that critique of the Occupy Movement. But there’s something also – scholars in utopian studies also make the point that sometimes the length of time a movement or a particular group or whatever survives isn’t always the best gauge of evaluating their success.
So, one could make the argument that the Occupy Movement did bring to visibility the level of economic inequality that today’s labor movement is responding to, right? That would be one possible response to that. But yes, those debates are important debates to have.
Michael: You describe very well in various parts of the book how out of movements come organizations and eventually institutions, if they grow.
Victoria: Yeah.
Stephanie: And I just want to follow up on that question of when communities become cults. Can you say more about what were some of the signs along the way?
Victoria: Yeah. I mean, I should say the word, the term ‘cult’ – people who are scholars of religious studies and so forth don’t like to use that term because it’s so loaded. They usually use the term, for example, ‘new religious movements’ or things like that. But there are certain characteristics that sociologists have been able to look at where you can see levels of exploitation being deeply, deeply problematic.
And that things like you have a charismatic leader who insists that the followers of the movement cut off all ties to their former families and friends, you know, give all of their economic wealth to the movement. And there’s other ways in which one can measure that level of isolation which leaves them vulnerable to exploitation in the end.
And so, there are certainly ways to kind of evaluate that. And there are cases – you know, Jim Jones and the People’s Temple is a good one that started off as an interracial, left-wing, socialist movement. The People’s Temple in the 60s and into the early 70s, really coming out of the Father Divine Movement, in some ways. And then it turns into the absolute worst-case scenario where you have, you know, children being murdered and, you know, many people being murdered by a charismatic leader. So, it doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. And that is certainly part of the study of these movements, is also to see where they go wrong.
Stephanie: Yeah, that is interesting. Now where they go right, we think that where they go right is this vision of nonviolence. And so, in what ways does this utopian – is nonviolence a form of utopianism as well, given that we don’t live in a nonviolent world, and yet we have the long civil rights movement dedicating itself, in a lot of ways, to nonviolence, not in every instance?
Victoria: Yeah, I mean that’s definitely, I think how the practitioners – actually not to use the past tense because obviously this is ongoing – who are just deeply committed to these values, are thinking about it in those utopian – in that utopian sense, of a world without conflict, without violence, without war, without exploitation. And ensuring that, in their own lives, that they’re following those practices. Whether it’s vegetarianism, tax refusal, you know, bodily practices also are often very important to them. Yeah, to follow through on that kind of model.
Stephanie: As we wrap up, we’d love to hear what kinds of recommendations you might have for activists today to draw upon some of the legacy of these utopian envisionings and embodiments and living situation and so forth. Where can we go from here?
Victoria: Well, I’ve said a few times that, you know, when you start looking, you see these kinds of ways of thinking, practicing, and doing everywhere, I mean that quite literally. And so, I would say, you know, this isn’t just about joining an ashram, right? There’s all sorts of counter-institutions that have been developed through these practices.
One great example are cooperatives – economic cooperatives, producer and consumer cooperatives. Those exist in pretty much every community. So, you know, getting involved in the cooperatives movement is a way to kind of plug in to this deep past. There was, for example, in the city of Buffalo, earlier in the 20th century, a number of black cooperatives, African-American cooperatives that were incredibly successful that ran department stores, apartment buildings, and grocery stores, and helped to generate wealth within the community.
And then they got literally bulldozed by urban renewal. But the memory of those persists and has been uncovered so that today, the African-American community in Buffalo is very much keyed into that longer history and is trying to recreate those sorts of counter-institutions. So that’s, you know, one example of cooperatives.
I wrote extensively about interracialism in various kinds of guises. I still think that that’s a really crucial part of any movement, talking across differences and building community in that way as well. And then, you know, a lot of the organizations and movements that I write about in my book still exist today.
So, the peacemakers and others are still out there, but there’s lots of examples. I think people, if you look at their family histories, go back and they might find out that, you know, one ancestor or another were a part of these movements. Whether it’s following Upton Sinclair in California in the 1930s or, you know, being part of a cooperative movement or something else. So, it’s all over the place. You just have to start looking for it.
Stephanie: Thank you so much for joining us today on Nonviolence Radio. It’s been great to have you.
Victoria: Thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.
Stephanie: You are here at Nonviolence Radio. We were just speaking with Victoria Wolcott. She is a historian at University of Buffalo. And she is author of many books, including Living in the Future: Utopianism in the Long Civil Rights Movement.
[Music: This Little Light of Mine]
Stephanie: So, let’s turn next to the Nonviolence Report with Michael Nagler. This is a form of utopianism helping to point around the world to where nonviolence is happening. We can pinpoint it on a map, and it’s quite beautiful. And we should know this as part of our visions of the future that it’s happening all around us. So, Michael, take us to some nonviolence.
Michael: Well said, Stephanie. I guess I would like to start off with a kind of somber note and that is a memoriam. A memoriam for my friend Rabbi Michael Lerner, 1943 until August 28th of this year. Michael was such a powerful influence for nonviolence, and particularly connecting nonviolence with some of its Jewish roots. I won’t say more about him right now, except to say he was a very, very good friend, and it’s a loss to the world. But, of course, his legacy with Tikkun magazine and the spiritual progressive movement is still with us.
