I was saddened to learn of the death last month of James Jackson Kilpatrick, whose die-hard segregationist views, voiced through his editorials in the Richmond News-Leader, paved the way for Virginia’s “Massive Resistance” during the Civil Rights struggle.

I say this as one who strongly disagreed with his views on segregation, but who admired him as a wielder of words and a defender of elegant English.

As a Virginia editor during Kilpo’s heyday as a syndicated columnist, my path crossed his on occasion. In a critique of the Roanoke Times & World-News, he once spoke admiringly of the editorial pages I edited, even though I sometimes took issue with his own columns. In editorial-page critiques I did for the National Conference of Editorial Writers, I often held up his writing as exemplary of clear, forceful expository prose, regardless of whether one agreed with his ideas.

Years later, on the 40th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, I went to Charleston, S.C., where he was then living, to interview him for an article I was researching for the Mobile Press-Register.

As it happened, Mrs. Kilpatrick became ill on the day of our appointment, and he had to cancel the interview to be at her side. But we later got together by telephone, and the interview was intriguing.

Kilpo told me about a fascinating interview he had with a couple of black reporters from a Northern newspaper.

“Years after Brown,” the old warhorse told me, “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.’”

That, the columnist conceded, “was long ago and far away, and my thinking has changed.” Though he lived within walking distance of the cannons that launched the Civil War, he said he felt comfortable having black guests in his home, didn’t hesitate to attend racially integrated social events, and even conceded that, in many cases, desegregation had worked. But he remained convinced that the Brown decision was constitutionally flawed and that the laudable movement toward equal rights had been subverted into reverse discrimination.

Kilpatrick acknowledged that he grew up without a real understanding of black Southerners. Asked whether his attitude toward blacks had changed during the 40 years since Brown, he replied: “I don’t know what attitude I had toward Southern blacks in general. I grew up in a segregated society in Oklahoma City. I spent all my formative years in a segregated society. They were kind of invisible. You saw certain servants . . . but you never had any relationship as equals.”

With this background, Kilpatrick entered the battle over public-school desegregation under the conservative banner of the Richmond News-Leader. He dusted off the pre-Civil War doctrine of interposition, which held that a state had the right to interpose its sovereignty between the people and the federal government.

This provided the intellectual basis for Massive Resistance, the commonwealth of Virginia’s all-out effort to preserve its racially segregated school system.

The Supreme Court never bought the doctrine of interposition, in either the 19th century or the 20th, and the Virginia General Assembly eventually knuckled under to the inevitable.

Kilpatrick’s views changed as he grew in stature as a nationally syndicated columnist and a respected voice of conservatism. He came to acknowledge that the Brown decision was morally correct though constitutionally flawed. Segregation should have ended in another way.

“If it had been done by constitutional amendment it would have been far more acceptable,” he told me.

At the time, the Kilpatrick grandchildren were attending racially mixed schools in Williamsburg, Va., and were having no problems. But mandatory desegregation led, in other places, to “the phenomenon of white flight, and that hasn’t done anybody any good.”

I asked him whether it wasn’t the stubborn resistance of white Southern leaders that forced the Supreme Court to use draconian measures to enforce its order.

“I suppose that was true in some instances,” he replied, “but in a free country, I don’t see how in the world you’re going to prevent the parents of a white child from taking that child and moving somewhere else.”

Kilpatrick seemed much more concerned at the time with quality of public education than he was with the color of the students.

“I’m not going to put all the blame on desegregation now,” he said. “It may be that the dumbing-down business has had a significant part to play. The National Education Association, he charged, “downplayed the old disciplines of reading, writing and arithmetic,” and “television has been a bad influence.”

Ann Merriman, an editorial writer on Kilpatrick’s staff at the News-Leader and a colleague of mine with the National Conference of Editorial Writers, agreed with her old boss’s characterization of Yankee journalism’s biased attitude toward the South.

“They would come down here and find the most literate liberals and blacks they could find,” she told me. “Then, to speak up for the South, they would find the most illiterate and ill-spirited people they could.”

Then came those two black reporters for a Northern newspaper, who yacked for an hour with a literate and articulate editor named James Jackson Kilpatrick.

Kilpo wielded the cudgel for good writing long after he had thrown in the towel on interposition and Massive Resistance.

Despite our differences, I liked him and I’ll miss him.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 317 Braeburn Drive, Anderson, S.C. 29621, or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@aol.com.