Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Shameful Legacy of a Wicked Man

Today is Wednesday, 18 August 2010.

“The Negro race, as a race, is in fact an inferior race”. So wrote James J. Kilpatrick (JJKkk) in 1963, in an essay (“The Hell He Is Equal”) for The Saturday Evening Post, which declined to publish it. JJKkk died Sunday past.

As editor of the Richmond News Leader (1951-66), JJKkk was a staunch defender of segregation, The Second Slavery. JJKkk promoted opposition to the Brown v. Board decision of 1954 which outlawed school segregation, deploying the theme of “massive resistance”, the white racist slogan of the time, meaning stopping desegregation by all means necessary, including terrorist violence. (The white Southern middle and upper classes were the “genteel” mouthpieces of white hate, assigning the grubby chore of actual violence to the "lower" white orders which formed the KKK, etc.)

JJKkk also promoted the doctrine of “interposition”, a 19th-century concoction of Southern white supremacists. This flight of diseased imagination claimed that the several states had a Constitutional duty to interpose their (non-existent) sovereignty between their citizens and the Federal government, when said citizens disliked Federal court rulings, and thereby invalidate and nullify those rulings. (The doctrine was fantastical in claiming that Mississippi, etc. were Nation-States, and not component states of the Union, as each had subsumed its sovereignty into the Union upon joining.)

In some way, JJKkk "reassessed" his white supremacy, telling Time in 1970: “I was brought up a white boy in Oklahoma City in the 1920s and 1930. I accepted segregation as a way of life. Very few of us, I suspect, would like to have our passions and profundities at age 28 thrust in our faces at 50.” Well, that would partly depend on whether, at age 28, one was an ardent nazi-style racist, now wouldn’t it? I find no evidence JJKkk ever publicly recanted his white supremacy, and condemned his vile past. Certainly, he never withdrew from public life, and profiting therefrom, in penance.

It is curious that JJKkk references the age of 28, which he was in 1948. When he wrote the 1963 essay, he was 43, rather late for a “youthful indiscretion”.

Perhaps JJKkk operated on HydeTime, named for the late Rep. Henry Hyde, vicious right-winger and “champion” of family values, who admitted having an affair at the age of 41 (which broke up the family of his lover), and dismissed it as a “youthful indiscretion”. Given that Hyde lived to 83, his youth occupied at least 49% of his life. By the same token, JJKkk’s youth also occupied at least 49% of his life. “You’re only as old as you feel”, I suppose.

Southern white supremacists such as JJKkk affected to blame “outside agitators” for creating “uppity nee-grahs” from the "dumb-but-happy Sambos" of their imaginations. In fact, JJKkk and his like were the “inside agitators” who provided the veneer of pseudo-intellectual “respectability” to white-hate, and fomented anti-desegregation, anti-Black terrorism. Ruin and the blood of innocents forever stain their self-disgraced hands.

TO BE CONTINUED
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UPDATE

Foul-mouthed radio bigot and JJKkk think-alike Laura Schlesinger is ending her radio propaganda stint. "I want to regain my first amendment rights. I want to be able to say what is on my mind, in my heart, what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry."

Dr. Laura was able to say “n—r” eleven times in five minutes. How much more regaining does she need? To say “k—e”, “f—t”, “s—k”, “g—k”, etc. each fifteen times in three minutes? Good riddance. We know what’s in your heart and on your mind: evil. And we're staying angry.
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On this date in 1587 was born Virginia Dare, at Roanoke Colony (in what is now North Carolina), the first English child born in the Colonies.

The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on this date in 1920, guaranteeing women the vote.

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