On the 5th of March 2020, Professor Leah Wright Rigueur joined the LSE US Centre for the event “African Americans in a ‘White’ House: Presidential Politics, Race, and The Pursuit of Power.” At the event, using one of the most outrageous scandals in modern American political history as a case study – the Housing and Urban Development Scandal (HUD) of the 1980s and 1990s which saw political officials steal billions in federal funding set aside for low-income housing residents – Professor Leah Wright Rigueur told the complex story of the transformation of Black politics and the astonishing racial politics of presidential administrations that have paved the way for patterns of political misconduct that have continued into the present.

This seminar was chaired by Professor Imaobong Umoren, Assistant Professor at the Department of International History at LSE.

The event was part of the ‘Race and Gender in US Politics in Historical and Contemporary Perspective’ seminar series organized by the LSE United States Centre.

Professor Leah Wright Rigueur is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the Harry S. Truman Associate Professor of American History at Brandeis University. She is the author of The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power and is currently working on the book manuscript Mourning in America: Black Men in a White House.

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• Featured image credit: Jeff Fillmore (Flickr, CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0)

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