From Caste to Color Blindness:
James J. Kilpatrick's Segregationist
Semantics
By WILLIAM R HUSTWIT
I T ' S A BEAUTIFUL THING, THE DESTRUCTION OF WORDS," REMARKED ONE
character in George Orwell's 1949 anti-authoritarian dystopian novel.
Nineteen Eighty-Four. The British writer described a society where
a totalitarian government strove to eliminate alternative thinking
by removing words that denoted ideas of freedom and radicalism.
"Newspeak," the fictional language suited to the state's ends, shrank the
English dictionary and replaced it with a vocabulary designed to subdue and coerce the people. To conservative syndicated columnist and
ardent segregationist James J. Kilpatrick, who had read and appreciated
Orwell, the oppressive regime was not an imaginary insfitution but the
post-New Deal liberal state that swept aside the old racial caste system
of the South.'
Twentieth-century liberalism, according to Kilpatrick, sought not to
free men but to shackle them to the state. In editorials and columns that
spanned the late twentieth century, he warned readers about the central government's encroachments in daily life and the dangers of racial
equality. Eew concerns disturbed Kilpatrick's mind more, and he struggled to develop a unified, popular, and persuasive basis for crippling
liberal governance, even as he tried to express his beliefs without coarse
racism. He talked and wrote about states' rights, strict constitufionalism, individual freedom, and anti-egalitarianism, but behind it all stood
race. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the writer helped reclaim for conservatism a language of individualism and freedom of association meant
to erase the troublesome issue of impolitic racial bigotry and to deprive
' George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York, 1949), 52 (quotation); James J. Kilpatrick
(hereinafter abbreviated JJK), "Reagan Vetoes Show Conservative Streak," St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
December 5, 1988; JJK, "Homage to the Great George Orwell," Manhattan (Kans.) Mercury,
November 17, 2002.1 thank the Journal of Southern History and its anonymous referees for their
careful readings of this manuscript. Thanks also to Charles W. Eagles and Nancy MacLean.
MR. HUSTWIT is a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of
Mississippi.
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
Volume LXXVII, No. 3, August 2011
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THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
civil rights leaders and liberals of arguments they had monopolized for
almost a generation.
Not long after the heyday of the civil rights movement, Kilpatrick
and other conservative leaders congratulated themselves for acquiescing in the end of the old racial order, for protecting average Americans
from the excesses of the state, and for recognizing African American
equality before the law. Seeming to accept the black freedom stmggle, the political Right absorbed the language of the civil rights protesters. As a result, late-twentieth-century conservatism's attitudes about
race appeared almost indistinguishable from liberalism. Committed to
a color-blind version of the law and to the end of racially discriminatory
policies, both conservatives and liberals agreed that racism no longer
had a place in contemporary America. In the late 1960s, many conservative intellectuals and politicians disavowed racism, recognizing that
it was becoming a disgraceful point of view. Tuming away from the
Right's opposition to or indifference toward black rights, these conservatives looked boldly toward the future.^
Few influential conservative spokesmen had more to explain for their
roles in opposing African American progress than James Kilpatrick. As
did thousands of white southemers, Kilpatrick opposed the civil rights
movement, but he took an unusual approach to racial problems. Whereas
many southem whites relied on abrasive racial arguments, Kilpatrick
did not simply stir up local resentment against African Americans. He
hoped that people across the country would share his views and would
stand up with him and other conservatives and traditionalists to limit
desegregation.
As early as the nineteenth century, southem politicians courted
whites' votes with the worst kind of demagoguery and bigotry. Then,
with the advent and success of the civil rights movement, nearly a century of openly racist politicking came to an end. In the 1970s, even
as bellicose segregationists faded from the political scene, Kilpatrick's
informative histories of the aftermath of the civil rights movement, the affirmative action
era, and conservative reactions include Terry H. Anderson, The Pursuit of Faimess: A History of
Affirmative Action (New York, 2004); Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and
Development of National Policy, 1960-1972 (New York, 1990); John David Skrentny, The Ironies
of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture, and Justice in America (Chicago, 1996); and Skrentny,
The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2002). For the best place to start on the controversial subject of affirmative action, as well as an especially helpful study of Kilpatrick's relationship to other conservatives, see Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the
American Workplace (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). For an overview of conservative political leaders'
stmggles to discuss race, see Jeremy D. Mayer, Running on Race: Racial Politics in Presidential
Campaigns, 1960-2000 (New York, 2002).
JAMES J. KILPATRICK AND SEGREGATION
641
influence grew. During and after the southem civil rights movement,
many polidcians, like Alabama govemor George C. Wallace, staked
their future to a doomed strategy of rowdy, racial antagonism. Kilpatrick
likened Wallace to a "bull-in-the-china-shop" and rejected his bluecollar populism and racial backlash in favor of the approach of more
convendonal conservadves, such as Barry M. Goldwater. The racist talk
of the brawler Wallace marked a political trend that stretched back to
the white supremacist fears of the late nineteenth century, but some
scholars have suggested that segregadonist leaders declined into irrelevance after the end of massive resistance. Historian George Lewis has
described the southem white supremacist resistance to civil rights as
"an unruly and protean beast," and David L. Chappell contends that
segregationists were unorganized, fragile failures. Kilpatrick's efforts
to dismpt civil rights, according to Chappell, "divided segregadonists
further." Other historians have disputed that declensionist narrative.^
For nearly a decade, Dan T. Carter's biography of George Wallace set
the interpretative standard for students of southem conservatism. Carter
argues that the Alabamian was "the alchemist of the new social conservadsm," part of a "conservadve counterrevoludon that reshaped American
polidcs in the 1970s and 1980s." Wallace served as the South's voice
for a "growing national white backlash in the mid-1960s" that fueled
the Right's ascent at the national level by catering primarily to whites'
racial fears but also to an ultraconservadve mixture of anticommunism
and traditional values. "The polidcs of rage that George Wallace made
his own," Carter concludes, "had moved from the fringes of our society to center stage." Carter's Wallace succeeded mostly because race—
specifically a widespread white backlash against the civil rights movement, civil rights laws, and urban disorder of the mid-1960s—had laid
the basis for a polidcal realignment. In simple terms, although Wallace
propelled southem racial beliefs into the national arena, Kilpatrick had
a longer public exposure and more respectability within the ranks of the
to Lance Philips, July 2, 1964, Box 45, James J. Kilpatrick Papers (hereinafter cited as
JJK Papers), 6626-b (Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia,
Charlottesville) (first quotation); George Lewis, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the
Civil Rights Movement (London, 2006), 8 (second quotation); David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope:
Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill, 2004), 170-71 (third quotation on
170). Lewis's account of massive resistance suggests homogeneity among southern whites. He
also rejects a focus on the top-down politics of massive resistance, only to conclude with the
culmination of massive resistance at the ballot box and among the politicians and strategists of
the Republican Party. Lewis, Massive Resistance, 7-8. See also George Lewis, The White South
and the Red Menace: Segregationists, Anticommunism, and Massive Resistance, 1945—¡965
(Gainesville, Fla., 2004).
642
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
conservative intellectual movement because he drained his rhetoric of
racism. He understood that the days of race-baiting were over, and he
possessed the flexibility, skills, and ambition to work within a new conservative dynamic that tried to sever ties to people like Wallace.'*
A recent burst of books has made the white South's resistance to civil
rights and the region's relationship with the conservative movement a
subject of renewed historical inquiry and debate. Most of these authors
employ social history rather than traditional political and biographical
approaches to the study of conservafism. A new generation of scholars
has also moved away from a concentration on racial explanations of the
South's transidon into the Republican column and has noted the innovative responses by southem whites to desegregation. Questioning the
backlash interpretation, many of these authors have shown that middleand working-class urban whites, regardless of region, rejected racial
integration long before the 1960s. Matthew D. Lassiter's portrayal of
suburban moderates in Charlotte, Atlanta, and Richmond spums an
emphasis on racism. He disputes the notion that massive resistance
was the foremnner of an emerging conservative majority and instead
cites a nascent political coalition in the suburbs and northem South that
defended an ideology of regional prosperity, economic individualism,
and peaceful neighborhoods. Racial segregation alone could not safeguard suburbanites. They wanted a new consensus to protect middleclass privileges and preferred color-blind rhetoric when they discussed
racial topics. In his study of post-World War II mral Mississippi,
Joseph Crespino complicates the role of racial conservatism by adding economics and religion as sources of the Right's appeal in the
Magnolia State and nationally. Putting all the emphasis on race, notes
Crespino, attributes "to white racism a mystical, ahistorical quality that
explains everything and, thus, explains nothing very well." The white
South's shift from Democratic to Republican, he argues, had less to do
with race than with "a powerful critique of liberal social reforms that
emerged by the 1970s." Seeing race as more of a factor than Crespino
and Lassiter do, Kevin M. Kmse, in a study of working-class whites
in suburban Atlanta and the identity polifics of the South's crabgrass
suburbanites and New Right warriors, intertwines whites' advocacy of
merit-based advancement, property rights, and individual freedom with
••Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism,
and the Transformation of American Politics (New York, 1995), 12 (first and second quotations),
466 (third quotation), 468 (fourth and flfth quotations). Critics often oversimplify Carter's work
as focused only on a racial backlash without considering his interest in the ways race, economics,
and religion may be inseparably intertwined.
JAMES J KILPATRICK AND SEGREGATION
643
their condnued resistance to integration. These historians maintain that
overemphasizing racism obscures broader economic and demographic
developments, like corporate growth, migradon, suburbanization, and
class interests. Kmse, Lassiter, and Crespino's arguments that southemers' views had national import and the trio's emphasis on relatively
unknown people in their local contexts mark a significant departure in
the historiography.'
For many historians, scholarly interest in the white South, civil rights,
and southem conservadsm has grown in large part out of personal experiences. Differing personal perspecdves have often derived from a generadonal difference. Dan T. Carter was bom in 1940 in eastem South
Carolina on a tobacco farm within a hundred miles of Charleston. He
grew up in a poor agricultural region of swamps and creeks where segregation was his "universe." Carter heard his school principal announce
the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, witnessed the fear
and oppression of massive resistance, and felt and exhibited hate and
ignorance toward African Americans. His world involved racism. The
"Southem way of life," Carter recalled, was "my way of life."*
Crespino, Lassiter, Kruse, and a crowd of younger historians have
experienced only the wake of the civil rights South. They attended
school, often outside the South, long after the fiercest days of racial
fighting and, like Carter, wrote about their southem neighbors and
neighborhoods. Crespino, a Macon, Mississippi, native, has deep roots
in the Magnolia State and special insight into the subjects of his book.
