James J. Kilpatrick: Salesman for Segregation

Introduction

1 i n t r o d u c t i o n In 1960 or “thereabouts,” James J. Kilpatrick vaguely, unhappily remembered , two black journalists came to his office in Richmond to report on the city’s response to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling and asked for his opinion as editor of the Richmond News Leader. Forty-two years later, in 2002, Kilpatrick noted the reporters as about his age, attractive, and intelligent . Despite their engaging conversation in his office about the city’s reactions to the desegregation decision, Kilpatrick had not extended invitations to them for dinner or drinks. His reasoning could not have been simpler: they were black; Negroes and whites were not equals or friends. Raised in the Jim Crow South, Kilpatrick had been “nurtured on the mother’s milk of segregation,” which formed “the natural order of mankind.” He went to bed ashamed and slept terribly, but snubbing his black visitors was “an epiphany of sorts,” he later recalled. During the decade after his awakening, Kilpatrick claimed to edge toward edification on racial matters. By 1970, he had recognized the “terrible evils” of “state-sponsored racism.” The story of Kilpatrick’s retreat from espousing segregation also involves conservatism and the South’s long entanglement with white supremacy. For more than four decades in public life—first as an influential editor defending Jim Crow in Virginia, then as a major syndicated political columnist—Kilpatrick captured how support of segregation could segue into conservatism as the civil rights era faded and gave a lot of fumbling, apprehensive people ways out of a predicament beyond their control.1 Kilpatrick’s apology was wrapped up in his career, and his life chronicles the emergence of modern American conservatism and the collapse of segregation. Though not at first recognized as a sentinel segregationist, he led a campaign at the News Leader against school desegregation and the Supreme Court based on a resuscitation of states’ rights to defend “the southern way of life” from an intrusive and expansive federal government. Kilpatrick pitched segregation to white southern resisters and a national audience alike, and his work at the newspaper earned him a reputation as the fire-breathing editor-intellectual of massive resistance. Behind that notoriety , however, hid a more complex man with a strategic ability to change 2 | Introduction over time into an underappreciated yet significant figure on the political right. For Kilpatrick, massive resistance served as a springboard to larger venues and a wider purview and acted as an early conduit between his region ’s conservatives and their ideological counterparts beyond the South. He refused, however, to let racial malice blind him to positions the right found more tenable over the long term. The fight against the Brown decision consecrated a marriage between Kilpatrick’s segregationist thought and political and intellectual conservatism that challenged the civil rights movement and its progeny. Working with William F. Buckley’s National Review, David Lawrence’s U.S. News & World Report, Henry Regnery’s press, and Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign swept Kilpatrick into a clique within the conservative movement where the high priests of the right set the parameters for orthodox beliefs and the linkage between states’ rights and civil rights became a thoroughly domesticated issue. Already by the late 1950s, in the view of historian George H. Nash, James Kilpatrick had emerged as the “more or less ‘official ’” conservative spokesman on constitutional issues and civil rights. Southern, western, and national conservatism speedily teamed up in the postwar years, and Kilpatrick’s attacks on civil rights, based mostly on constitutional grounds and enshrined in the 1964 Republican presidential platform , meant that his racial beliefs were in league with national trends and attitudes.2 During the late 1960s and 1970s, Kilpatrick contested federal affirmative action and school busing programs and popularized the notion of “reverse racism” even as he admitted that legal segregation was wrong. In post-1965 America, his approach actually furthered a broader conservative opposition to race-conscious policies. As America’s foremost syndicated political columnist and a well-known network television personality, he emphasized freedom of association as he tried to foil government intervention that proposed remedies for public and private forms of discrimination. In the process , Kilpatrick erased the troublesome issue of impolitic racial bigotry and deprived civil rights leaders and liberals of the very arguments that they had monopolized for almost a generation. His rhetorically race-neutral rejection of minority rights engineered on themes of strict constitutionalism , civil...