So, to move on to an event happening now in Palestine. I have been thinking to myself that in the midst of the savagery and the violence that’s taking place there, there must be little bubbles and little flashes of nonviolent reality.
And one of them is with the doctors. I bet there are some Israeli doctors among them, but they’re mostly Palestinians, who are at that main hospital, al-Shifa. And I just want to quote from one of them: “We have no plan to evacuate and we have no plan how to operate in the event of a siege. We are working under impossible conditions, but if we leave our positions, if we give up our duties, we will fail ourselves and our society. We will fail our families and the friends who count on us.”
And they go on to say, “For 11 months now, the hospital has stayed in service all the time, but it’s getting more and more difficult to do that.” And the rousing note that I’d like to end this on is, again, “If the Army surrounds the hospital, neither us nor the patients will be able to survive for very long. But we will do our best – until our last breath. We chose this path, and we will stay with the patients and save their lives. We imagine the Israeli Army is capable of anything. But we won’t leave our people.”
And that reminds me of the courage, the heroism of people in Katrina, who when that city was being devastated, that people went into a hospital and carried patients – of course, electricity was out, elevators weren’t working. They carried patients on their backs down six, seven flights of stairs, got them into Army trucks and got them out of there.
It’s an unrelieved tragic situation, to be sure. But it is in these situations that sometimes the nobility of humanity arises. We could wish it didn’t require that, but I think it’s very, very important for us to know that that element is never eliminated. It can be covered, but it can’t be abolished.
Similarly, in that same region, in that same conflict, there is a journalist by the name of Bisan Owda, a Palestinian journalist and recently on Deadline, which is a news publication put out from Hollywood, California. She responds to being nominated for the Outstanding Hard News Feature Story Short Form category, which is certainly a good description.
Her project was called – or her performance was called “It’s Bisan from Gaza and I’m Still Alive.” She talks about how one group, the CCP, as it’s called, the Creative Community for Peace, which is a very, very Zionist pro-Israel group, is trying to take away her Emmy Award. And she calls that – it’s a demonstration of “soullessness.” But also, it was – and this is a direct quote, “An incredible testament to the threat posed by a single young woman with an iPhone.”
And she says, it is just – it’s eating people alive that, quote, “2000-pound bombs have not been able to snuff out the power of witness and narrative.”
So, moving on to some other organizations and projects. There is a group based in the UK, Dartmoor in the UK, called The Centre for Peaceful Solutions. It’s a dialogue and nonviolent communication effort and they have been focusing on criminal justice. One of their statements recently was, “Rather than seeing prisoners as a ‘problem to be fixed’, we work with the whole prison community.” That’s an unusual approach which we’ve seen working elsewhere.
“We work with the whole prison community, identifying the strengths on which to build and inspiring all members of the community – prisoners, staff, and families – to find and nurture their inner mediator.” And she says, “At the heart of our approach is a communications framework rooted in the philosophy of nonviolence,” I don’t consider nonviolence just a philosophy, but we’ll let that pass for now, “rooted in the philosophy of nonviolence called The Dialog Road Map, DRM.” And that gives you a structured framework for getting past resistance, hostility and transforming violence into cooperation.
It was all started because one person who was caught up in the nastiness and the violence had a glimpse of light and, “this glimpse of light within himself became a pivotal moment of change and of possibility.”
So, that is a great testimony to what I was saying before with those brave Palestinian doctors in al-Shifa, that human nobility, awareness of unity, can never be completely eliminated even though it can be covered over.
So, a little bit more on Palestine. That seems to be where I’m focusing for today. Truthout reports that Palestine Has Mobilized a Global Movement. And for it to last, we must get organized. That’s why I raised that comment toward the end of my interview of Victoria Wolcott. Past solidarity movements teach us that organization is just as important as mobilization.
That is – I’m putting this now in my own words – when you have a movement that arises in response, usually to some kind of injustice, people come together. They take some kind of action to address that issue. And then the question comes up, what is the permanent future of this? What is going to happen now going forward?
Sometimes movements come up, and they just go back down when the issue is resolved. But sometimes they can build networks of personal relationships. And now this movement is operating at the grassroots level but making permanent marks on the consciousness of millions of people and impacting the agendas of some elected officials like our dear friends on the Squad. And this is critical today because of the rise of authoritarian movements, on which I do not propose to dwell.
Thank you very much for listening, and I look forward to sharing more nonviolence news with you on our next episode.
Stephanie: You’ve been here at Nonviolence Radio. Michael, thank you so much for your Nonviolence Report. We’d like to thank our guest, Victoria Wolcott. “Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement.” To Matt and Robin Watrous who help to edit and transcribe the show, Sophia Pechaty, Annie Hewitt, Bryan Farrell over at Waging Nonviolence, who helps to syndicate the show at their organization. Thank you very much to all of the listeners across the various stations, including over the Pacifica Network. Also thank you to KPCA and KWMR, our favorite radio stations in the local area.
And to you, all of our listeners, if you want to learn more about nonviolence, find us at MettaCenter.org, or at NonviolenceRadio.org. And until the next time, everybody, please take care of one another. And as Wolcott’s book says, “Live in the future.” Thanks.