His interest in racial politics came, in part, from meedng African
Americans in Chicago while he was an undergraduate at Northwestem
University. Lassiter leamed about the civil rights movement as history
in school in Sandy Springs, a white, middle-class suburb of Adanta.
"I was trying to find my own people, my parents and grandparents,"
commented Lassiter. Kruse, raised in Nashville after age seven, shares
' Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton,
2006), 4, 303; Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative
Counterrevolution (Princeton, 2007), 8 (first quotation), 10-11, 236 (second quotation); Kevin
M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, 2005),
7-9, 242. See also Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and ¡nequality
in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996); and Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston, The End of
Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (Cambridge,
Mass., 2006).
'Dan T. Carter, "Reflections of a Reconstructed White Southemer," in Paul A. Cimbala and
Robert F. Himmelberg, eds.. Historians and Race: Autobiography and the Writing of History
(Bloomington, 1996), 33-50, esp. 35, 37 (first quotation), 39, 40-41 (second and third quotations
on 40).
644
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
Crespino and Lassiter's belief that racism does not necessarily set off
the South from the remainder of the nation.'
Recent scholarship has mostly compressed conservatism into the
social history of middle-class issues, such as home ownership, low
taxes, church schools, and suburbs. The new historians of the postwar
South have found middle-class whites willing to change with the times
by not heckling or throwing rocks at civil rights activists, so these studies sometimes diminish the role of race. James J. Kilpatrick's story provides a challenge to that narrative. Even a committed segregationist
like Kilpatrick, who does not fit the new scholarship's tale because of
his elite status and his leadership in the massive resistance fight, still
thrived in post-Jim Crow America. When segregation disappeared, he
found a new home among former Goldwaterites and within the so-called
Silent Majority that became the backbone of the Republican Party during Richard M. Nixon's presidency.
Eor conservatives unable or unwilling to articulate their racism,
Kilpatrick disguised bigotry with the language of race neutrality and
color blindness or, early in his career, with rhetoric of states' rights
and strict constitutional constructionism. Eor more racially progressive
Americans, he rationalized their choice of economic growth and social
stability over any sustained effort to create social justice. Kilpatrick's
approach to racial issues lacked the populist anger of Wallace, but race
motivated the Virginia journalist more than many Sun Belt southerners
could publicly admit about themselves. As the editor of the Richmond
News Leader, he wrote for both himself and other people eager to retaliate against the federal government and civil rights reform. As a nationally syndicated columnist, he adjusted his racial tone to fit with the tastes
and expectations of his new readers. Between the 1950s and the 1980s,
'Patricia Cohen, "Interpreting Some Overlooked Stories from the South," New York Times,
May 1, 2007, pp. El, E8 (quotation). Crespino's father-in-law, James H. Herring, acted at one
time as chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party. For more on Knise's scholarship, see Dick
Polman, "Civil Wrongs," Smithsonian, 38 (Fall 2007), 88-90. For the work of another young
historian who studies the white South during and after the civil rights era, see Jason Sokol, There
Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (New York, 2006).
The debate about southern exceptionalism and the old dialectic about race versus class in the South
seems ultimately less satisfying than understanding how whites learned to speak differently about
their beliefs and interwove race and other, sometimes purely political, motives. For an earlier call
to end the scholarly infighting over southern exceptionalism, see George E. Mowry, Another Look
at the Twentieth-Century South (Baton Rouge, 1973). Perhaps too many historians have lost focus
on the mutual adaptation and ideas shared between the South and the rest of America. It took a
nonhistorian to point out that the South was being Americanized and America was being "southernized" simultaneously and that regional exchanges are not one-way streets. See John Egerton,
The Americanization of Dixie: The Southemization of America (New York, 1974).
JAMES J. KILPATRICK AND SEGREGATION
645
he searched for ways to preserve his racial beliefs without offending his
audience and ruining his career.*
Kilpatrick helped delineate a new course for many white southemers
and extended his brand of conservatism into national media outlets.
Work at the News Leader served as a springboard to larger venues and
wider exposure. While editing the paper, he expanded his writing activities into books and articles for the National Review, Human Events, the
Saturday Evening Post, U.S. News and World Report, and other magazines, popular and fringe. Newspaper columns, however, remained his
most important fomm for expressing his views on contemporary racial
issues. In the 1970s he wrote a nationally syndicated column and articles for Nation's Business while also championing conservative causes
on network television. Kilpatrick succeeded because he wanted a slower
pace of change, of the sort that many white Americans craved in the
1950s and 1960s, and he leamed to conceal his prejudice under the auspices of racially nuanced language and color-blind arguments.
While Kilpatrick certainly was not the singular mastermind behind
the postwar South's transformation into a two-party. Republicandominated region, he was a pioneering authority who used his considerable standing on the Right and his moderated racial language to bring
Dixie into alignment with the realities of the post-civil rights world.
Kilpatrick contributed to mainstream political dialogue with the conservative argument that many of the most venerated civil rights laws
and accomplishments were, in fact, cormpt, dangerous, unlawful, and
un-American because they impinged on American individualism and
freedom. Forced equality became an abridgment of the rights of the
individual and communities. Kilpatrick not only won a national following but also helped conservatives in their push against midcentury liberalism. He was neither a political liability nor an albatross for
conservatism.'
* Lassiter locates Kilpatrick among the white supremacist losers who lost power as a consequence of massive resistance's demise. See Lassiter, Silent Majority, 40. Jeff Roche, "H-1960s:
Roundtable—Roche on Kruse and Lassiter," May 31, 2007, available from http://www.h-net
.org/~h-1960s/.
'Kilpatrick's racial politics also warrant attention because most recent scholarship focuses
on grassroots conservatism and the political mandarins who built the modem Republican Party.
Kilpatrick was not a grassroots activist but more a second-tier movement leader. He contributed
substantially to conservatism and filled an intellectual gap between the public and politicians from
J. Strom Thurmond to Barry Goldwater to Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan. For examples of the
literature on these topics, see Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking
of the American Consensus (New York, 2001); Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and
the Fracturing of America (New York, 2008); Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New
Haven, 1995); Mary C Brennan, Tuming Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the
646
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
Bom in 1920, James Jackson Kilpatrick grew up in Oklahoma City,
where his mother and father had setded a few years before his birth. He
came of age during the Oklahoma oil boom, when the city was transformed into a snarl of oil derricks, and during the Great Depression,
when his father's dmber business collapsed. Published in a children's
magazine at age six and working part-time for one of the Southwest's
legendary newsmen, Walter M. Harrison, at thirteen, Kilpatrick decided
on the newspaper profession as his vocadon and avocadon. After graduadng from the University of Missouri's joumalism program in 1941,
Kilpatrick took a train east to revise copy for the Richmond News
Leader, the influential and conservadve aftemoon newspaper of the
former Confederacy's capital. With his coworkers away fighting in the
Second World War and a diagnosis of bronchial asthma that rendered
him unfit for duty, Kilpatrick quickly rose in the newspaper's ranks.
Between 1949 and 1951, he assisted Douglas Southall Freeman, the
News Leader's, editor and a biographer of Confederate generals. When
Freeman retired, Kilpatrick took the reins of the editorial page, where
his reputadon as an opponent of the civil rights movement grew.'"
In November 1955 Kilpatrick initiated an intellectual attack on the
Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education mling against segregated public schools when he resurrected the idea of "interposidon."
Interposition originated from tracts written by James Madison, Thomas
Jefferson, and John C Calhoun that urged states to resist abuses by
the federal govemment. Since the states, Kilpatrick believed, formed
a compact to create a Union, they granted the federal govemment certain powers but retained their essendal sovereignty. The states, as sovereign bodies, sdll had the responsibility and the ability to counteract
extreme actions by the federal govemment, or to "interpose" themselves
between the national and local levels in behalf of the people's liberty.
For Kilpatrick, the Confederacy's defeat almost ninety years earlier had
GOP (Chapel Hill, 1995); Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From
Conservative Ideology to Political Power (New York, 1986); and John B. Judis, William F. Buckley,
Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (New York, 1988). For two important studies of grassroots conservatism in the 1960s, see David Färber and Jeff Roche, eds.. The Conservative Sixties
(New York, 2003); and Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right
(Princeton, 2001).
'"Philip J. Hilts, "The Saga of James J. Kilpatrick: The Terror of Richmond Rode North,"
Washington Post, September 16,1973, p. 012ff.; Robert Gaines Corley, "James Jackson Kilpatrick:
The Evolution of a Southern Conservative, 1955-1965" (M.A. thesis. University of Virginia,
1971); "An Interview with James Jackson Kilpatrick," Quill, October 1975, pp. 13-17; Neil A.
Grauer, Wits and Sages (Baltimore, 1984), 179-93; William A. Bake and James J. Kilpatrick,
The American South: Four Seasons of the Land (Birmingham, 1980), xviii; "Man Who Took
Richmond," Time, 58 (July 16, 1951), 57.
JAMES J. KILPATRICK AND SEGREGATION
647
never altered the relationship between the states and the federal govemment; the war only eliminated secession as an option to deal with perceived tyranny and oppression."
The Court's desegregation edict, according to Kilpatrick, had illegally amended the Constitution, given the judiciary the powers of a
super-legislature, and directly assaulted the sovereignty of the states. In
editorials from late November 1955 to early Febmary 1956, he stirred
white Virginians into an uproar over the unconstitutional nature of
Brown v. Board of Education. Kilpatrick dubbed Brown "a revolutionary act by a judicial junta which simply seized power, and thus far has
managed to get away with its act of usurpation." The editor chafed at
the unprecedented, coercive mling and assailed the Court for its "rape
of the Constitution." Only through interposition could the states check
the power of the Court, declare unpalatable mlings unlawful, and then
resolve the matter through constitutional channels.'^
Day after day. News Leader readers found editorials from Kilpatrick
that featured essays on the legality and rightness of interposition alongside portraits of Madison and Jefferson and historical states' rights documents, like the 1798 Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions and John C.
