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 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.

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

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

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

""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

""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

""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

""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 new perspective on one of the South's leading segregationists."" - Virginia Magazine

""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

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

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



Book Information
ISBN 9781469642369
Author William P. Hustwit
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint The University of North Carolina Press
Publisher The University of North Carolina Press
Weight(grams) 460g