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Quite naturally, these and other Kilpatrick editorials found favor among those Southerners who are still fighting the Civil War. He has been reprinted in The Citizen, monthly organ of the South's rabid racist organization, the Citizens Councils of America. But in that growing part of the South that is at least resigned to the inevitability of change, Editor Kilpatrick has almost no defenders. Editor William Baggs of the Miami News, a strong voice of Southern moderation, calls Kilpatrick "a grits-eating Westbrook Pegler" and "an amusing antique" who serves a useful purpose: "He reminds me almost every day of the power and the glory of the U.S. Constitution." Kilpatrick's credo, says Nashville Tennessean Editor John Seigenthaler, seems to be "that nothing has happened in the past 100 years, and if it has, it shouldn't have."
Kilpatrick himself has sensed the winds of change. His book is less of an editorial rebel yell than a petulant plea to stop history's clock. The Negro "must do what every other race of men has done since time began, and that is to demonstrate his worth to the community he seeks to enter." The integrationist must "be patient; be tolerant of imperfection." The segregationist, whom Editor Kilpatrick once rallied so stoutly to the Confederate flag, must accept "tokenism—two Negroes in one school, ten in another." And as for James Jackson Kilpatrick? "I'm sure this book is my last effort on the subject—at least for a long while. Frankly, the subject of segregation palls."
* The so-called states' rights amendment.