Calhoun's 1831 Fort Hill address. "I was on [a] horse and the pen was a
lance," Kilpatrick later delighted. The editorials touched a nerve in the
commonwealth that hardly needed reawakening. Interposition "was not
an idea that had to be planted," he boasted. "That was an idea that grew
like dandelions and crab grass ."'^
Kilpatrick's editorial campaign helped ignite resistance to civil rights
and the Court in Virginia and the South. The Virginia General Assembly,
at the behest of Kilpatrick and Harry F Byrd, Virginia's powerful senator, passed a "Resolution of Interposition" on Febmary 1,1956. It vowed
to resist Brown with all legal, honorable, and constitutional means.
Seven other southem states also announced their right to interposition
"Joseph J. Thomdike, "The Sometimes Sordid Level of Race and Segregation'; James J.
Kilpatrick and the Virginia Campaign against Brown',' in Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B.
Lewis, eds.. The Moderates' Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia
(Charlottesville, 1998), 51-71, esp. 51-52.
'^JJK to Jameson G. Campaigne, January 20, 1956, Box 9, JJK Papers, 6626-b (first quotation); JJK editorial, Richmond News Leader, November 23, 1955 (second quotation); Edward
S. Twardy, "James Jackson Kilpatrick; Southern Conservative," in Mark J. Rozell and James F.
Pontuso, eds., American Conservative Opinion Leaders (Boulder, Colo., 1990), 221-31, esp. 225;
Thomdike, "'Sometimes Sordid Level of Race and Segregation,'" 58.
"JJK, The Southern Case for School Segregation (New York, 1962), 8 (first quotation);
Interview with Kilpatrick, conducted by author, Washington, D.C, April 2007, tape recording
in author's possession; Shelley Rolfe, "Columnist Mellowed, Moved Toward Center," Richmond
Times-Dispatch, October 3, 1976 (second and third quotations).
648
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
and noncompliance with the Court's verdict. Accompanying the states'
protest, the March 1956 "Southem Manifesto" signed by 101 southem
congressmen denounced the Court's reckless subversion of the consdtudonal order. Emboldened by its interposidon stand, Virginia's legislature
met in August and September 1956 and passed thirteen and-integradon
bills, including a law that allowed the govemor to seize control of
any local school district ordered to desegregate and close its schools.
Kilpatrick enjoyed fmstrating the implementadon of Brown and trying
to unify southem opposidon. He remarked, "There is a feeling that knits
together the Georgian, the Virginian, the Carolinian, the Louisianan.
All of us stand figuradvely on the ramparts together, facing a common
foe."'4
Unidng white southemers against the federal govemment was one
objecdve of Kilpatrick's interposition work. He hoped that sustained
resistance could force the Court to withdraw its demands for desegregadon. "Our thought here," Kilpatrick told one North Carolinian, "is that
if six or seven—or hopefully, nine or 10—Southem States should unite
in a common front, all of them undertaking to nullify the Court's mandate, and all of them appealing to their sister States to resolve a quesdon of contested power, the Supreme Court would be faced with a tmly
formidable problem in enforcing its orders." A second purpose was
to protect himself and the white South from accusations of racism by
insisdng that interposidon was a consdtudonal matter. "School segregadon," he maintained in the first interposidon editorial, "however cridcal
a problem it may be right now, is not the overriding problem. The transcendent issue lies in finding some effecdve check upon the encroachments by the Federal judiciary upon the reserved powers of the States."
The doctrine of interposidon could, as Kilpatrick put it, raise the debate
"above the sometimes sordid level of race and segregation.""
Having laid the intellectual groundwork for the South's intransigence to the Court, Kilpatrick tumed to other ventures. While condnuing to edit the News Leader, he served as publicadons chairman of
the new Virginia Commission on Consdtudonal Govemment (CCG),
'••JJK to North Carolina editorial writers. May 1958, Box 62, JJK Papers, 6626-b (quotation); Thomdike, '"Sometimes Sordid Level of Race and Segregation,'" 62; Robbins L. Gates,
The Making of Massive Resistance: Virginia's Politics of Public School Desegregation, ¡954¡956 (Chapel Hill, 1962), 110; Benjamin Muse, Virginia's Massive Resistance (Bloomington,
1961), 21.
"JJK to Paul D. Hastings, December 28, 1955 (first and second quotations); JJK to Joe Lee
Frank, January 2, 1956 (third, fourth, and fifth quotations), both in Box 61, JJK Papers, 6626-b;
Numan V. Bartley, The New South, ¡945-¡980 (Baton Rouge, 1995), 188-89; Anthony Lewis,
"South Is Talking of 'Interposition,'" New York Times, January 22, 1956, p. 68.
JAMES J. KILPATRICK AND SEGREGATION
649
one of the more influential and active sovereignty commissions of the
civil rights years. CCG booklets, press releases, and speakers promoted
Virginia's official anti-ßrown, pro-states' rights agenda across the
South and America, and CCG members lobbied against civil rights bills
in Congress. Kilpatrick also entered the elite ranks of the conservative
intellectual movement. Clarence ("Dean") Manion, Indiana's host of
the popular weekly radio show For America, called Kilpatrick's interposition drive a "courageous stand" and "thrilling." Asking his listeners
to consider the legitimacy of Kilpatrick's ideas, he proclaimed interposition "the current answer" to the "federal invasion of the longstanding
constitutional prerogafive" of the states. Richard M. Weaver, a defender
of the U.S. South and Western civilization and author of Ideas Have
Consequences, David Lawrence, the publisher-editor of U.S. News and
World Report, and Eelix Morley, a cofounder of the conservative newsletter Human Events, all endorsed Kilpatrick's arguments. Russell Kirk,
author of The Conservative Mind, offered Kilpatrick the editorship of
his magazine. Modern Age. William E. Buckley Jr. anointed Kilpatrick
as the authority on civil rights and the Constitution for his new journal,
the National Review. In two years, the thirty-seven-year-old Kilpatrick
rose from a provincial editor to a nafionally recognized opinion maker
on states' rights and southern affairs.'*
Kilpatrick's honeymoon with success ended in the fall of 1958 when
federal courts ordered the desegregation of several schools in Norfolk,
Charlottesville, and Warren County, Virginia. In response. Governor
J. Lindsay Almond Jr. shut the schools. The closures upset whites as
well as blacks and generated widespread condemnation. Although
Kilpatrick initially supported Almond's move, the editor soon backed
away from his position. In a November address to Richmond's Rotary
Club, Kilpatrick called for "new weapons and new tactics" in the fight
against desegregation. He had miscalculated the resolve of the courts as
well as the validity of interposition. On January 19, 1959, the Virginia
"George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New
York, 1976), 153, 187, 211-13; Felix Morley, Freedom and Federalism (Chicago, 1959); Ronald
Lora and William Henry Longton, eds.. The Conservative Press in Twentieth-Century America
(Westport, Conn., 1999), 416; Richard M. Weaver to JJK, September 23, 1957, Box 21 ; Clarence
Manion to JJK, December 9, 1955, Box 61 (quotations); Russell Kirk to JJK, January 29, 1959,
Box 27, all in JJK Papers, 6626-b; Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (6th
rev. ed.; Chicago, 1978); Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago, 1948). For
examples of Kilpatrick's early writing for National Review, Human Events, and U.S. News and
World Report, see JJK, "Down to the Firehouse," National Review, 6 (December 20,1958), 397-98;
JJK, "The Sovereign States—How Americans Can End Federal Usurpation," Human Events,
November 3, 1956; and JJK, "The South Will Be Vindicated; Long-Range Analysis of the Battle
Over State Powers," U.S. News and World Report, 43 (October 25, 1957), 126-29.
650
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
Supreme Court of Appeals and a three-judge federal district court stmck
down the school-closing laws and interposition along with them.'^
Few thought about the death knell of interposition more than
Kilpatrick. After Govemor Almond accepted court-ordered desegregation in January 1959, Kilpatrick reminded Virginians, "There are more
ways of waging a war . . . than by stubbom defense of a single fixed
position. The late M. Maginot was a most admirable minister of war,
but he failed in 1932 to comprehend the tanks of 1942, and in time his
famous line was rendered useless." As events tilted against Kilpatrick,
the time for a different kind of fight against Brown and civil rights had
arrived.'*
Recognizing the limitations of interposition as a legal strategy of
resistance was only part of Kilpatrick's reconsideration. The real issue
was the place of African Americans in and the preservation of the segregated South. Despite his appeals about the illegitimate, unconstitutional origins of Brown and the soundness of interposition, not even
Kilpatrick could deny the source of his opposition. He demeaned blacks
as racial inferiors in The Sovereign States (1957), his anú-Brown exegesis of interposition's history that posed the dispute between the states
and the federal govemment in constitutional terms. "The experience of
generations has demonstrated that in the South (whatever may be tme
of the Negro in urban areas of the North and West) the Negro race, as
a race, has palpably different social, moral, and behavioral standards
from those which obtain among the white race," he remarked. African
Americans corroded civilization through their venereal diseases and
marital infidelity. Their ignorance, he feared, could hinder white children's education in mixed schools. In private, Kilpatrick also exposed
his racial views. He revealed to one confidant that "the Negro race has
never been able to build a civilization of its own, and it has debased
every society in which its blood has been heavily mixed."'^
"Muse, Virginia's Massive Resistance, 70-71, 96-97; Garrett Epps, "The Littlest Rebel:
James J. Kilpatrick and the Second Civil War," Constitutional Commentary, 10 (Winter 1993),
25-26; Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis, "Massive Resistance Revisited: Virginia's
White Moderates and the Byrd Organization," in Lassiter and Lewis, eds.. Moderates' Dilemma,
1-21, esp. 12; Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights
Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York, 2006), 208; JJK, "Tactics in the School War,"
speech at the Richmond Rotary Club, November 11, 1958, Box 1, JJK Papers, 6626-c (Small
Special Collections Library) (quotation).
'* Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 20, 1959 (quotation).
