James J. Kilpatrick: Salesman for Segregation

by William P. Hustwit

Overview

James J. Kilpatrick was a nationally known television personality, journalist, and columnist whose conservative voice rang out loudly and widely through the twentieth century. As editor of the Richmond News Leader, writer for the National Review, debater in the "Point/Counterpoint" portion of CBS's 60 Minutes, and supporter of conservative political candidates like Barry Goldwater, Kilpatrick had many platforms for his race-based brand of southern conservatism. In James J. Kilpatrick: Salesman for Segregation, William P. Hustwit delivers a comprehensive study of Kilpatrick's importance to the civil rights era and explores how his protracted resistance to both desegregation and egalitarianism culminated in an enduring form of conservatism that revealed a nation's unease with racial change.

Relying on archival sources, including Kilpatrick's personal papers, Hustwit provides an invaluable look at what Gunnar Myrdal called the race problem in the "white mind" at the intersection of the postwar conservative and civil rights movements. Growing out of a painful family history and strongly conservative political cultures, Kilpatrick's personal values and self-interested opportunism contributed to America's ongoing struggles with race and reform.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469642369
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	02/01/2018
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.72(d)

About the Author

William P. Hustwit is associate professor of history at Birmingham-Southern College.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

In sparkling and accessible prose, Hustwit provides James Kilpatrick with an intelligent, fair assessment. An important contribution to our understanding of modern conservatism in the South.—William A. Link, University of Florida

We have long needed a first-rate biography of James J. Kilpatrick, one of the most influential figures in the evolution of conservativism in the South of the 1950s and 1960s. William Hustwit has given us just such a study. But it is more than biography. It is an illuminating examination of the role that Kilpatrick played in leading white southerners away from a conservatism based overwhelmingly upon race to a broader national coalition.—Dan Carter, University Professor Emeritus, University of South Carolina

Editorial Reviews

Traces the intellectual journey of James J. Kilpatrick from regional southern journalist to one of the most prominent conservative commentators of the latter half of the 20th century . . . . It represents an important aspect of the Civil Rights movement.—Publishers Weekly

An engrossing new biography. . . . [Hustwit] has done a first-rate job of providing a much-needed biography of one of the South's most important journalists of the 20th century.—Raleigh News & Observer

In this lively and well-researched study, William P. Hustwit places his subject, James J. Kilpatrick, in the vanguard of two movements: the effort to uphold segregation in the South and the rise of conservatism in America.—American Historical Review

Hustwit's study of Kilpatrick as a political and media figure deepens our understanding of the complex relationships connecting opposition to civil rights, media, modern conservatism, and the evolving rhetoric of white racial politics in the second half of the twentieth century.—Journal of Southern History

Offers a new perspective on one of the South's leading segregationists.—Virginia Magazine

Recommended. Specialized libraries, upper-division undergraduates and above.—Choice

This book would be an important source for scholars studying the civil rights movement, southern newspaper history during the mid-twentieth century, or the origins of the radical conservative wing of the twenty-first-century Republican Party.—Jhistory

Offers a detailed analysis of how Kilpatrick negotiated, renegotiated, reinvented, and repackaged massive resistance thought into a mainstream container that resonated with society's conservative turn in post-civil-rights America.—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society

Hustwit's attention to the suppleness and the adaptability of Kilpatrick's thought is . . . this book's strength.—Journal of American Studies

Hustwit reminds us in this fine biography why Kilpatrick was much more than a television personality.—The Historian

From the Publisher

A visiting assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi traces the intellectual journey of James J. Kilpatrick from regional southern journalist to one of the most prominent conservative commentators of the latter half of the 20th century. Kilpatrick focused his early career on creating supposedly acceptable public arguments against desegregation by “elevat the level of debate beyond race” and into the realm of constitutional theory—as a harbinger of FOX News and the conservative talk radio cadre, he is most interesting as an embodiment of how desperately the south fought integration. Hustwit’s analysis reveals how many of their tactics—e.g., asserting that “real affirmative action meant letting blacks help themselves”—have become standards of conservative rhetoric, and it is sobering to discover how readily the mass media and society at large accepted Kilpatrick’s overt racism, even as late as 1963. (After Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, Kilpatrick wrote a solicited article for the Saturday Evening Post entitled “The Hell He Is Equal.” To the magazine’s credit they decided in the wake of the Birmingham church bombings not to publish it.) Hustwit’s history will likely find a limited scholarly audience, but it represents an important aspect of the Civil Rights movement. 9 illus. (May)

Publishers Weekly