Conclusion

This chapter discusses the close of Reddick’s career, particularly as he served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at Dillard University from 1978 to 1987. Although he commiserated with his good friend St. Clair Drake about the new conservative era and its hostility to further civil rights gains, he nevertheless remained active, including his participation in a landmark conference that grow into the important book The State of Afro-American History (1985), which included work by the next generation of pioneering black scholars like Darlene Clark Hine, Thomas C. Holt, James D. Anderson, and Robert L. Harris, Jr., even as it also included Reddick’s contemporaries such as his fellow Fisk student John Hope Franklin. The chapter closes by recounting Reddick’s death, explaining why he is not better known, and underlining the ongoing importance of his model of scholar-activist and its palpable importance today.