"JJK, The Sovereign States: Notes of a Citizen of Virginia (Chicago, 1957), 279 (first quotation); JJK to Robert G. Patterson, November 7, 1960, Box 5, JJK Papers, 6626-j,k,m (Small
Special Collections Library) (second quotation).
JAMES J KILPATRICK AND SEGREGATION
651
Even as Kilpatrick assaulted the very idea of black equality, the
forces of civil rights broke down the racial caste hierarchy. By the early
1960s, he had difficulty recognizing the old segregated South or articulating a definite stance. The prospect of losing the order and divisions of
Jim Crow troubled him, but he saw the futility of hanging on to a dying
system. "I find myself in a peculiar limbo just now," he told one correspondent, "unwilling to idendfy myself with the total segregationists
in their supposed hell, and twice as unwilling to identify myself with
the gauzy liberals in their phony heaven." Clinging to the past without effective new methods of resistance doomed his original policy.
White southemers, like Kilpatrick, not only had to recognize the reality of some desegregadon but also had to acknowledge the presence of
a handful, according to him, of industrious and capable blacks. In 1961
he pondered.
For a long time, I followed a policy of tiot yielding anywhere at all on these questions of segregation, on the theory that if we gave an inch, they [blacks] would
take a mile. That may still be the wiser course. I don't know. But the longer I have
lived with this probletn, and the more I have thought about it, the more persuaded
I am that we have to get rid of a few of the old stereotypes we have lived by,
and that we have to begin some gradual adaptation to a genuinely new order of
things. Whether we like it or not is immaterial, but a new generation of Negroes
is growing up that includes a great many decent, well education [sic], intelligent,
and perfectly respectable men and women.
Mostly, Kilpatrick expressed puzzlement about the long-term goals of
the civil rights activists and African Americans. If they did not seek
integration and intimate social "intermingling" with whites, he claimed,
he could live with the results.^"
Despite his feigned confusion, a belief in black inferiority continued to guide Kilpatrick's thinking. Making a case for African American
inequality, however, without the outright racist declarations that were
no longer tolerated by a desegregating society challenged him. With
Mississippi friend Robert Patterson of the White Citizens' Council,
Kilpatrick planned a way to promote the segregationist South's posidon in a manner that stopped short of eugenics but demonstrated a gulf
between the races. "I think your idea of emphasizing the 'difference'
instead of the 'inferiority' of the Negro race is absolutely sound," he
told Patterson. Sensing the danger of tmmpeting blacks' anthropological or genetic inferiority, Kilpatrick experimented with a new rhetoric
™JJK to Raymond Wheeler, March 21, 1961, Box 37 (first and second quotations); JJK to Mr.
and Mrs. James Mitchell, March 27, 1961, Box 35 (third quotation); JJK to Walter Reed, January
5, 1961, Box 36 (fourth quotation), JJK Papers, 6626-b.
652
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
to present effective resistance. "Like yourself," he wrote his collaborator, "I believe the Negro race is inferior, and I don't see how any person
who weighs the evidence objectively could come to any other conclusion. Be that as it may, the word 'inferior' is semantically bad. It goes
with 'white supremacy,' which is another phrase difficult to manage in
a public opinion stmggle. By dwelling upon the 'difference' between
the races, we can establish the case for inferiority without involving
ourselves directly in a value judgment." Moral and cultural judgments,
however, still played important, albeit secondary, roles.^'
After two years of wrestling with how to discuss his rejection of
black equality without showing strident racism, Kilpatrick wrote another
book. In 1962 he released The Southern Gase for School Segregation.
Paying less homage to lofty constitufional arguments than he had in previous works, he devoted more attention to the notion of black equality
and the future of race relations. In The Sovereign States and the interposifion editorials, Kilpatrick mostly concealed his racism behind the
facade of states' rights. In The Southern Gase for School Segregation,
however, he exposed his certainty of black inferiority. According to
Kilpatrick, racial separation existed naturally because blacks could not
compete with whites as a race. In the opening section, "The Evidence,"
Kilpatrick placed responsibility for securing black political and economic progress with African Americans: since blacks and their allies
had succeeded in breaking down many racially exclusive laws, let them
prove their equality in a society devoid of race-based criteria. Even with
an equal playing field, Kilpatrick argued, blacks failed. His argument
admonished African Americans and contended, "[I]n terms of values
that last, and mean something, and excite universal admiration and
respect, what has man gained from the history of the Negro race? The
answer, alas, is 'virtually nothing.' From the dawn of civilizafion to the
middle of the twentieth century, the Negro race, as a race, has contributed no more than a few grains of sand to the enduring monuments of
mankind."^^
Kilpatrick's summary of the "evidence" included a wide-ranging
assault on the intelligence, resourcefulness, and morality of blacks. He
located the crisis of the African American community squarely in their
homes. The decline of the black family as a functional unit of society
" JJK to Patterson, November 7, 1960, Box 5, JJK Papers, 6626-j,k,m (quotations). Kilpatrick
liked eugenics arguments, subscribed to Mankind Quarterly, and even tried to use the Virginia
Commission on Constitutional Govemment to encourage the joumal's proliferation in the Virginia
school system. See JJK to Donald Swan, November 10, 1960, Box 32, JJK Papers, 6626-b.
^^JJK, Southem Case for School Segregation, 49-50.
JAMES J. KILPATRICK AND SEGREGATION
653
made African Americans a menace to the natural order. As a race, blacks
suffered from low standardized test scores, high rates of illegidmate
births, and venereal diseases. Hundreds of years of cultural and moral
depravity had left African Americans in a poor position to receive
equal consideration with whites. Insisting on integration only fmstrated
blacks and angered whites. "Why is this so?" Kilpatrick posited, "The
answer, in blunt speech, is that the Negro race . . . has not eamed equality." Blaming segregadonists, he added, merely provided blacks with a
"cmtch, the piteous and finally pathetic defense of Negrophiles unable
or unwilling to face reality." He elaborated, "In other times and other
places, sturdy, creative, and self-reliant minorities have carved out their
own desdny; they have compelled acceptance on their own merit; they
have demonstrated those qualides of leadership and resourcefulness
and disciplined ambition that in the end cannot ever be denied. But the
Negro race, as a race, has done none of this."^^
Simply wandng the same status as whites did not create tme equality; nor did the eliminadon of a few laws. Blacks had to demonstrate
their worth and merit through self-respect and hard work. "'Why are
we treated as second-class cidzens?'" Kilpatrick asked rhetorically for
blacks. He responded, '"Because all too often that is what we are."'
The "Negro race, as a race," he declared, "plainly is not equal to the
white race." African Americans faced an uphill batde to prove their
capabilities.^"*
Kilpatrick's opinion of the contemporary generadon of African
Americans looked like a confusing blend of harshness and hopefulness.
He acknowledged the possibility of black uplift but also erected barriers to their advancement. Kilpatrick put the task of creadng equality
and progress on blacks and nudged them to fulfill the American Dream
without govemment aid. An individual's acquisitiveness and ambidon
measured one's value and required no outside interference, he argued.
The freedom to rise to unequal levels would determine whether blacks
could compete in an open society. In a compedtive nadon like America,
the black race had to "develop the talents that command respect in the
market place." Kilpatrick coupled his faith in the free market with a
dose of the Protestant work ethic for moral probity. If blacks practiced
padence, hard work, and honesty and lived "in terms of Westem values
bid., 96 (first and second quotations), 97 (third and fourth quotations); 1. A. Newby,
Challenge to the Court: Social Scientists and the Defense of Segregation, ¡954-¡966 (rev. ed.;
Baton Rouge, 1969), 170-73.
^•i JJK, Southem Case for School Segregation, 97 (first and second quotations), 26 (third and
fourth quotations).
654
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
of maturity and achievement," he wrote, then equality would result. The
number of blacks who could actually achieve such levels of success
would always be small, Kilpatrick thought. White southerners, therefore, should not fear a little black progress and could allow African
Americans the freedom to advance while whites maintained segregation in private. "The only approach I know of is to do everything within
our power, as individuals, simultaneously to preserve an essential separation of the races in certain key areas of our lives," he told a fellow segregationist, "and to strive in any way to see that the Negro truly is given
an equal opportunity to prove himself."^'
Since segregation restricted the freedom to compete and restricted
equality of opportunity, Kilpatrick now accepted the removal of laws
that sanctioned racial divisions. Toward the end of the book, readers
received a disclaimer from the author. "As a creature of the law, racial
segregation in the United States is dead," he announced. Interposition,
massive resistance, and segregation laws had failed to halt changes in
Dixie's racial order: "Many staunch Southerners, declaring themselves
unwilling to surrender, do not realize that as a matter of law, the war
is over." White southerners' best "case" for school segregation did not
mean they could stop court-ordered integration. In segregation's stead,
Kilpatrick put forth arguments that reminded whites of blacks' inherent
inferiority without using abrasive racial language and that left blacks
with no excuses for their inability to gain wealth and position in society. By accommodating his preference for racial discrimination in the
language of the free market, equality of opportunity, and merit-based
advancement, Kilpatrick positioned himself to discuss issues of civil
rights in a post-ßrown era that would not condone arguments based on
race and hereditary science.^*"
The Southern Case for School Segregation replaced older arguments
for segregation guaranteed by race-based laws with an attack on the
merit and character of blacks that questioned their ability to advance.
Kilpatrick dared blacks to succeed or fail. His new scheme tried to make
African Americans their own worst enemy and to obstruct black progress without using segregationist invective. "Jim Crow is dead, but the
legal shot that felled him also put Massa in the cold, cold ground," he
^Ibid., 97 (first quotation), 101 (second quotation); JJK to Florence Schiele, June 28, 1963,
Box 41, JJK Papers, 6626-b (;third and fourth quotations). Kilpatdck allowed for the possibility
of a few talented and exceptional blacks to enter white schools but warned that it would deny
weaker black students the stimulation of superior ones. See JJK, Southern Case for School
Segregation, 90.
^''JJK, Southern Case for School Segregation, 183 (first quotation), 184 (second quotation).
