"A Different Shade of Freedom," Dillard's current manuscript-in-progress, is a book that responds to our hyper-partisan age in which the way we write, understand, and consume history has become a pressing issue within contemporary American political culture. It provides an “entangled” history with black conservatism foregrounded within debates that have shaped the contours of the black freedom struggle, one the one hand, and that have impacted the evolution of American conservatism, on the other. It seeks to disrupt the all-too-easy assumption that political movements on the left and on the right are mutually exclusive. The interrelationship of the post-WWII civil rights movement and the rise of the New Right sits at the center of this analysis, but Dillard argues that across the 20th century these phenomena have not been as separate and as antagonistic as we like to believe. The individuals and organizations around which the book is grounded -- including James Meredith, Roy Innis and CORE as well as lesser known figures like Mildred Jefferson and the Reverend J.H. Jackson -- bring moments of entanglement into clearer focus in ways that can help us to rethink the past and better understand the present. Ultimately, the goal is to not just put another brick in the wall of a growing literature on race and conservatism, but to begin to shift the ways that we think about the history of the black freedom struggle (as a primary focus) as well as the history of American conservatism (as a secondary one). Portions of this work have appeared under the banner of "civil rights conservatism."