Hutchins Lecture: Nancy MacLean on Free-Market Fundamentalism

“Free-Market Activists and School Desegregation”

Suppose that something long understood as an ending was really a beginning. What if the white South’s massive resistance to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision proved to be not just the death rattle of Jim Crow, but also the dawn of free-market fundamentalism in practice? In this James & Marguerite Hutchins lecture, Historian Nancy MacLean reveals how northern advocates of neoliberalism–the push to dismantle popular reforms of the New Deal and the Progressive Era–rallied to the segregationist call for private schools subsidized by the states, with the economist Milton Friedman in the lead.

Nancy MacLean is William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University and Director of the Center for the Study of Class, Labor, and Social Sustainability. She is the award-winning author of Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Harvard UP); Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (Oxford UP); The American Women’s Movement, 1945-2000 (Bedford/St Martins); and, with Donald T. Critchlow, Debating the American Conservative Movement: 1945 to the Present (Rowman & Littlefield). Her latest book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, will be published by Viking/Penguin in the spring of 2017.

This lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held in the University Room at Hyde Hall. Light refreshments will be served.