JAMES J. KILPATRICK AND SEGREGATION
655
concluded. "The paternalism of generations is vanishing year by year,
to be replaced by a healthy skepticism: The Negro says he's the white
man's equal; show mer Seeing the end of segregation two years before
the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Kilpatrick placed the burden
of black uplift on African Americans and shifted the blame away from
racially exclusive laws. Many of his arguments were still steeped in scientific racism, but Kilpatrick, awkwardly at times, started to reconceptualize the nature of the debate on black rights. He understood that he
no longer needed legal segregation to keep blacks in an inferior position; with race-based laws under siege, an occasional reminder of black
deficiencies and unofficial segregation would do.^''
As the civil rights movement intensified, his resistance to racial
equality kept pace. In August 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. delivered
his "I Have a Dream" speech and asked America to judge his children
by the "content of their character." Kilpatrick weighed the character
of blacks and found them wanting. Shortly afterward, he composed a
screed entitled "The Hell He Is Equal," in which he argued that discrimination against blacks benefited humanity. African Americans contributed nothing to Westem civilization and deserved no special treatment.
Kilpatrick bridled at the notion that blacks had eamed equality and
wrote,
[T]he Negro race, as a race, is iti fact an inferior race
Within the frame of reference of a Negroid civilization, a tnud hut may be a masterpiece; a tribal council may be a marvel of social organization; a carved image may have a primitive
purity all its own. Well and good. But the mud hut ought not to be equated with
Monticello, nor jungle rule with Periclean Athens, nor phallic dolls with Elgin
marbles. When the Negro today proclaims or demands his "equality," he is talking of equality within the terms of Westem civilization. And what, pray, has he
contributed to it? Putting aside conjecture, wishful thinking and a puerile jazzworship, what has he in fact contributed to it? The blunt answer, may it please
the court, is very damned little.^'
Kilpatrick persisted in his belief in blacks' racial inferiority and also
maintained that African Americans, unlike whites, failed to add to the
economic growth of the United States. Blacks' incapacities resulted
from their incompetence, laziness, and stupidity, not from restrictions
placed on them by segregation. "There are respected Negro teachers,
lawyers, doctors, writers. Of course, there are," he conceded. "But in
general terms, where is the Negro to be found? Why, sir, he is still
W., 184-85, 191 (quotations).
, "The Hell He Is Equal: A Virginia Editor Defends the South's 'Prejudice' Against the
Negro" (unpublished article for the Saturday Evening Post), 1963, Box 6, JJK Papers, 6626-c (first
and second quotations); Roberts and Klibanoff, Race Beat, 350 (third quotation).
656
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
carrying the hod. He is sdll digging the ditch. He is down at the gin mill
shoodng craps. He is lying limp in the middle of the sidewalk, yelling he
is equal. The hell he is equal." Blacks had no right to demand full cidzenship if they had never proved their worth or contributed to America's
prosperity. Whites, in contrast, had every reason to discriminate against
them and resent their demands for racial equality. "This precious right
to discriminate," he maintained, "underlies our entire polidcal and economic system." In an example of convoluted logic, Kilpatrick used the
inability of African Americans to perform like the white race to explain
their failure to compete in America and to attain the wealth and position of whites.^'
"The Hell He Is Equal" was solicited for a fall 1963 issue of the
Saturday Evening Post, but a tragedy prevented the article's publicadon.
On September 15, 1963, Birmingham Ku Klux Klansmen bombed the
Sixteenth Street Bapdst Church in the heart of the city's black neighborhood. The blast killed four girls and nearly tore apart the town again.
At the Post's, New York offices, editor Thomas B. Congdon Jr. cancelled the release of Kilpatrick's article. He explained to Kilpatrick that
such a shocking publicadon would be in "Bad taste, in the extreme,
and, in fact, inflammatory." Eager to reduce the emotional outcry created by the terrorist act, Kilpatrick accepted the Post's, reservadons.
Publishing the provocative essay would stimulate support for the pending civil rights bill. "Sound legislation simply cannot be enacted in such
an atmosphere," he wrote in the News Leader. The editor waited for
a more appropriate occasion and a more respectable vantage point to
abuse African Americans.^"
The opportunity to hamper civil rights through acceptable means
came in 1964. Kilpatrick was suscepdble to angry outbursts against
desegregadon, but as a professional joumalist he normally had a reputation as a writer with a radonal, unemotional approach to race problems. William F. Buckley asked him to oudine for the National Review
what posidon Republican presidendal candidate Barry Goldwater
should take on civil rights. Determined to bring Senator Goldwater's
campaign and the white South's defense of its race reladons under one
umbrella, Kilpatrick geared his proposals toward the Right's common
goals of freeing capital from reguladon and defending private property.
''JJK, "The Hell He Is Equal," Box 6, JJK Papers, 6626-c (quotations); MacLean, Freedom Is
Not Enough, 63.
'"Thomas B. Congdon Jr. to JJK, September 16, 1963 (first quotation); JJK to Congdon,
September 19, 1963, both in Box 6, JJK Papers, 6626-b; Roberts and Klibanoff, Race Beat, 350;
JJK editorial, Richmond News Leader, September 19, 1963 (second quotation).
JAMES J. KILPATRICK AND SEGREGATION
657
states' rights, and individual liberty. He framed his arguments in a way
that placed his contempt for racial progress within a set of conservative
values. Through emphasizing fiscal restraint and federalism, Goldwater
could counteract reckless federal spending and the new civil rights legislation. Kilpatrick encouraged enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of
1964 only with "moral suasion" and "State [rather than federal] regulation," but never through force and arbitration. "The right to own, and
possess, and manage property is vital" to the freedom of Americans,
wrote Kilpatrick. He advised Goldwater, instead of talking about race
explicitly, to focus on proper respect for state sovereignty to limit
socialistic welfare and civil rights programs. Federal intervention in
social problems had deprived states of their power and reduced them to
"merely eunuchs" pitifully orbiting "a federal sun."^'
Kilpatrick's articles, books, and editorials grabbed the interest of
publishers who began to wonder if he could handle a nationally syndicated column. His connections with William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk,
and David Lawrence made him a widely known voice in the conservative movement, and news syndicates approached the penciler about a
political column. In August 1964 Kilpatrick's new syndicated column,
"A Conservative View," debuted for Newsday, a Long Island daily newspaper that wanted a Right-leaning political spokesman for its northem readers. Newsday elevated Kilpatrick's career to a national level by
giving him a mandate "to present to a national audience the reasoned
and calm point of view of a conservative white Southemer." What that
meant in practice was that Kilpatrick should talk about racial problems
without anthropological arguments about black inferiority. His writing for the News Leader had catered to the opinions of Virginia politicians and racist hotheads. Newsday required that Kilpatrick appeal to
"JJK, "Some Proposals to a Goldwater Administration Conceming Domestic Affairs,"
National Review, 16 (July 14, 1964), 586-89 (first and second quotations on 588; fourth and fifth
quotations on 587); Folder "National Review July 14, 1964," Box 6, JJK Papers, 6626-c; Nancy
MacLean, "Neo-Confederacy versus the New Deal: The Regional Utopia of the Modem American
Right," in Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, eds.. The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism
(New York, 2010), 308-29 (third quotation on 314). Kilpatrick's writings for the National Review
do not implicate William F. Buckley or all conservatives in racist motivations. Goldwater, a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, regarded the Brown decision as morally correct. See Perlstein, Before the Storm, 89; and Barry Goldwater, The Conscience
of a Conservative (Shepherdsville, Ky., 1960), 33-37. Buckley, at times, stemly refuted racism,
especially scientific racism. See William F. Buckley to Carleton Putnam, May 21, 1965, Box 46,
JJK Papers, 6626-b. Scholars have occasionally conflated Buckley's conservatism with a racial
agenda. See MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough, 46-48, 50-51, 230, 257-58, 341. Some historians have persuasively argued that certain conservatives used race only for political ends. Richard
Nixon's Philadelphia Plan comes to mind. See Bmce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift
in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York, 2001), 35-42.
658
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
nonsouthemers and marketed him to its suburban New York audience.
"I was perfecdy aware that I had the reputadon in some quarters as
an old fire-eating segregadonist, one of the fathers of interposidon and
massive resistance and so on," Kilpatrick said. "I didn't have any idea
of writing columns that would embarrass Newsday as being the rabid
outpourings of a southem segregadonist." Changing his stance on segregadon advanced him to new heights of success.^^
Rather than deserving targeted efforts to aid blacks with govemment
assistance or laws, Kilpatrick argued, African Americans would benefit instead from more hard work, self-help, and a hands-off approach
by the federal govemment. Kilpatrick's ideal behavior for blacks in
the sixties was comparable to that of conservadve black role models like Booker T. Washington and Harriet Beecher Stowe's character
"Uncle Tom." Kilpatrick wrote in a Febmary 1965 column that "the
serene Uncle Tom and the industrious Washington were superior men.
They were possessed of pride in themselves, and in their race, and in
their own integrity; their purpose was not to obliterate their own idendty through assimilation into a predominantly white community, but to
build upon that idendty and to eam their own way." Kilpatrick avoided
writing about integration to protect himself and his career from antiracist ridicule. "I have hesitated to get it [integradon] into my syndicated
column . . . . If I write on the theme at all, it probably would be from a
consdtudonal standpoint," he explained to one reader. When required
to comment on desegregation, he avoided scientific racism and stuck to
arguments about blacks' character and merit. In one column, he complained that the federal govemment's efforts to equalize the races would
"treat the Negro like a white man. God knows his race has done little
enough to deserve a fate so difficult and demanding. This is to expect
of the Negro . . . work; and then self-restraint; obedience to the law;
respect for authority; creadve imaginadon; right conduct."^^
Kilpatrick also seemed to tum against his open support for segregadon. Privately and publicly, he conceded that his views on race had
'^ Hilts, "Saga of James J. Kilpatrick"; "Interview with James Jackson Kilpatrick," 13; JJK
to Ben Moreel, January 20, 1965, Box 47, JJK Papers, 6626-b (first quotation); Robert Mason,
"Newspaper Days," Virginia Quarterly Review, 78 (Spring 2002), 342^7, esp. 347; Robert F.
Keeler, Newsday: A Candid History of a Respectable Tabloid (New York, 1990), 351-53 (second
and third quotations on 353).
