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• Faculty/Staff Links

Victoria Wolcott

Assistant Professor
Department of History

E-mail: wolc@mail.rochester.edu
Office: 585.275.4756
Fax: 585.256.2594

Fields of Interest:
African-American history; urban history; Post-1945; women's history; popular culture.

My research focuses on the African-American experience in the twentieth-century urban North. My first book, Remaking Respectability, examines the Great Migration of southern African-American women to Detroit, Michigan in the 1920s and 1930s. The book traces how divergent notions of appropriate behavior and deportment shaped the actions of elite and working-class African Americans during this period. Female migrants often depended on storefront churches, numbers runners, and other nontraditional sources of economic survival and personal identity that urban reformers considered problematic. By World War II these female migrants had helped foster a racial politics of self-determination in the motor city.

Studying an interwar black community has led me to a second major research project. Recreation and leisure were major concerns within the African-American community throughout the interwar period. Black reformers who struggled to find respectable and safe forms of leisure within the city found their efforts stymied by segregation policies practiced by white owners of amusement parks, swimming pools, and movie theaters. In my current research I am looking more closely at race and recreation in northern cities after World War II. I am now completing the first stage of research, an examination of a 1956 race riot on the Canadiana, a Lake Erie steamer that ferried passengers between Buffalo and the Crystal Beach amusement park. This riot reveals the limits of integration in the post-war urban North, and the consequences of spatial segregation. I will soon broaden my analysis to look at racial conflict in Riverview Park in Chicago, and Olympic Park near Newark to complete a book manuscript, Integrated Amusements: Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters in the Post-War Urban North.

Representative Publications:

* Remaking Respectability: African-American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
* "Gendered Perspectives on Detroit History," Michigan Historical Review (Spring 2001): 75-91. "Defending the Home: Ossian Sweet and the Struggle Against Segregation in 1920s Detroit," in American Stories: Collected Scholarship on Minority History from the OAH Magazine of History (Bloomington: Organization of American Historians, 1998).
* "The Culture of the Informal Economy: Numbers Runners in Inter-War Black Detroit," The Radical History Review (Fall 1997): 46-75. "'Bible, Bath, and Broom': Nannie Helen Borroughs, the National Training School, and the Uplift of the Race," Journal of Women's History (Spring 1997): 88-110.
* "Mediums, Messages, and Lucky Numbers: African-American Female Spiritualists and Numbers Runners in Inter-War Detroit," in Patricia Yeager, ed., The Geography of Identity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 273-306.

Courses
AAS 142/HIS 166 Afro-American History II
AAS 259/HIS 259 African American Women History