Almost none of the obituaries
noted that he did terrible damage to the United States
Constitution--damage for which he never even weakly apologized, and
which continues to do harm to the national dialogue today.
Kilpatrick's
death comes in the midst of a new burst of pseudo-constitutional
ugliness--with attacks on religious freedom, birthright citizenship, and
federal civil-rights protections increasingly dominating the right-wing
airwaves and the blogosphere. As I watch governors "reclaim" their
state's "sovereignty" and legislators attack newborn children as "anchor
babies," I am flooded with a sick déjà vu. I lived through this once
before; and in that earlier cantata of hate, Kilpatrick was one of the
choirmasters.
Jack Kilpatrick was my hometown newspaper editor
during my childhood in Richmond, Virginia. I never met him and have
been given to understand that he was a genial soul. But in print he was
a racist dragon. His writings were hateful, but more than that, they
were effective. Almost single-handedly, Kilpatrick laid the
intellectual foundations for "massive resistance," the extremist
Southern strategy of defying the Supreme Court by closing public schools
to thwart court desegregation orders.
When Brown v. Board of
Education was decided in 1954, a remarkable number of Southern leaders
quietly expressed a willingness to comply. As segregationists, they
weren't pleased; but the rule of law called for obedience to the Court.
A
few, the most dedicated racists, would have none of it. "Segregation
today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" George C. Wallace
memorably proclaimed. Wallace was a vulgarian; but the intellectual
leader of the "segregation forever" movement was James J. Kilpatrick.
Using the editorial columns of The Richmond News Leader, he made
Virginia and then the South too hot to hold any white leader who talked
of compromise.
Kilpatrick supplied a constitutional theory to
justify defiance, and it is one that will seem familiar to anyone who
follows the Tea Party movement today. The Supreme Court's
interpretations of the Constitution were wrong--not just in Brown, he
explained, but ever since 1803. "The sovereign states," not
individuals, were the only important citizens of the Union. When the
federal government, or the Supreme Court, overstepped its bounds, states
could simply "interpose" their authority and nullify their orders. The
Fourteenth Amendment (which was probably not valid anyway) did not
provide for racial equality. The Tenth Amendment guaranteed state
"sovereignty." The United States of 1954 was the United States of John
C. Calhoun, "unchanged by John Marshall, unchanged by the Civil War, not
altered in any way since the Constitution was created in 1787."
Kilpatrick's
concern was not simply purity of principle though; he was frank to say
it was the purity of the white race. "What has man gained from the
history of the Negro race?" he wrote in 1957. "The answer, alas, is
'virtually nothing.'" When the founders of the segregationist Prince
Edward Academy fell short in assembling a library needed for state
accreditation, Kilpatrick donated his own books to make sure that the
all-white school could open on schedule. As late as 1964 he wrote an
article for The Saturday Evening Post arguing that "the Negro race, as a
race, is in fact an inferior race." Mercifully, in view of violence
against black people in the South, the editors spiked this piece.