James J. Kilpatrick: Salesman for Segregation

THREE: If at First You Don’t Secede

79 t h r e e If at First You Don’t Secede In the summer and fall of 1957, James J. Kilpatrick’s work at the Richmond News Leader consumed at least fourteen hours of each day, and the preservation of segregation dominated much of his thought. The man most responsible for making interposition a reality and stirring portions of the white South to protest the Supreme Court’s Brown decision was once again under duress. Massive resistance in Virginia showed signs of crumbling when federal courts began to hear cases about the desegregation of public schools in Norfolk, Charlottesville, and the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Kilpatrick wrote to his friend William J. Simmons, “Things are moving toward a showdown here in Virginia, and between us girls, I am rather gloomy about what is likely to happen.” Virginia’s options looked bleak, but outright defiance could work still, and the editor remained optimistic. “If the will of the people were stronger everybody would simply say ‘no’ and wait for the marshals to show up with writs of contempt. We have our backs to the wall in this fight now, but maybe that’s not so bad a place to fight from. At least, they can’t goose us from the rear,” he joked.1 One week after writing Simmons, Kilpatrick’s humor turned into anguish . Charlotte, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, desegregated their schools. Virginia now had fewer allies in the South. He commented to Simmons, “That means that eight States no longer are standing firm. We are only seven now, and I doubt that Florida will hold out much longer. With North Carolina cracked, the pressure will turn harder than ever on Virginia, and unhappily, I doubt that our people have guts enough to stand up against it.” By August, the situation soured. The first civil rights bill approved by Congress since 1875 set up a Commission on Civil Rights to document interference with the right to vote and a Civil Rights Division within the Justice Department to prosecute offenders. Describing his mental exhaustion from defending segregation and unhappiness about the new law, Kilpatrick told his acquaintance Don Shoemaker, editor of the Southern School News, 80 | If at First You Don’t Secede As one old friend to another, I confess I am so sick of the whole business of school segregation I try most of the time not to read about it, think about it or even to write about it. Most of the Southside Virginia counties, I expect, will abandon their school systems before they will integrate. Over the rest of the State, the people probably will accept mongrelization, a little at first, then a lot. I expect the word offends you. It used to offend me. The longer we fight, though, the more intransigent each side becomes, and the more bitter becomes the emotional involvement. I’ll never yield. I have no idea that the Afro-American will either. Where does that leave us?2 The Second Lost Cause As James Kilpatrick groped for answers, trouble loomed for the future of segregation. Other southern states also felt the pressure of the federal courts. In the fall of 1957, the Supreme Court ordered Arkansas governor Orval Faubus to admit black students to Little Rock’s Central High School. When Faubus refused, President Eisenhower authorized the use of federal troops to guarantee African American enrollment. Until that point, few white southerners thought the national government would force desegregation . A year earlier, Kilpatrick assured a supporter, “All we have to do is to say, we will have public schools, and we will not integrate, and stick by it. In a show down, I do not believe the Federal government would attempt to use force or troops against us.” After Little Rock, however, interposition seemed increasingly like a doomed cause. For the News Leader staff, the desegregation of the city’s schools was utter shuck. One reporter wept when he heard the news. A despondent Kilpatrick regretted, “It looks mostly as if Reconstruction days are here again.”3 Negative press coverage of white intransigence further frustrated southern segregationists. At Little Rock, the entire nation witnessed the brutality of southern bigotry when television networks broadcast images of students maligned and journalists assaulted by white mobs. After Eisenhower rushed the 101st Airborne to Little Rock, the three television networks interrupted daytime programming to report the developments. In Richmond, Kilpatrick watched the crisis with a sense of revulsion and feared...