James Edwards

Does anyone remember James J. Kilpatrick? At one time, in the late 1970s to the mid 1980s he was apparently one of the most widely read columnists in the country. Do you know how he became famous? In the early 1950s he was an unknown editor/editorial writer for a newspaper in Richmond, Virginia. Then he began denouncing Brown vs. Board of Education, and championing states’ rights and segregation. He died in 2010. The following was printed in his obituary.

James J. Kilpatrick, a nationally syndicated columnist whose strongly conservative viewpoints on politics, law and language appeared in hundreds of newspapers over the last five decades and made him a popular, even parodied, television pundit, died Sunday at a Washington, D.C., hospital. He was 89.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Kevin.

Kilpatrick, who once described himself as “10 miles to the right of Ivan the Terrible,” was the editor of a Richmond, Va., newspaper in the 1950s. His anti-desegregation crusades gave him national prominence, eventually leading to a thrice-weekly syndicated political column called “A Conservative View.

His views on race especially impressed William F. Buckley, who asked him to write for National Review:

During this period he also became an outspoken opponent of desegregation. He editorialized against the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, which declared school segregation unconstitutional. The centerpiece of Kilpatrick’s opposition was a 19th century doctrine called “interposition,” which said that states had the right to override a federal mandate that encroached on their sovereign authority. Bolstered by Kilpatrick’s editorials, several Southern states used the interposition argument to pass laws favorable to segregation. Kilpatrick also wrote a book, “The Sovereign States” (1957), to drum up support for the doctrine outside the South, but it failed to gain traction.

Kilpatrick became well-known nationally, particularly after he participated in debates with prominent civil rights leaders, including one with the Rev. Martin Luther King in 1960. He became a contributing editor to William F. Buckley’s conservative journal, National Review, which led in 1964 to his debut as a syndicated columnist with the Newsday Syndicate.

Here are a few samples of Kilpatrick’s work that William F. Buckley published in National Review:

The September 28, 1957 issue contained a piece by James Kilpatrick called “Right and Power in Arkansas,” in which he endorsed Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus’ call-up of the National Guard to prevent forced integration at Little Rock’s Central High School. Defending a community’s right to keep the peace, he wrote that “the State of Arkansas and Orval Faubus are wholly in the right; they have acted lawfully; they are entitled to those great presumptions of the law which underlie the whole of our judicial tradition.” Predicting a “storm” of white resistance he wrote, “Conceding, for the sake of discussion, that the Negro pupil has these new rights, what of the white community? Has it none?”

An article by James Kilpatrick in the September 24, 1963, issue argued that the Civil Rights Bill (eventually passed in 1964) should be voted down. He wrote, “I believe this bill is a very bad bill. In my view, the means here proposed are the wrong means… In the name of achieving certain ‘rights’ for one group of citizens this bill would impose some fateful compulsions on another group of citizens.” After it passed, an editorial declared: “The Civil Rights Act has been law for only a little over two months, yet it already promises to be the source of much legalistic confusion, civic chaos and bureaucratic malpractice.”

Mr. Kilpatrick also took aim at the 1965 Voting Rights Act in the April 20, 1965 issue. “Must We Repeal the Constitution to Give the Negro the Vote?” he asked, accusing the bill’s supporters of “perverting the Constitution.” He thought certain blacks should be given the right to vote but notes, “Over most of this century, the great bulk of Southern Negroes have been genuinely unqualified for the franchise.” He also defended segregation as rational for Southerners. “Segregation is a fact, and more than a fact; it is a state of mind. It lies in the Southern subconscious next to man’s most elementary instincts, for self-preservation, for survival, for the untroubled continuation of a not intolerable way of life.”

Yes, National Review used to be an “racist” honest magazine, well up into the 1970s. Today’s conservatives, in an effort to prove that they’re the good guys who love black people the most, love to scream that “Bull Connor was a Democrat!” and that “It was Democrats who opposed the Civil Rights movement!”

What they never mention is that it was conservatives who once opposed the “Civil Rights” movement, and they did it from the pages of National Review, the leading conservative magazine in the country back then.

Compare that to the National Review of today, an irrelevant publication that just fired John Derbyshire for writing common sense, elementary level truths about race.

Columbus Day has suffered an unprecedented diminution in importance in recent years, at least in the eyes of the solons of modern American culture.

Why? Columbus Day celebrates Christopher Columbus, the first European (white person) to come to the Western Hemisphere and make the presence permanent. Columbus Day, in other words, celebrates the advent of the White race in the so-called New World of the Americas. This, of course, is the last thing that the multicultural Left wants celebrated.

Their guiding principal, invented by both Trotsky and the Cultural Marxists at approximately the same time, is best summed up by the late, unlamented Susan Sontag’s famous quote, “The white race is the cancer of human history.” Who wants to celebrate cancer? Consequently, Columbus Day has been transformed from a holiday into an occasion for weeping, wailing, rending of garments and gnashing of teeth by the Left.

