Columnist James J. Kilpatrick Dies At 89
Conservative columnist James L. Kilpatrick died of congestive heart failure at the age of 89 yesterday at George Washington University Hospital.
His column, “A Conservative View,” ran for nearly three decades across hundreds of papers, and he became a regular feature on “60 Minutes'” Point-Counterpoint segment, which would make pop culture history after being parodied regularly on “Saturday Night Live.”
Kilpatrick had been a proponent of racial segregation in the 50s during his time as an editor of the Richmond News Reader. In later years, he would distance himself from his earlier writing on race and racial issues. In fact, a black newspaper in the Richmond area named Kilpatrick to its “honor roll for courage and justice” after his extensive research into and reporting on the case of Silas Rogers, a black shoeshine man who had been, it turned out, wrongly convicted of killing a police officer in Virginia. Silas was eventually pardoned thanks to Kilpatrick’s investigation into certain inconsistencies in testimonies given in the case against the young man.
