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.