We beg to differ, and think it’s high time to challenge this modern orthodoxy regarding Columbus and Columbus Day.

Consider, if you will, the Western Hemisphere when Columbus discovered it in 1492. The entire continent is estimated to have sustained only a few hundred thousand people. It was a huge undeveloped wildlife preserve; its population stuck for the most part in the New Stone Age. And despite what the Left would have you believe, it was not populated by peace-loving early environmentalists.

The indigenous inhabitants were bloodthirsty savages living in a state of nature in which life, as Hobbes famously noted, was “nasty, brutish and short.” The highest level of civilization achieved in the Hemisphere by the indigenous was that of the Aztecs, famous for capturing young men from neighboring tribes for ritual sacrifice and ripping their still-beating hearts from their chests.

When you live in a place like Memphis, the local news media (which is owned by and takes its marching orders from the National news media-ABC, CBS, NBC, Scripps-Howard, Gannett, etc.) is constantly fanning the dying embers of the “Civil Rights” movement.

Why? Because the CRM was the one unqualified success of liberalism since WWll. It was the one manifestation which, at least among both mainstream conservatives and liberals, is like Caesar’s wife and is “beyond reproach.”

A case in point is the article, “United in Prayer,” taken from the Monday, August 1 edition of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, our daily fish wrap. The occasion for this article is to focus attention on the unveiling of the new MLK Statue on the National Mall in Washington D.C. next week.

The story features the “iconic” Clayborn Temple, formerly Second Presbyterian Church until 1949 when, as often happens in Memphis, the old neighborhood transitions from white to black and the white churches sell their facilities to black churches. Clayborn Temple is “iconic” because MLK and other “civil rights pioneers” used it as a base of operations back in the 50s and 60s.

Clayborn Temple is a stone building, and therefore the only thing that needs to be done to keep it presentable is to keep the roof repaired, but like so many other buildings in the black neighborhoods of Memphis, this didn’t happen and the AME denomination, which owns it, is now offering to sell the dilapidated hulk for $1 million plus, due to its “iconic” status, in hopes that some guilty white liberals will buy it and convert it into yet another CRM shrine.

Right on cue, the GWLs show up, this time a contingent from the now uber-liberal Second Presbyterian Church, the original owners. A gaggle of liberal “church ladies” fighting back tears of guilt and remorse despite the fact that most of them hadn’t been born when the CRM occurred, took to falling on their knees before black folks at Clayborn Temple to beg forgiveness for the imagined and unspecified “racial sins” of their forefathers and mothers.

Anyone who wants to know how we got to the point of all this Diversity nonsense and multicultural madness, and where it came from, should watch this short film called The House I Live In. Starring Frank Sinatra, it came out in 1945, and was created “to oppose anti-Semitism and racial prejudice.” It was awarded both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award in 1946.

The plot’s pretty simple. Sinatra, playing himself, heads outside for a cigarette break in the middle of a recording session, where he happens upon a gang of about a dozen young boys chasing and cornering another kid, getting ready to pummel him. Sinatra intervenes, asking what the trouble is. The ruffians explain that they want to beat the kid up because they don’t like his religion. One tells Sinatra “he’s a dirty -” but Frank cuts him off before he can finish the sentence.

Frank then has a talk with the boys, and shows them how wrong they are. Does he tell them that, while religion is important, going around beating up people with a different religion is not appropriate behavior? Nah, Frank cuts right to the chase. He tells them:

“Look, fellas, religion makes no difference. Except maybe to a Nazi, or somebody that’s stupid.”

Christians like to complain about “modern day” Hollywood denigrating and downplaying Christianity, while insisting that back in the good old days Hollywood respected Christianity. But even back in 1945 Hollywood was giving Oscars to a movie that says that anyone who thinks Christianity is better than other religions is either a Nazi, or stupid.

Sinatra then goes on to explain that we’re all Americans, no matter what we believe, and “prejudice” and “intolerance” are wrong, because even though we all may not see eye to eye on religion, we’ve got to stick together to fight “the Japs.” And, yes, he says “Japs”, repeatedly. The kids then stare wide eyed as Frank breaks into an expurgated rendition of the title song.

The film is based on the song of the same name, The House I Live In. It’s all about America being a multiracial, multicultural Disneyland. But the songwriter was livid that the movie makers cut the verse that explicitly refers to blacks out of the movie. He even got tossed out of a theater for protesting the excision. But the people that made the movie knew that America wasn’t quite ready for a movie promoting that much Diversity just yet. No matter; they had plenty of time, and now they push not only racial integration, but miscegenation non-stop. And it goes without saying that if they were making the movie today, they would no doubt still leave in the line comparing evangelicals to Nazis for thinking religion is important, but they would take out the stuff about “Japs.”

