WaPo on Robert Byrd: A Senator's Shame

[quaoar]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/18/AR2005061801105.html

A Senator's Shame
Byrd, in His New Book, Again Confronts Early Ties to KKK

By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 19, 2005; Page A01

In the early 1940s, a politically ambitious butcher from West Virginia named Bob Byrd recruited 150 of his friends and associates to form a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. After Byrd had collected the $10 joining fee and $3 charge for a robe and hood from every applicant, the "Grand Dragon" for the mid-Atlantic states came down to tiny Crab Orchard, W.Va., to officially organize the chapter.

As Byrd recalls now, the Klan official, Joel L. Baskin of Arlington, Va., was so impressed with the young Byrd's organizational skills that he urged him to go into politics. "The country needs young men like you in the leadership of the nation," Baskin said.

The young Klan leader went on to become one of the most powerful and enduring figures in modern Senate history. Throughout a half-century on Capitol Hill, Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) has twice held the premier leadership post in the Senate, helped win ratification of the Panama Canal treaty, squeezed billions from federal coffers to aid his home state, and won praise from liberals for his opposition to the war in Iraq and his defense of minority party rights in the Senate.

Despite his many achievements, however, the venerated Byrd has never been able to fully erase the stain of his association with one of the most reviled hate groups in the nation's history.

[Xipe Totec]

1. I'd Rather Have a Byrd in the Senate

Than a Bush in the White House.

[Ken Burch]

2. It's absolutely a coincidence, a bizarre accident of timing

that the Post would just happen to dredge up the old "Byrd was a Klansman sixty years ago" story now that he's been proven right on the war and they've been proven wrong, isn't it kiddies?

[Xipe Totec]

3. Here's another coincidence

A boot lick article about Bob Dole by the same author. What are the odds?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40497-2005Apr9.html?referrer=emailarticle

[napi21]

5. Oh, they keep bringing that Klan thing up all the time.

I hear some Pub say it a couple of times every month. Byrd has appologized many times for being wrong when he did that so very long ago. I just wonder if the current Pub Sens & Reps had been alive that longs ago, just how many of them would have joined Bob Byrd?

Hell, I bet some of the ones from Miss and Ala might be closet Klan supporters now!

[KingFlorez]

4. over 60 years ago

They go and drag this crap up. They wouldn't give a darn if he supported the illegal war.

[realFedUp]

6. swiftly rocking the boat again.....nt

[Idioteque]

7. At least Sen. Byrd had the decency to co-sponser the lynching apology! nt

[AirAmFan]

8. Article omits mentioning 'Shame' THIS WEEK of Republicans refusing

to apologize for a century of Senate inaction on lynching. More than a dozen Republicans refused to cosponsor Mary Landrieu's lyching apology, even though they STILL can sign on days after the legislation passed Monday night (see http://www.congress.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:SE00039:@@@P ).

But the article DOES cite results of in-depth research on the timing of lynchings in West Virginia. This is a fairly large article which may have had such a great deal of space allocated to it because the author hoped to find that Byrd personally might be accused of having had a hand in some West Virginia lynchings. Such a finding would have dovetailed nicely with important Republican plans to eliminate the filibuster and pave the way for 30 or 40 years of ultraright dominance of the USSC. But the last recorded WV lynching preceded Byrd's Klan chapter by more than a decade.

Do you sense DISAPPOINTMENT in these paragraphs?

From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/18/AR2005061801105_2.html :

"Forty-eight people, including 28 blacks, were lynched in West Virginia, mostly during the late 1880s and early 1900s, according to the Tuskegee University archives. The last two reported lynchings occurred on Dec. 10, 1931, in Lewisburg, W.Va. By the time Byrd began organizing for the Klan during World War II, the organization had largely morphed into a money-making fraternal organization that was virulently anti-black, anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic.

Byrd's indelible links to the Klan -- the "albatross around my neck," as he once described it -- shows the remarkable staying power of racial issues more than 40 years after the height of the civil rights movement. Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) learned that lesson the hard way at a birthday party in December 2002, when his nostalgic words about Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), who ran for president as a segregationist in 1948, caused a public uproar and cost Lott the majority leader's post."