"JJK, "A Conservative View," Newsday, February 16, 1965, p. 25 (first quotation); JJK, "A
Conservative View," ibid., August 19, 1965, p. 45 (third quotation), both in Box 1, JJK Papers,
6626-1 (Small Special Collections Library); JJK to G. S. Manelty, June II, 1965, Box 53, JJK
Papers, 6626-b (second quotation); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; or. Life among
the Lowly (Boston, 1852).
JAMES J. KILPATRICK AND SEGREGATION
659
altered in the previous decade or so: "I would be pretty concerned about
myself if they hadn't, for that way lies stagnation." He wanted a versatile and dynamic conservative approach to race relations. Conservatism,
like segregation, had to be energetic and speak positively to present
issues, especially race, and not dwell forever on the past.-'"'
The modified Kilpatrick and "A Conservative View" became a hit.
By January 1965 the column had spread to over fifty newspapers, and
its quick success threw more opportunities his way. Harry Elmlark, the
owner/publisher of the conservative Washington (D.C.) Star, helped
Kilpatrick acquire an even bigger name when he enticed Kilpatrick
from Newsday in 1965 and introduced him to the Washington press
corps. By March 1966 Elmlark had sold Kilpatrick's column to nearly
a hundred newspapers. He appeared to publishers and readers alike as
a polished, professional columnist; the old massive résister Kilpatrick
seemed a relic.^'
Kilpatrick's motives, though, were not noble. He cultivated a more
tolerant tone on race issues because it was good for business. In
1966 John Hunt, senior editor at the Saturday Evening Post, wanted
Kilpatrick, by then one of the Right's leading commentators on race
and the Constitution, to write an essay on contemporary race relations.
The magazine had scrapped Kilpatrick's 1963 article "The Hell He Is
Equal" because of the church bombing in Birmingham. Three years
later. Hunt suggested renaming the piece "Negroes Are Not Equal" and
trying it again. After much debate, Kilpatrick decided not to publish the
old essay. Eeeling his new career threatened, he explained to Hunt,
From my owti professiotial point of view, the problem is quite simply that I do
tiot want—atid could not possibly afford—to be publicly associated with these
views, phrased with such vigor. Since the piece was written, as you may know,
I have launched into the writing of a nationally syndicated column. It is going
tolerably well, with about 70 papers in the fold, but my whole pitch is a reasoned
and good-humored conservatism, in which I shun these racial views almost completely. My syndicate tells me that the biggest single obstacle to further sale of
the column is my reputation as a[n] old-fashioned Southem racist and segregationist. If the column is to make headway, and to provide me a platform for selling dozens of ideas more important to me than the anthropological differences.
*'JJK to Herman Barbour, February 22, 1965, Box 47, JJK Papers, 6626-b.
" Hilts, "Saga of James J. Kilpatrick"; "On the Right@40," National Review, http;//www.nation
alreview.com/articles/216042/right40-interview; "James Kilpatrick; The Journalist Who Made
'Curmudgeons' Chic," June 9, 2006, http;//www.amuniversal.com/ups/newsrelease/?view=345;
JJK to John Fischer, March 11, 1966, Box 50, JJK Papers, 6626-b. Newsday promised Kilpatrick
a one-year contract, which was its normal offer for new columnists. Elmlark, however, gave
Kilpatrick a five-year deal with an office in Washington, D.C, that put him close to political action.
Newsday could not match Elmlark's offer. See Keeler, Newsday, 353.
660
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN
HISTORY
if any, of the Negro race, I must continue to treat the subject, if at all, with the
greatest restraint, compassion, tact, and all that.""
Since the beginning of his public career as a segregationist, Kilpatrick
had always found practical solutions to obstacles in his path. When
Brown violated the southem racial order, Kilpatrick dug up interposition to oppose it. After massive resistance collapsed, he helped establish new tactics to keep the fight against desegregation alive. If editors
wanted him to sacrifice his segregationist sympathies and anthropological arguments on race, he could give them the impression that he had
done so while he continued to question the validity of black assertions
of equality and to fight the civil rights movement.
Throughout the late sixties, Kilpatrick insisted that his views on
blacks had changed. "When I wrote this piece for the Post, two and a
half years ago," Kilpatrick professed, "I was in the last throes of my
Southem convictions. Since then, my views have ameliorated enormously." By 1966 he had a national reputafion and a column to lose.
His new career did not relegate Kilpatrick to the sidelines, however.
He battled civil rights initiatives while he crafted a public identity free
from racism. As the "last throes" of his racist convictions "ameliorated,"
he pushed for segregated private schools "from Southside Virginia
to the MS Delta," started a yearlong lobbying campaign against the
1964 Civil Rights Act, and called the 1965 Voting Rights Act unconstitutional in the National Review. Kilpatrick may have preached
the end of his segregationist days, but his practices remained the
Success as a columnist came at a price, and he leamed to suppress his
conviction of blacks' genetic inferiority. Principles yielded to a desire
for acceptance in Washington and to economic incentives. If John Hunt
would not abandon the article, Kilpatrick hoped to buy his way out
of bad publicity. He bargained with the Post editor, "In some concem,
I ask where this leaves us, money-wise? It would be a helluva blow,
but if necessary, I can raise the $1,500 to buy this [article] back from
you, and I would rather do that than see it published. You send me back
the 1963 manuscript, to be destroyed or shelved pianissimo, among my
"John Hunt to JJK, January 25, 1966; JJK to John Hunt, January 31, 1966 (quotation). Box
51, JJK Papers, 6626-b.
"JJK to Hunt, January 31, 1966, Box 51, JJK Papers, 6626-b (first through fourth quotations); JJK editorial, Richmond News Leader, August 27, 1963 (fifth quotation); JJK, "Must
We Repeal the Constitution to Give the Negro the Vote?" National Review, 17 (April 20, 1965),
319-22.
JAMES J. KILPATRICK AND SEGREGATION
661
archives, and keep [a revised] copy in its place." Hunt dropped die issue,
and Kilpatrick stowed the article in his files.^*
Few segregadonists could match Kilpatrick's skill in adapdng to a
desegregadng society. As civil rights acdvists expanded their objectives
and called for equal access to schools and the workplace, the withy
Kilpatrick responded in kind. His stmggles simultaneously to free
himself from his racist past and to stymie black equality served as an
instmcdve example to other conservadves about effective ways to block
affirmadve action programs in the late 1960s and the 1970s.
Into the late twentieth century, the issue of equality between the races
condnued to be a major point of contention between the Left and the
Right. Two rival forces using one political language with words like
progress, freedom, and equality collided during and after the black freedom stmggle. Kilpatrick and many conservatives rejected the right and
capacity of govemment to ensure racial equality in the general interest of the community and in the specific interest of its less fortunate
members. Attempts to remove natural inequalides among people would
threaten liberty and destroy society, they argued. National Review editor
Frank S. Meyer wrote that helping African Americans into jobs tainted
Westem and Chrisdan principles of individualism and led "inexorably
to barbarism and darkness." Any definidon of equality beyond equality of opportunity meant govemment coercion. Throughout the 1960s,
Kilpatrick argued that "the intemational obsession with egalitarianism" corroded modem society. Even while Kilpatrick accepted the end
of legal segregadon in the early 1960s, he wamed against laws that
established black equality or white supremacy. In 1961, nearly a decade
before the bitter disputes over affirmative acdon and busing policies, he
told one supporter, "In this whole field of segregadon-integration, I've
come to realize that laws that prohibit are just as wrong as laws that
compel.'"»
'»JJK to Hunt, January 31, 1966, Box 51, JJK Papers, 6626-b. In the discussion of the article,
Kilpatrick had two concems to satisfy: his racial beliefs and monetary matters. For a purely racial
interpretation of Kilpatrick's article, see MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough, 63.
''Frank S. Meyer, "Equality Ad Absurdum," National Review, 18 (November 15, 1966), 1168
(first quotation); JJK to Thomas Smith, 1961, Box 71, JJK Papers, 6626-b (third quotation); JJK,
"Notes for Informal Talk to Association of Senate Press Secretaries," January 30, 1969, Box 12,
JJK Papers, 6626-e (Small Special Collections Library) (second quotation); MacLean, Freedom Is
Not Enough, 234. A few scholars emphasize an altemative to describing opposition to affirmative
action as bigotry. It could be argued that although some conservatives' motives for opposing affirmative action stemmed from prejudicial beliefs, many others were merely ambivalent or ignorant
about race and social equality for blacks.
662
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
Liberals, the principal advocates of reform, believed positive action
by the federal govemment was necessary to continue the successes of
the civil rights revolution and guarantee equality. Kilpatrick claimed
that affirmative action would intmde on and coerce corporations, put
less-qualified workers in positions that talented candidates deserved,
and push socialistic egalitarianism on Americans. His ideal was a natural aristocracy where the most intelligent, able, and competitive people
could distinguish themselves through their superior energy and capabilities. Any checks or restraints on inequities violated individual liberty. Kilpatrick, therefore, insisted on negative govemment and equality
of opportunity. He insisted that race relations be left alone by meddlers and planners who wanted to force racial equality and that govemment let society as a whole and blacks develop in their own way. Real
affirmative action, to Kilpatrick, meant letting African Americans help
themselves. "At some point the Negroes must stand on their own feet,
as white persons do. Do you know who said that? Frederick Douglass,
1865," Kilpatrick pointed out in 1978. His reasoning echoed comments
that he had made fifteen years earlier in an essay about the bankruptcy
of black culture: "'What would happen to the Negroes once they were
freed?' Lincoln asked [Douglass]. 'Let them take care of themselves,'
Douglass replied." Between 1963 and 1980, Kilpatrick demanded that
African Americans prove their equality without any compensatory or
unfair assistance, and he flung the arguments of civil rights activists
back in their faces.'*"
To many conservatives, especially Kilpatrick, affirmative action
deprived individuals of the chance to demonstrate their merit, drive,
and intellect. Only through faith in an unregulated workplace and the
judgment of employers could Americans establish faimess between
the races. Affirmative action, however, threatened to replace established hiring practices with an egalitarian "New National Nightmare,"
Kilpatrick wrote in a column for Nation's Business, the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce's joumal that hired him in the 1970s to bulk up the Right's
numbers and promote its social causes among businessmen. The number of Nation's Business subscribers grew from fifty thousand in 1975
to over two hundred thousand individuals, companies, trade and professional organizations, and local and state chambers of commerce by
1984, with a combined readership of two million. Between his articles
""JJK to Isham Parker, January 9, 1978, Box 29, JJK Papers, 6626-j,k,m (first quotation);
JJK, "View from a Southern Exposure," in Robert A. Goldwin, ed., 100 Years of Emancipation
(Chicago, 1964), 103-28 (second quotation on 128).
