James J. Kilpatrick

James Jackson Kilpatrick (November 1, 1920 – 15 August 2010) was an American editorial columnist and grammarian. He was a legal abstractionist, a social conservative, and an economic libertarian according to Havard (1983).

Kilpatrick was born and raised in Oklahoma City, and received his degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in 1941. He spent many years as an editor of The Richmond News Leader in Richmond, Virginia.

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, though. In 1963, he submitted an article for 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.

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 "Shanna, 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.

Columnist

In 1979 Kilpatrick joined the Universal Press Syndicate as a columnist, eventually distributed to more than 180 newspapers around the country.

Kilpatrick went into semi-retirement in 1993, shifting from a three-times-a-week political column to a weekly column on judicial issues, "Covering the Courts," which ended in 2008. For many years he also wrote a syndicated column dealing with English usage, especially in writing, called "The Writer's Art" (also the title of his 1985 book on writing). In January 2009, the Universal Syndicate announced that Kilpatrick would end this column because of health reasons.

His other books include The Foxes Union, a recollection of his life in Rappahannock County, Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains; Fine Print: Reflections on the Writing Art; and, A Political Bestiary, which he co-wrote with former U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy and Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Jeff MacNelly.

Family

Kilpatrick married his first wife, sculptor Marie Louise Pietri, in 1942. She died in 1997. In 1998, Kilpatrick married liberal Washington-based syndicated columnist Marianne Means.

Kilpatrick's personal papers, including his editorial files and correspondence, are housed in Special Collections of the University of Virginia Library. Guides and descriptions of Kilpatrick's papers are available through the Virginia Heritage database.

Works

• The Sovereign States: Notes of a Citizen of Virginia. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1957.
• The Smut Peddlers: The Pornography Racket and the Law Dealing with Obscenity Censorship. Doubleday, 1960.
• The Southern Case for School Segregation. Crowell-Collier Press, 1962.
• The Foxes' Union, EPM Publications, Inc., 1977.
• A Political Bestiary, Viable Alternatives, Impressive Mandates & Other Fables (with Eugene McCarthy and Jeff MacNelly), 1978.
• The American South: Four Seasons of the Land (with William A. Bake). Oxmoor House, 1983.
• The Writer's Art. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1985. ISBN 0836279255
• The Ear Is Human: A Handbook of Homophones and Other Confusions. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1985. ISBN 0836212592
• Fine Print: Reflections on the Writing Art. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1993.

Further reading

• Chappell, David L. "The Divided Mind of Southern Segregationists," Georgia Historical Quarterly, Spring 1998, Vol. 82 Issue 1, p45-72
• Friedman, Murray. "One Episode in Southern Jewry's Response to Desegregation: An Historical Memoir," American Jewish Archives, July 1981, Vol. 33 Issue 2, p170-183, focused on his debates with Kilpatrick
• Havard, William C. "The Journalist as Interpreter of the South," Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 1983, Vol. 59 Issue 1, pp 1–21

External links

• Kilpatrick's Columns on LegalNews.TV
• Shana Alexander's Obituary at the LA Times