W.W. Kitchin was the son of William H. Kitchin and Maria Figures Arrington. He was born in Scotland Neck, NC. He was the brother of Claude Kitchin and the uncle of Alvin Paul Kitchin, each of whom served in the U.S. Congress. He graduated from Wake Forest College in 1884, studied law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and passed the North Carolina Bar examination in 1887. He practiced law in Roxboro, NC. On 22 December 1892, W.W. Kitchin married Sue Musette Satterfield of Roxboro, NC. They had six children: Sue Arrington, William Walton, Anne Maria, Elizabeth Gertrude, Clement Satterfield, and Musette Satterfield. The children related stories of how kind he was to the hired help at the Governor's Mansion, going so far as to offer them time off one Christmas. This greatly disappointed the employees as they looked forward to the annual event. The children also enjoyed roller skating through the Governor's Mansion.
Political career
In 1892, he ran unsuccessfully for the North Carolina Senate but was later elected for six terms in the United States House of Representatives, from 1897 to 1909. In 1898, he helped lead the Wilmington insurrection of 1898, a violent coup d'état by a group of white supremacists. They expelled opposition black and white political leaders from the city, destroyed the property and businesses of black citizens built up since the Civil War, including the only black newspaper in the city, and killed an estimated 60 to more than 300 people. With other members of his family, he was an active participant in leading to the approval of a state constitutional amendment in 1900 placing numerous limitations on the right of black Tar Heels to vote. In January, 1901, George Henry White, an African-American, included Kitchin in his Congressional farewell address. He said that no politician had done more to bring the African-American into disrepute. White also said that Kitchin attempted to disprove African-Americans were worthy of the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1906 Kitchin proposed an amendment to the Post Office Department's appropriations bill to end the $167,000 subsidy paid to Southern Railway funding the Fast Mail service, which served his constituency directly and was the last fast mail train in the United States that received such a subsidy. The train was discontinued on January 1, 1907, as a result, and Kitchin's amendment was later used as a campaign issue against him. Limited to one term as governor by the state constitution of the time, Kitchin ran unsuccessfully for the United States Senate in 1912. His tenure as governor was highly productive: he increased expenditures for public education and public health services, oversaw expansion of railroads and increased stability of the state's banks. After completing his term, Governor Kitchin practiced law in Raleigh, NC until 1919, when his declining health led him to retire to his home in Scotland Neck, NC. He died in 1924 and is buried in the Scotland Neck Baptist Cemetery.
