Professor Angela Dillard, Richard A. Meisler Collegiate Professorship in Afroamerican & African Studies and in the Residential College, Inaugural Lecture

What happens when history and ideology are at odds? And how are the stakes higher when the history in question has become part of our public culture – celebrated through commemorations, concretized in public monuments and statuary, and taught in textbooks? In exploring the often-unacknowledged intersections, parallels and alliances between the post-WWII civil rights movement and the rise of the New Right, my work centers on “civil rights conservatives”: African-American figures, such as James H. Meredith, who were critical of the mainstream of the movement from a right-of-center perspective. Meredith, famous for integrating the University of Mississippi, is a major civil rights icon who has struggled to distance himself from his own political legacy, even coming to denounce integration as a "con job." This irony, I argue, is deeply intertwined with modes of public history – “monumental history” – that do not allow for ideological complexity, and that distort as much as they clarify.