James Jackson Kilpatrick, who ran the Richmond News-Leader’s editorial page at the time, described his epiphany:
“Years after Brown, Northern papers would send in their traveling teams to get all the nasty stories they could about the segregated South, and these people arrived with their prejudices in their suitcases, and never unpacked their suitcases. Then a couple of black reporters came down -- very literate, very intelligent -- and they sat around my office and we yacked for an hour or so. They were two first-rate reporters.
``I remember saying to my wife that evening -- and this may have been part of the awakening: ‘If they had been white I would have invited them to dinner in my home.’”
Integration Succeeded, but was Constitutionally Flawed
Forty years later, Kilpatrick felt perfectly comfortable with black guests in his home and conceded that his grandchildren received decent educations in racially integrated schools.
But he still believed the Brown decision was constitutionally flawed, and that the laudable movement toward equal rights was subverted into reverse discrimination.
Ann Merriman was on Kilpatrick’s staff in 1954 when the ruling came down. Forty years afterward, she conceded that the Brown decision came when it was time for change.
Reverse Discrimination
``Life was never going to be quite the same as it was before, for which we are now very grateful -- it was time,” Merriman said. But the change, once it started, never found a stopping place, she lamented. It led to reverse discrimination.
“The old system wasn't right; The present system isn't right,” agreed Lee Anderson, editor and publisher of the Chattanooga News and Free Press. ``Times would have changed,” he said. Brown “sped things up, but it tore down all the standards on the way and created ill feeling.” He coined the term “Usurpatious Supreme Court” to condemn the decision.
For Equal Rights, Against Compulsion
Anderson said his newspaper never opposed equal rights though it opposed compulsory desegregation: “We were against compulsion,” he said. But “we've never put blacks down.”
At the time he was interviewed, Anderson lived on Missionary Ridge, site of bloody fighting when Union forces took Chattanooga.
Arthur Wilcox of Charleston, S.C, a retired admiral in the Navy Reserve, is the grandson of a Confederate soldier. His mother was descended from French Huguenots who made a fortune in rice and contributed liberally to the patriot cause in the American Revolution.
When a hurricane destroyed the rice crop in 1910, his grandfather shut down the last rice plantation on the North Santee River and bought the Charleston Post for $5,000. Arthur Wilcox crafted many of its editorial opinions.
Two Races, Two Cultures
``We went into desegregation basically telling each other we're all brothers under the skin,” he said. In fact, the two races had developed different cultures, and there is an “unwillingness on the part of both sides to conform to cultural values of the other side.”
Ann Merriman thinks the national media gave a distorted picture of the South after the Brown decision.
“They would come down here and find the most literate liberals and blacks they could find; then, to speak up for the South, they would find the most illiterate and ill-spirited people they could,” she said.
Then came those two black reporters for a Northern newspaper, who yacked for an hour with a literate and articulate Southern editor named James Jackson Kilpatrick.
Source: Interviews by Gene Owens conducted in 1994
Gene Owens - Gene Owens is a veteran of more than 50 years of newspaper writing. At his retirement in 2003 from the Press-Register in Mobile, Ala., the ...
