Until rather recently, I had a poor understanding of who James J. Kilpatrick was and what he did during his lifetime (1920-2010). I first knew him as the articulate, conservative commentator on the news show 60 Minutes in the 1970s. He engaged in fiesty one-on-one debates with the liberal Shana Alexander—later satirized by Dan Akroyd and Jane Curtin on Saturday Night Live. And after I read his 1985 book The Writer’s Art, I was a fan. Not only was Kilpatrick critical of flabby prose, he showed how to craft a sentence, a paragraph, an article, a book. Kilpatrick wrote with vigor, superbly and concisely.
The son of an Oklahoma City lumber dealer, Kilpatrick enrolled at the University of Missouri. That school was the first in the USA to have a department of journalism, and the standards were high. In 1941, he was hired as a reporter for the Richmond News Leader. Within 10 years, Kilpatrick had succeeded Douglas Southall Freeman as editor. It is perhaps indicative that the latter, steeped in Southern history, had written a multi-volume biography of Robert E. Lee. The News Leader, which existed from 1888 to 1992, had a reputation as one of the most conservative newspapers in the country so Kilpatrick was right at home.
In 1954, the Supreme Court handed down its Brown vs. Board of Education decision outlawing school segregation. Kilpatrick was galvanized. He soon became the most prominent journalist in opposition to that ruling which preceded more than a decade of civil rights activity. In his writings, he provided a framework for Southern politicians to resist the court’s decision. He popularized the doctrine called “interposition,” by which states (understood to be those of the former Confederacy) had the right to interpose their sovereignties against federal court rulings. They could nullify such offensive decisions, he said, citing Jefferson, Madison, Calhoun and others from days gone by.
(I am almost certain that a war fought between 1861 and 1865 established that the states have no such right.)
In doing so, Kilpatrick aided and abetted the South’s European-American racists who saw that their long-standing hegemony was about to crumble. Most school districts dithered or flat-out refused to integrate. The best known example is Prince Edward County in Virginia, whose schools were closed for five years. White-on-black violence in the South, not a new phenomenon, surged during the civil rights era. I do not mean to blame it all on Kilpatrick, but his widely distributed views fanned the flames of intolerance.
Timing favored him once. In 1963, he drafted an article entitled “The Hell He Is Equal” for the Saturday Evening Post. Kilpatrick pulled no punches in asserting European-American superiority and its counterpart, black inferiority. “He’s still carrying the sod and digging the ditch,” Kilpatrick wrote, as if those tasks were not often done under compulsion. He talked about black laziness, propensity for violence, fondness for gambling and just about every other stereotype that pertained. Before the Post could publish his article, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed, resulting in the deaths of four black girls. The magazine's editors wisely pulled it, calling it in bad taste and inflammatory. Had the article run, or had the bombing taken place a couple of weeks later, Kilpatrick's reputation would have been in tatters.
By the late 1960s, he had begun a strategic retreat on the issue of race. Oh, Kilpatrick was still a right-winger, but he trimmed his sails. He moderated his language and even grudgingly accepted the sea change of civil rights in the South. I find it hard to believe that after being such a mad-dog opponent of integration he was able to reformulate himself. He certainly was nimble about changing his spots to keep up with the times. In one of the few occasions when he was called to account for his writings, he explained: “I was brought up a white boy in Oklahoma City in the 1920s and 1930s. I accepted segregation as a way of life. Very few of us, I suspect, would like to have our passions and profundities at age 28 thrust in our faces at 50.”
Seven years younger than Kilpatrick was my father, a Dallas native. A couple of times, I asked him about the injustice of those days but he could offer only the lamest of rationales. “That’s just the way it was,” he said. "Nothing could be done." James Kilpatrick was better educated and far more intelligent than my father, but I would submit that both of them had a failure of conscience. They ought to have seen that black Americans had suffered and endured for more than three centuries. Why could they not feel compassion and recognize our common humanity? Instead of resistance (Kilpatrick) or passivity (Dad), they might have climbed aboard the train which was heading to a much better place.
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