The Doctrine of Interposition: James J. Kilpatrick and the Radicalization of Virginia and the South

The Virginia campaign for Massive Resistance organized in response to Brown v. Board may have been avoided, if it were not for the editorials of journalist James J. Kilpatrick. Deemed a moderate voice in southern race relations, Virginia’s Commission on Public Education was expected to offer a reasonable plan for school desegregation that would serve as an example to other southern states.  However, the bombardment of public condemnation from government sources such as the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, as well as the 1955 media coverage of the lynching of Emmett Till and the organized bus boycott in Montgomery fueled southern resistance. Kilpatrick initiated a counter media campaign, resurrecting the Doctrine of Interposition—the theory that states had the constitutional right to interpose themselves between the Federal government—and advocating for its implementation. Kilpatrick reprinted the constitutional arguments made by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson to nullify the Alien and Sedition Acts, as well as John C. Calhoun’s legal case for secession in the decades prior to the Civil War. He cited these examples, as well as several nineteenth century case studies in Wisconsin, Iowa, and New England, all of which gave historical weight to Interposition. Kilpatrick’s theories spread like wildfire (even appearing in King’s “I Have a Dream” speech) and tapped into the growing sense of defensiveness and cultural inferiority rumbling in white communities throughout Virginia.  Encouraged by Senator Harry F. Byrd, and evermore sensitive to the national public ridicule of southern white bigotry, massive resisters dug in their heels. The result was a complete rebellion against moderation and the closing of public schools in some Virginia counties for five years.  The radicalization of Virginia moderates corresponds directly to the injection of Kilpatrick’s theory, which gave moderates a constitutional source on which to stake their claims of resistance.