Ujima Press Unveils: Black Utopias: Aaron Robertson in Conversation with Stacey Sutton

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Boston, MA — On the occasion of the publication of The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America, author Aaron Robertson joined urban planning scholar Stacey Sutton for a public conversation through the Boston Ujima Project’s #BlackTrust: Chuck Turner Arts & Lecture Series. Moving across histories of Black settlement, cooperative economics, political struggle, and collective care, the conversation explored how Black communities have imagined and built alternative worlds within and beyond the constraints of American democracy.

Robertson’s work traces the long history of Black utopian thought in the United States, from Reconstruction-era communities to contemporary experiments in freedom-making, surfacing attempts at paradise in a nation structured by racial capitalism and displacement. Sutton — whose research project Real Black Utopias examines Black-led solidarity economy ecosystems across cities including Chicago and Boston — extends these questions into the present, considering the infrastructures, governance models, and social practices that sustain collective life today. Together, Robertson and Sutton reflect on Black utopia not as fantasy, but as an ongoing social and political practice rooted in mutual aid, self-determination, and ways of living together.

Black Utopias: Aaron Robertson in Conversation with Stacey Sutton is the inaugural title in #BlackTrust, a book series based on public programs organized through the Boston Ujima Project’s #BlackTrust: Chuck Turner Arts & Lecture Series.