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.