Kittleman was very active in the Republican Party. He was a chair of the Howard County Republican Central Committee, president of the Howard County Republican Club, and a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), becoming president of the Howard County Branch. He was an active participant in the civil rights movement, pursuing desegregation of Howard County Schools which lasted more than a decade past the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. He was also a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW). In 1978 Kittleman ran for the Howard County Council, In 1982, he made his first run for Maryland House of Delegates.