Segregationist
Chappell (1998) shows that there were two factions of Southern segregationists that opposed federal enforcement of civil rights legislation between 1957 and 1962. The first used states' rights and constitutional arguments to justify segregation on an intellectual level; Kilpatrick was an important leader of this faction. The second group used highly emotional language to justify segregation for reasons of racial purity, often inclining toward the anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. Roy V. Harris, Georgia's political "kingmaker," was one of the leaders of this second group.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Kilpatrick was noted as a fervent segregationist. MacLean states that, "The National Review made Kilpatrick its voice on the civil rights movement and the Constitution, as Buckley and Kilpatrick united North and South in a shared vision for the nation that included upholding white supremacy.". The National Review was the conservative magazine edited by William F. Buckley, Jr..
Kilpatrick also advocated the states' rights doctrine of interposition, arguing that the states had the right to oppose and even nullify federal court rulings on the subject.
Kilpatrick's arguments against desegregation were not solely based on federalism, however. In 1963, he submitted an article for the The Saturday Evening Post entitled "The Hell He Is Equal" in which he wrote that the "Negro race, as a race, is in fact an inferior race." (The article was spiked by the magazine's editors out of sensitivity concerns after four black girls were killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.) He eventually changed his position on segregation, though he remained a staunch opponent of actual or perceived federal encroachments upon the individual states.
As editor of the Richmond News Leader, Kilpatrick started the Beadle Bumble fund to pay fines for victims of what he termed "despots on the bench". He built the fund using contributions from readers and later used the Beadle Bumble Fund to defend books as well as people. After a school board in suburban Richmond ordered school libraries to dispose of all copies of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, because the board found the book immoral, Kilpatrick wrote, "A more moral novel scarcely could be imagined." In the name of the Beadle, he then offered free copies to children who wrote in and by the end of the first week, he had given away 81 copies.
Kilpatrick began writing his syndicated political column, "A Conservative View," in 1964 and left the News Leader in 1966. Kilpatrick is perhaps best known for his nine years as a debater on the TV news magazine 60 Minutes. He appeared in a closing segment on each show in the 1970s called "Point-Counterpoint," opposite Nicholas von Hoffman and, later, Shana Alexander. This was later parodied on Saturday Night Live with Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin, where Aykroyd would respond to Curtin's opening argument with, "Jane, you ignorant slut." Another famous parody was in the film Airplane!, in which Kilpatrick, played by William Tregoe, argues "Shana, they bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash." Tregoe also played Kilpatrick in a "Point-Counterpoint" parody in the film The Kentucky Fried Movie.
Read more about this topic: James J. Kilpatrick