JAMES y. KILPATRICK AND SEGREGATION
663
for the magazine and "A Conservative View," Kilpatrick emerged as the
most important syndicated political columnist of the 1970s and a watchman for reverse racism. According to Kilpatrick, liberalism's insistence
on upward mobility for unskilled minorides through special privilege
discredited blacks and bred racism. Remedial govemment racial policies unleashed "scary dmes," he commented. "The egalitarians are in
command of the govemment . . . and many of them are fanatical," he
wrote. Liberals who wanted affirmative acdon to correct past injustices
and current inequities "are worse racists—much worse racists—than
the old Southem bigots, many of whom had an honest affecdon for the
Negro people as individual human beings.'""
Kilpatrick charged that in an effort to eliminate race as a barrier to
advancement, affirmative action made color consciousness a significant
factor in determining progress. He demanded a color-blind reading of
the law. For example, when the Supreme Court handed down its 1967
Loving V. Virginia decision, which invalidated laws against interracial
marriage, Kilpatrick in the National Review hailed the mling as a "commendable advance in human freedoms. With Loving the last vesdge of
racially discriminatory law has been wiped from the statute books.""^
Kilpatrick even tried to free himself from his earlier opposidon
to Brown and praised the ruling for removing racially determined
schooling. Although Kilpatrick maintained that Brown had been poorly
decided and had no firm consdtutional and legal precedents, he wrote
that "black children were the victims" of the resistance to desegregation. His acceptance of Brown, however, came with conditions.
If Americans read the ruling literally and in its original meaning, it
commanded only desegregation, not integradon. The decision also
did not mandate court-ordered busing or racially balanced schools,
which the federal courts pressed in the late 1960s and the 1970s.
Kilpatrick disdnguished between desegregadon and integration: the
former obeyed Brown, and the latter did not. He learned that argument
•"JJK, "The New National Nightmare," Nation's Business, 63 (August 1975), 11-12; JJK to
Marie Cooper, August 17, 1977, Box 12, JJK Papers, 6626-h (Small Special Collections Library)
(quotations). MacLean has also suggested that an equation had developed between affirmative
action and accusations of unfair treatment and reverse racism. See MacLean, Freedom Is Not
Enough, 50, 233-34. Nation's Business used Kilpatrick to promote free enterprise and deregulation and had little interest in coordinating a counterattack exclusively against black civil rights. See
Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal
to Reagan (New York, 2009), 200-203.
"UK, "Term's End," National Review, 19 (July 25, 1967), 800 (quotation); Loving v. Virginia,
388 U.S. 1 (1967). For more on the Loving case, see Peter Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My
Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law—An American History (New York, 2002), chap. 15.
664
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
from John J. Parker, the federal appellate judge who made that distinction in the South Carolina case Briggs v. Elliott (1955). Kilpatrick "never
saw any reason to retreat from [Parker's] masterful exegesis of the subject." With the threat of integration deradicalized and reduced to desegregation, he could live with Brown. Besides, the interracial harmony
that some civil rights leaders imagined never transpired. "Momentous
as the decision was," he piped up, "it has produced no millennial brotherhood." Kilpatrick acknowledged the moral rightness of the landmark
decision, but he lamented that the Court had engineered a society where
"racial consciousness is more than ever a factor in American life."
Initially, Brown struck down racial divisions, but its progeny reinforced
racial quotas and rejected color blindness in favor of integration and
busing plans.''^
Although Kilpatrick's color blindness seemed to promote a liberal
agenda with its absence of racist thinking, it had a thoroughly conservative purpose and in fact served as a defense of the established order and
private property. Since 1962, he had built a case that considerations of
color must not influence the free market, the workplace, or education.
Anyone who remained committed to racially biased policies, including
the old segregation laws, were racists, according to Kilpatrick. If a policy, ruling, or law favored blacks, then its authors sponsored racism in
reverse, and the program must stop. His accusations that liberals practiced reverse racism inverted the language of the civil rights movement,
as historian Nancy MacLean has argued was the case for conservative
figures in the late 1960s and 1970s. Onetime racists now sounded liberal in their calls for meritocracy, individual rights, equal opportunity,
and color blindness,"^
K, "A Conservative View," August 1, 1974, Box 3, JJK Papers, 6626-p (Small Special
Collections Library); Briggs et al. v. Elliott et ai, 132 F. Supp. 776 (1955); Morton Kondracke,
"James J. Kilpatrick," Washingtonian, October 1973, copy in Box 9, JJK Papers, 6626-e (first
quotation); JJK to Milton Honemann, March 25, 1975, Box 4, JJK Papers, 6626-g (Small Special
Collections Library) (second quotation); JJK, '"After 25 Years, Brown Still Fits the Description
Some Scholars Gave It at the Time; Good Justice, Bad Law,'" Charlotte Observer, May 13, 1979,
p. B2 (third, fourth, and fifth quotations). Parker's influential opinion, known as the "Briggs
Dictum," held sway in the courts until the mid-1960s. "The Constitution," wrote Parker, "does not
require integration . . . . It merely forbids the use of governmental power to enforce segregation."
See James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education; A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled
Legacy {New York, 2001), 143 (quotations), 145.
"" Several scholars note the Right's embrace of massive resistance and color-blind rhetoric in
the 1970s. See, for example, the chapter titled "The Confederate Chameleon," in Lewis, Massive
Resistance, chap. 5, esp. p. 180. Linking Kilpatrick to a 1970s conservative renaissance, MacLean
makes this point about the evolution of Kilpatrick and other conservatives. See MacLean, Freedom
Is Not Enough, chaps. 2 and 7, esp. pp. 257-60. A more appropriate case for Kilpatrick's significance to conservatism, however, identifies him as a medium for articulating and expressing longheld popular American beliefs about government and race, not simply as a reaction to the excesses
JAMES J KILPATRICK AND SEGREGATION
665
Kilpatrick realized that he needed neither to attack civil rights leaders directly nor to bash blacks as a race explicitly. African Americans
were not the culprits behind affirmative action. He blamed a twisted
coalition of govemment bureaucrats, judges, and liberal intellectuals who inflicted racial equality and inclusiveness on the public and
businesses. As early as the fall of 1963, when he appeared at a conference on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, Kilpatrick
lamented govemment efforts that "petted and pampered, cuddled and
coddled" blacks with "reverse racism." In the 1970s he sharpened his
allegations. In Nation's Business in 1974, he referred to the University
of Washington Law School's rejection of Marco DeFunis, a white
applicant, in favor of a minority candidate as a national "syndrome." In
one 1977 "A Conservative View" column entitled "The Color of One's
Skin Now the Only Measure of Merit," he called the developing case in
United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, where the Court eventually
upheld a private corporation's voluntary affirmative action program, a
racist plan as bad for blue-collar whites as anything perpetrated against
blacks. Kilpatrick's insistence on equal treatment and fair play for all
classes and races made him sound like a reasonable observer rather than
an oracle of segregation. Someone like him with strong segregationist
credentials could succeed in the absence of Jim Crow as long as he did
not insist on black genetic inferiority. James J. Kilpatrick could fight to
keep some racial separation intact and blacks in a degraded place."'
The road from massive resistance to color blindness and respectability appeared to have been a long and winding one for Kilpatrick. Noting
the changes, a Washington friend attributed the new Kilpatrick to the
company he kept and asked in 1973,
So what's happened to Kilpo? I don't think it's been an upheaval. He's just in
a new world, with a new set of issues. He's let the bitter Menckenesque part of
him go. With the race issue behind him, he just sort of emerged into the daylight.
Remember that he was an ambitious and striving man in the 1950s, and he was
striving in a right wing crowd. And in the South, the right wingers are not the
most delightful crowd you ever saw. They were just this side of John Birch and
of the 1960s. See Jeff Roche, "Political Conservatism in the Sixties: Silent Majority or White
Backlash?" in David Färber and Beth Bailey, eds.. The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s
(New York, 2001), 157-66. For another scholar who cites the conservative claim of liberalism's
"reverse racism," see Anderson, Pursuit of Faimess, 172.
"'JJK, "View from a Southem Exposure," 107 (first quotation), 110-11 (second quotation on
111); JJK, "The DeFunis Syndrome," Nation's Business, 62 (June 1974), 13-14; JJK, "The Color
of One's Skin Now the Only Measure of Merit," December 1977, Box 29, JJK Papers, 6626-j,k,m;
United Steelworkers ofAmerica, AFL-CIO-CLC v. Weber er a/., 443 U.S. 193 ( 1979). I corroborate
and reuse MacLean's insightful analysis of Marco DeFunis and the Weber case. See MacLean,
Freedom Is Not Enough, 219-21, 226-27, 249-56, 304.
666
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN
HISTORY
the KKK. He was a hero of that mob. Now, he goes out for a drink with people
like Peter Lisagor and Hugh Sidey; That's a hell of a difference.
"I guess I have come a pretty far place," Kilpatrick mminated that same
year. As a bom-again supporter of fair treatment for blacks and colorblind laws, he later described his conversion:
In these areas of race relations, I sometimes think I am getting to be like [the]
Catholic convert who became more Catholic than the Pope. I spent years as a
Southem editor, filled with old-fashioned Southem racial prejudices, fighting
to preserve segregation in our schools. Then came the light. Today I am just as
incensed as my Yankee critics were incensed 30 years ago at what seems to me
the virulent evils of a pervasive racism throughout our society. That men and
women must be hired, promoted, educated, transported, assigned or not assigned,
solely because of the color of their skin strikes me as indefensible."""
Kilpatrick's unexpected approval of racial faimess tricked even former segregationist friends and allies who thought he had abandoned
their cause. William J. Simmons of the Mississippi White Cidzens'
Council blanched at Kilpatrick's professed change of heart. A disgusted
Simmons confronted Kilpatrick, "So we have come full double circle.
