He was the Thomas Muncy Keith Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Delaware, where he taught from 1965 until his retirement in 2014.
In 1985, his book The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation won the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel award, a decision that proved controversial because the book was accused of being racist.
As a graduate student at UC-Berkeley, he participated in civil rights demonstrations in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco.
During his career, he received grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Delaware Humanities Forum, the Earhart Foundation, the Crystal Trust, the Pew Charitable Trust (1999), and the U. S. Department of Education.
[8] In 2017, after reviewing the book Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits in the American Historical Review (AHR), Wolters came under renewed criticism over his past writings for the white nationalist outlets, such as the magazine American Renaissance and think tank National Policy Institute.