A Long, Vital Tradition: Nine Books That Imagine What a Black Utopia Could Be

When asked to free-associate upon hearing the phrase “Black utopia,” many people today might mention Black artists or fictional worlds—the Sun Ra Arkestra and P-Funk’s elaborate, out-of-this-world mythology; the novels of authors such as Octavia Butler, Pauline Hopkins, Martin Delany, and Samuel Delany; imagined places like Wakanda. Some reach further back into history, citing the examples of former American slaves colonizing Liberia or the Universal Negro Improvement Association and Marcus Garvey’s call for diasporic Blacks to go “back to Africa.”

The implication is usually that Black utopia exists only at a distance or in the imagination; when it tries to take root as something more tangible, it is always destined to have an endpoint, a clear moment of collapse that makes it useful as a cautionary fable.

Throughout American history, most Black utopians have not self-identified that way. Utopian tends to sound like an insult, and only in recent years has there been a resurgence of efforts by artists, activists, philosophers, and others to reclaim the word and suggest its relevance for the present.

Black utopianism is a vital tradition woven into the fabric of Black liberation movements, stretching from the Reconstruction era to the present. These utopian visions encompass not only the desire to escape systemic racism and oppression but also the imaginative and practical steps taken to build communities, reclaim land, and demand self-governance. Rooted in collective dreams of a better future, these ideas have formed the backbone of countless experiments in autonomy and political resistance.

I write about my own personal and historical journey through Black utopian thought in The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America. Below are nine key works that provide a window into the long history of Black utopian experiments, tracing it through political, social, and speculative lenses.

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E.U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America

Essien-Udom’s foundational text about the Nation of Islam examines the surge of Black nationalist movements in the mid-twentieth century. He presents Black nationalism as a utopian project—a deliberate attempt to carve out a desirable future for Black Americans, one where the nation-state reflects their values, heritage, and struggles. Although Essien-Udom’s book focuses on the Nation of Islam, its core arguments encompass many different efforts on the part of Black Americans to stop living “in semibondage on the fringes of American society.”

Black Nationalism was inspired, in part, by the work of German philosopher Ernst Bloch, whose three-volume opus The Principle of Hope (1954, 1955, 1959) renewed interest in the subject of utopia during the last half of the twentieth century. “The Negro masses,” Essien-Udom wrote, “are seeking a way out of a sociocultural environment, a spiritual and psychological impasse, fostered by the stubbornly lingering mores of slavery and complicated during the present century by the urbanization of American society.”

William Pease, Jane Pease, Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America

This early work on Black communal experiments in North America provides an important historical overview of antebellum Black initiatives in the United States and Canada that sought to establish independent, self-sustaining communities. The Peases were a white couple who, in the mid-1950s, decided to document some of the “quite unknown and little studied Negro settlements”—places such as the Wilberforce, Dawn, and Elgin colonies in Canada, as well as the South Carolina Sea Islands.

Black Utopia documents how these communities were not just reactions to oppression, but planned projects designed to foster autonomy and resilience. The pursuit of economic independence, land, and educational opportunities were at the heart of these experiments. The founders and inhabitants of these places, the Peases wrote, “recognized the virtue of mutual aid and assistance and the pooling of resources until such time as the individual Negro settler could manage on his own.”

This is an essential book on Black utopian history, but it ends with a surprisingly pessimistic—and fundamentally incorrect—conclusion. The authors conclude that Black utopian settlements before the Civil War “did little in the long run but tinker in a vacuum….Let this be their epitaph. For their vision was unrealistic; their practice, at last, unfruitful.”

Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction

Painter examines the mass migration of Black Americans to Kansas following the Civil War, as they sought to establish new lives and secure land in the face of rising violence in the South. This story highlights the role migration has played in Black utopian thinking—a search for a place where freedom is not just granted but built.

In the aftermath of Reconstruction, as the federal government withdrew its protections for freedpeople, the Southern landscape became increasingly hostile, with the rise of Jim Crow laws, racial terror, and the resurgence of white supremacist violence. The Exoduster Movement, which took place in the late 1870s, was one of the largest and most organized Black migrations of its time. Thousands of formerly enslaved people and their descendants left the South in search of refuge, with Kansas symbolizing the biblical “Promised Land.”

Painter’s work not only contextualizes this pivotal moment but also links it to the broader Black utopian impulse toward freedom, land ownership, and autonomy.

Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History

Moses explores the historical development of utopian thought within African American intellectual traditions, tracing its roots from the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. He examines how Black thinkers and leaders, from Martin Delany to Marcus Garvey, constructed visions of a better future for African Americans, often blending utopian ideals with nationalist and diasporic aspirations.