Nowadays, of course, the message of the movie is considered mainstream. Who doesn’t love “tolerance” and “diversity” these days? But back then, the idea that race and religion were meaningless trivialities was only being pushed by radicals, Jews, and Communists. Forced racial integration was considered to be a Communist plot, largely because it was a Communist plot. And if you think I exaggerate, just consult some history books. Christians and conservatives of today love to pretend as if they’ve always stood for and promoted interracial marriage, integrated schools, integrated churches, Civil Rights laws, etc., and that Martin Luther King was the embodiment of Christian conservatism. But nothing could be further from the truth. Conservative evangelical churches in the era between WW 2 and the 1970s railed against racial integration, and opposed all efforts to mix the races. Probably not five white preachers out of a thousand would’ve conducted an interracial marriage in 1964. Conservatives and Christians weren’t “marching with Dr. King”; the non-blacks marching with MLK were Quakers, liberal apostate “Christians”, commies, beatniks, and, overwhelmingly, Jews. (One of the rare exceptions was Billy Graham, and he certainly didn’t take a prominent position in the Civil Rights crusade, because he knew it would kill his ministry. But he did invite King to pray at a New York City revival, and insisted on integrated seating at all his revival meetings. He was widely denounced by conservative Christians for these actions.) Again, just check the history books if you doubt that modern day shibboleths on race were considered far out, dangerous radicalism by Americans up until quite recently, and that the people pushing such things were generally Communists.

But if you don’t have time to read some history books, just watch the credits for this Academy Award winning movie. It’s like a Who’s Who of Hollywood Communism and radicalism. Sinatra was just their front man.

Let’s start with the man who wrote the lyrics to the song on which the movie is based. In the movie he’s credited as “Lewis Allan”, but don’t pay any attention to that. His real name was Abel Meeropol. He also wrote Strange Fruit, the song about lynching in the South which Billie Holiday made famous, and which TIME magazine called the most important song of the 20th century. Holiday claimed she wrote it in her autobiography, but that was a lie. And who was Abel Meeropol? Our good friend Max Blumenthal tells us that he was “a Jewish school teacher”, but there’s a bit more to it than that. Quite a bit more. Remember Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the nice Jewish couple executed for giving our atomic secrets to the Soviet Union? Well, after they were executed, Abel Meeropol adopted their kids. Was that because he took pity on a couple orphans? Possibly. It might also have to do with the fact that the “Jewish school teacher” was an “ardent Communist” himself. Funny how Blumenthal forgot to mention that little fact…

OK, so we’ve seen that the lyricist for the song which inspired the movie was some strange fruit, indeed. What about others? Well, Earl Robinson wrote the music for the song. You remember Earl Robinson, right? He was one of the notorious Hollywood Ten, who were blacklisted for refusing to tell Congress whether or not they had ever been members of the Communist Party. Of course, every single one of the Hollywood Ten either was or had been a member of the Communist Party. Most still were. Robinson also wrote the music for other songs, like Ballad For Americans, an anthem all about how race and religion don’t matter. It was performed at the Communist Party national convention of 1940. (They also played it the GOP convention that year, which oughta tell you something.) Robinson also wrote Black and White, a celebration of the Brown vs. Board of Education travesty of jurisprudence. You’ve probably heard a watered down version of Black and White – Three Dog Night had a #1 hit with their less blatantly political form of the song in 1972.

OK, so the guy who wrote the words to the song that inspired the movie was an America hating Communist. And the guy who wrote the music was another Communist. Anyone else? Well, there’s also the guy who wrote the screenplay for the movie. His name was Albert Maltz, surprise, surprise, and he, too, “was a man on the rise both inside and outside of the Communist Party.”

Yes, The House I Live In, and its message, was a Communist production through and through. And make no mistake. The message of the movie wasn’t that people shouldn’t go around beating up Jews. We have no problem with that message; we oppose violence against anyone. But that wasn’t the message of the movie. The message was that religion and race are meaningless trivialities, and anyone who disagrees is either “a Nazi” or “stupid.”

In 1945, that was a radical Communist idea. Now, it’s a mainstream view parroted by nearly everyone.

Glenn Beck’s big rally at the Lincoln Memorial a couple days ago is the talk of the news media and the internet. Liberals are denouncing it, conservatives are walking on air, while tens of millions of people are completely mystified. And with good reason -- if Seinfeld was a show about nothing, this massive gathering was a rally about nothing. And while it may have looked impressive, in reality it shows just how impotent and adrift the mainstream conservative movement has become.

Nobody is really sure what it was even about. Beck, who is only famous because he has spent hours a day for the last decade ranting about politics, says it had nothing to do with politics, even though Sarah Palin was the keynote speaker.

It was about “restoring honor” or something, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Or it was a way of "supporting the troops," depending on which day you talked to Beck.

Then it turned into a rally to reclaim the Civil Rights movement, and give it back to the people who Beck swears pioneered the Civil Rights movement, right-wing conservatives. Yes, that’s what Beck actually claims to believe. Leave it to Glenn Beck to make white-hating black columnist Leonard Pitts look sane and reasonable.