Date:
Location:
Author’s Talk at the Ash Center
Leah Wright Rigeur
Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
The Loneliness of the Black Republican
Co-sponsored by the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, The Harvard Journal of African American Policy and the HKS Black Student Union.
About the Event
Harvard Kennedy School Assistant Professor of Public Policy Leah Wright Rigueur, Former U.S. Representative Artur Davis and Harvard University Professor of History Lisa McGirr will discuss Professor Wright Rigueur's new book, The Loneliness of the Black Republican in an event moderated by Alex Keyssar, HKS Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy. Covering more than four decades of American social and political history, The Loneliness of the Black Republican examines the ideas and actions of black Republican activists, officials, and politicians, from the era of the New Deal to Ronald Reagan’s presidential ascent in 1980. Their unique stories reveal African Americans fighting for an alternative economic and civil rights movement—even as the Republican Party appeared increasingly hostile to that very idea.
The book examines the “intersection of race, civil rights, conservatism, and party politics” and traces almost half a century between 1936, marking the political realignment of the new deal and 1980, heralding the beginning of the Reagan revolution. The author peels away the stereotypes and simplistic characterizations that seem to define African American Republicans. She studies the motivation, efforts and contributions of African American conservatives: activists, officials, middle class professionals and politicians at the local, state and national level who “attempted to influence the direction of conservatism—not to destroy it but rather to expand the boundaries of the ideology in order to include black needs and interests.”
Co-sponsored with the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, the Harvard Journal of African American Policy, and the HKS Black Student Union.
Ash Center Foyer, Suite 200-North, 124 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA.
Free and open to the public.