Moses highlights the complexities of Afrotopian thought, revealing how it encompasses both the hope for a utopian future and the critique of present realities. By analyzing various political and religious movements—including Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Ethiopianism—Afrotopia uncovers how African American visions of liberation were often grounded in the desire for a separate, self-governing Black nation, whether in Africa or in the United States.

Through these historical explorations, Moses shows how Afrotopian dreams have been a driving force behind African American activism and cultural production.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice

Nembhard traces the history of Black cooperative economics in America, revealing a tradition of mutual aid and collective action that dates back centuries. She traces the roots of Black utopian communes to the isolated Maroon communities founded by runaway slaves in the American South; the women-led Combahee River Colony in South Carolina; pro-abolitionist communes such as the Northampton Association of Education and Industry in western Massachusetts; and interracial communities such as Nashoba in Tennessee.

Nembhard’s research also uncovers the extensive networks of cooperatives, credit unions, and mutual aid societies that have often been overlooked in traditional economic histories. She explores how these organizations provided crucial support for Black communities, allowing them to pool resources, build wealth, and create economic alternatives in the face of exclusion from mainstream financial institutions.

Collective Courage highlights the resilience of these efforts and their continued relevance for contemporary movements seeking to address racial and economic inequality.

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

Hartman shifts the focus from physical utopias to the utopian potential embedded in acts of refusal and resistance. By documenting the lives of young Black women, queer people, and radicals in early twentieth-century New York City and Philadelphia, Hartman shows how mundane gestures of defiance and experimentation in living are utopian in themselves.

This groundbreaking book opens up a new realm of Black utopianism, where the refusal to conform becomes a pathway to new modes of being. Hartman’s narrative—”written from nowhere,” she writes, “from the nowhere of the ghetto and the nowhere of utopia”—challenges traditional historical accounts by focusing on marginalized figures whose lives have often been overlooked or dismissed.

She highlights how these individuals, through small yet radical gestures—whether in intimate relationships, sexual autonomy, or alternative living arrangements, the “practice of the social otherwise”—enacted a form of everyday rebellion. These “wayward” lives reflect a utopian impulse toward freedom and self-determination, even in the face of intense social and economic constraints, expanding the possibilities for Black liberation beyond conventional political movements.

Alex Zamalin, Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism

Zamalin links political and cultural expressions of Black utopian thought, tracing the evolution of these ideas from early nationalist movements to the rise of Afrofuturism. By showing how utopian thought has been a central element of both political struggle and artistic expression, Zamalin expands the conversation to include speculative visions of freedom.

In the years since its publication, Black Utopia has had a significant impact on the study of Black utopianism, bringing renewed attention to the central role that utopian thinking has played in Black intellectual and artistic traditions. Zamalin casts the work of figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Delany, George Schuyler, Octavia Butler, and Sun Ra as utopian.

The book has become a touchstone for readers interested in how Black utopian thought envisions radical alternatives to existing social orders.

Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds

Brown bridges the gap between historical utopias and speculative futures by exploring how music, art, and imagination have served as tools for imagining new worlds. She connects Black creativity to a utopian impulse that transcends political movements, showing how sound and artistic expression become forms of liberation.

“I am not interested in tracing utopian blueprints or totalizing remedies,” Brown writes, “but I am fascinated by how people have envisioned utopian worlds—in, through, and outside of the European tradition, which is long. I therefore seek out black quotidian practices and visions of communality, sociality, and kinship already operating outside the bounds of normalizing imperatives.”

Brown highlights the work of visionary women mystics such as Rebecca Cox Jackson and Zilpha Elaw, the musician Alice Coltrane, and others. Through these examples, Brown shows how Black musicians and artists crafted utopian visions not just through political action, but through cultural practices that redefined the meaning of freedom and existence.

Victoria Wolcott, Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement

Wolcott’s book offers a fresh perspective on the Civil Rights Movement, framing it as a utopian project aimed at reimagining American society. By showing how activists—many of them radical pacifists—employed utopian ideals in their fight for racial justice, Wolcott provides a framework for understanding how movements for equality are always rooted in visions of a better world.

Wolcott highlights key movements and institutions, such as the Highlander Folk School, Father Divine’s International Peace Mission Movement, and the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco to show how activists embraced utopian practices, from cooperative living and pacifism to nonviolent resistance. She argues that these efforts were proactive attempts to build inclusive, egalitarian communities that modeled the world they sought to create.

By connecting the Civil Rights Movement to broader utopian traditions, Wolcott reveals how dreams of a radically transformed society were central to the movement’s strategies and enduring legacy.

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The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson is available via FSG.