Hiding in Plain Sight: Does Ideology Obscure the Black Conservative Archive?

The study of Black conservatism presents a number of challenges, but finding the wealth of archival resources necessary to weave this perspective into compelling historical narratives is not one of them. The problem lies, instead, with a general unwillingness to look for, and to look at, these materials that are, in many cases, hiding in plain sight/site/cite.

This talk takes the history of the 1963 March on Washington as a prime example of this political, historical, archival and (arguably) deeply ideological phenomenon. While remembered – and enshrined in our public history – as one of the finest, defining moments in post-WWII civil rights movement, the March was heavily contested among African Americans, with strong arguments against the action put forward from a center-to-right perspective. We are much more likely to memorialize critiques emanating from left-of-center, such as Malcolm X’s famous “farce on Washington” quip; but what about those African-American leaders, activists and intellectuals who rejected plans for the March on “conservative” grounds, and in defense of a “law and order” politics? The figures who did so – the Reverend J.H. Jackson, George Schulyer, James Meredith and others – were hardly marginal. Obscuring their presence flattens out our political history and diminishes the richness and fluidity that has long defined Black political culture.

In our present moment of echo chamber politics, it may be time to excavate moments when ideological diversity was very much at play in shaping debates about protest strategies and the meaning of civil rights activism.

Angela D. Dillard is the Earl Lewis Collegiate Professor of Afroamerican & African Studies and in the Residential College. She serves on the faculty of both of these units within the College of Literature, Science and the Arts and on January 1, 2015 will become LSA’s new Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education.