The Kilpatrick of Interposidon now writes of race prejudice, private
bias and evil." The meaning of Simmons's statement made Kilpatrick's
import clearer. Kilpatrick simultaneously misled segregadonists and
liberals about his modves. The divergence of public opinion between
Simmons and Kilpatrick demonstrated how completely the columnist
understood post-civil rights America and the conservadve spirit of
exclusiveness and how backward Simmons remained. When another
reader pushed Kilpatrick about his retreat from strong racial language,
the columnist shoved back. Tired of the racist fan mail he received, he
told the man that '"niggers' is a word that happens to offend the hell
outofme.""^
"'Hilts, "Saga of James J. Kilpatrick" (first quotation); Kondracke, "James J. Kilpatrick"
(second quotation); JJK to Ralph May, July 21, 1978, Box 29, JJK Papers, 6626-j,k,m (third
quotation).
"William J. Simmons to JJK, May 5, 1976 (first quotation); JJK to Dan Cubbin, September
7, 1978 (second quotation), both in Box 29, JJK Papers, 6626-j,k,m; Roberts and Klibanoff, Race
Beat, 405-6, 461; Interview with William J. Simmons, conducted by author, Jackson, Miss., July
2007, tape recording in author's possession. But compare the Kilpatrick of 1978 with the Kilpatrick
of 1962, and striking similarities occur. He had already started the transition toward adopting color
blindness long before the 1970s. MacLean makes interesting mention of Kilpatrick's conversion
narrative, too, although it should be added that he wrote to fool both former segregationist allies
and liberal opponents. Kilpatrick's break with Simmons was part of a feud among segregationists
about their future rather than the easy fusion with the conservative movement that MacLean outlines or the class-driven rejection of racism that Lassiter examines. See MacLean, Freedom Is Not
Enough, chap.7, esp. p. 236; and Lassiter, Silent Majority, chap. 8.
JAMES J. KILPATRICK AND SEGREGATION
667
Privately, however, the columnist often reassured segregafionist critics that his changed stances on some civil rights issues were not sincere,
as they had feared. After an angry segregationist accused Kilpatrick of
betraying the white South, the writer set the "record straight." "I did not
say I was sorry for my former views on racial integration," he corrected
the man. Kilpatrick remained consistent in both his attachment to racial
inequality and his insistence that federally coerced racial mlings and
legislation were wrong. He could not allow race-based laws at either the
state or the national level. Kilpatrick clarified, "I said, very carefully,
that I was sorry I ever defended the practice of State-sanctioned segregation. There is a world of difference. Neither did I 'belatedly come
to the conclusion that I was wrong about my former stand on equality
of the races.' As I tried to make clear, I belatedly came to the conclusion that I was wrong about my former stand on the rightness of Statesancdoned discrimination." According to Kilpatrick, since southemers
could no longer govem with race-conscious laws, neither could federal
lawmakers. During the 1970s, he hid his distaste for integration in the
respectable language of color blindness to defy racial egalitarianism
and diversity, but the change was a facade.''^
Color-blind rhetoric and a rejection of multiculturalism showed up
routinely in Kilpatrick's wrifings from the 1960s until recently. In a
1993 column, he took a progressive tone with supporters of corrective
measures to help minorities. "I worry about racial tensions, and I worry
that all the posturing gestures of 'diversity' and 'multiculturalism' and
'affirmative action' are making bad matters worse. Our country ideally
should be colorblind. We have become color obsessed," he complained.
In an article in 1991, just as he had in the 1970s, he still saw affirmative action in academia as a disease. The movement for political correctness, he protested, was an "intellectual vims" run by people who
want "diversity" in higher education. He called ivory tower elites the
harbingers of George Orwell's draconian state and "academic dragoons
ofNewthink.""»
In understanding the development of Kilpatrick's ideas, accounting for the role of decisions handed down by the federal judiciary
also becomes important. The arguments Kilpatrick used to claim that
Brown had contributed to racial inequality, rather than racial equality.
"»JJK to Reginald Jones, October 18, 1977, Box 12, JJK Papers, 6626-h.
"'JJK, "Columnist's (Kind of) Farewell," Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard, January 3, 1993,
p. B2 (first quotation); JJK, "'Newthink' Threatens Old Masterpieces," Salt Lake City Deseret
News, February 19, 1991, http;//www.deseretnews.com/article/147863/newthink-threatens-old
-masterpieces.html (second, third, and fourth quotations).
668
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
eventually appeared in the Supreme Court, where the desegregadon
decision had originated. In 2007 the justices reversed a Hawaiian circuit court decision that kept a segregated school for nadve Hawaiians in
operadon and limited enrollment for non-nadves. Kilpatrick hoped the
Court would open the school to white students to teach the Hawaiians
something about a color-blind reading of the law. "Somedmes nothing
fits so comfortably as a shoe upon another foot," he reflected.^"
The Supreme Court does not take its cues direcdy from Kilpatrick,
but its mlings on racial matters adhere to the kind of govemment posidons he advocated. In the same year as the Hawaii mling, the Court also
denied local school districts in Louisville and Seatde the right to choose
race-conscious strategies to keep schools integrated. Covering the Court
for his syndicated column, Kilpatrick andcipated the bench's decision,
which, if implemented, would halt the cides' involuntary racial balance
plans. "Far beyond Seattle and Louisville," he calculated, "the whole
country will be listening" to the Court's verdict. Ironically, rather than
defend the local communides' control over educadon against the federal govemment, he encouraged the Court to interpose itself and end
the busing program. He folded on his states' rights principles when the
Court stmck against local opdons for integradng schools. In the 1950s,
Kilpatrick had abhorred robust judicial circumscripdon of democracy
and states' rights; however, in 2007 he applauded the Court's hostility toward local govemment and social experimentation because Chief
Justice John Roberts delivered the majority's opinion that "the way to
stop discriminadon on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on
the basis of race." When four liberal justices dissented from the mling,
Kilpatrick reprimanded them for their inability to see the validity of
a color-blind version of the law. He ridiculed the "misguided cohort"
for believing "that our nadon's residual racism will be cured by a litde
more racism."^'
In previous decades, conservatism had moved rapidly toward the
color-blind rhetoric promoted by Kilpatrick and the Court, and the
"JJK, "Covering the Courts," April 17, 2007, http;//www.humanevents.com/article
.php?id=20306.
"JJK, "Segregation; How Much Longer, Lord?" June 14, 2006, http;//townhall.com/colum
nists/jamesjkilpatrick/2006/06/14/segregation_how_much_longer,_lord/ (first and second quotations); Parents ¡nvolved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et ai; Meredith v.
Jefferson County Board of Education et al., 551 U.S. 701 (2007) (third quotation at 748); Nancy
MacLean, "The Scary Origins of Chief Justice Roberts's Decision Opposing the Use of Race
to Promote Integration," August 3, 2007, http;//hnn.us/articles/41501.html (third quotation); JJK,
"Advancing to the Rear," July 11, 2007, http;//www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=21479/
(fourth and fifth quotations).
JAMES J. KILPATRICK AND SEGREGATION
669
controversies over affirmative action, diversity, and the aftermath of the
civil rights movement played roles in sharpening the way people spoke
and wrote about race in America. To implement his stand against ongoing expansion of black civil rights, Kilpatrick had publicized his position
without segregationist trappings. But if Kilpatrick used color blindness to dull the sharper edges of opposition to black progress, his effort
surely met with much popular approval. His media-savvy color-bUnd
rhetoric achieved mass appeal and turned him into a one-man institution
whose words reflected what many Americans already believed about
racial issues. In the 1980s more than 538 newspapers with a collective
circulation of over twenty million readers carried his "A Conservative
View" columns. "He seems to have a constituency, and I think they're
legion and they're loyal," said Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News
in 1973; "It's almost as if he's a congressman from some huge district."
Philip J, Hilts characterized Kilpatrick as "the representative of Right 'n
Proud-of-it County" and "king of the county conservative spokesmen."
The race question continued to stalk the conservafism of this throng of
Silent Majoritarians, whites fleeing to the suburbs, and the New Right.
Identifying the sources of color blindness in Kilpatrick's thought process helps explain some of the Right's posturing for race neutrality in
the 1970s and beyond and questions the alleged reduction of color-consciousness in the Silent Majority's Sun Belt South.'^
With reluctance, Kilpatrick had abandoned his defense of racial
inequality and his defiant stand against Brown, but that capitulafion
proved liberafing and allowed him still to shape the debate about race
despite his segregationist baggage. His adaptive polifical philosophy
that combined segregadon and color blindness captured a new generation's calls for order, merit, individual freedom, and local control. In
print and other media, Kilpatrick often gave the impression of a new
national conservative who stressed economic freedom as the basis of
an individual meritocracy that led to more productivity, limited government, and the betterment of everyone. His final manifestation indicated
the degree to which Kilpatrick's southem reactionary streak eroded into
"Hilts, "Saga of James J. Kilpatrick" (quotations); JJK, Fine Print: Reflections on the Writing
Art (Kansas City, Mo., 1993), 67. Kilpatrick's example provides one way to look at the formative
years of postwar conservatism and the ordinary Americans who agreed with his color-blind arguments. Rather than writing another intellectual history that assumes people receive ideational or
party indoctrination from above, one may perhaps argue more usefully that what seemed true to
Kilpatrick was similar to what his readers believed and observed in both southem and nonsouthem
areas of the nation.
670
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
the mainstream of the Right's revitalization of the free market on the
national political scene and his integration with the nation.
Kilpatrick's joumey from the plains of Oklahoma to the press corps
of the nation's capital had started with a boyhood passion for writing
and working for newspapers. In adulthood, his legacy as the editorarchitect of interposition, apologist for the southem racial caste system,
and enemy of the civil rights movement threatened his achievements as
a writer, joumalist, and commentator and created a dilemma between
public respectability and personal racism. Kilpatrick chose to preserve
his racial and political ideology despite setbacks and the requirements
of his audiences and employers. He molded his racial views into an
aggressive and flexible force that influenced many on the Right while
achieving professional success.
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