An era ended Monday morning with Senator Robert Byrd's death. The 92-year-old lawmaker had served in the United States Senate for 51 years, longer than anyone else in the history of the nation. Byrd entered the upper chamber of America's legislature on January 3, 1959, before ten current U.S. senators (not to mention the nation's present commander-in-chief) were born. Prior to entering the senate Byrd spent six years in the U.S. House of Representatives. Fifty-seven years in Congress is an impressive total for anyone, let alone someone who despite being class valedictorian at Mark Twain High School in Stotesbury, West Virginia, was so impoverished that he couldn't afford to take any college classes until he was in his 30's.
Few impact makers in America's history have emerged from more modest circumstances. Cornelius Calvin Sales, Jr. was born in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina on November 20th, 1917. However, his mother died in the influenza epidemic of the following year, and her husband Cornelius Sr. honored her deathbed request to give young Cornelius Jr. to her sister and brother-in-law. The lad's aunt and uncle adopted him, rechristened him Robert Carlyle Byrd, and then moved to the rural mining country of southern West Virginia.
The late senator's life is testimony to how much an open-minded individual can grow in a lifetime. At 24 Byrd organized a 150-member chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Sophia, WV, and was unanimously chosen to lead them at their first meeting. In an autobiography Byrd stated that his motivation was his opposition to Communism and his desire to become associated with influential citizens of his state, but his views on race at the time were anything but enlightened. In a 1944 letter to Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, an avowed racist, Byrd wrote, "I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side... Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory Opponents unsuccessfully tried using Byrd's brief courtship with the KKK against him during his first run for Congress in 1952, but nonetheless Byrd subsequently spent decades apologizing for what he termed his "sad mistake." In a 2005 Washington Post article Byrd said, "I know now I was wrong {in joining the KKK}. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times... and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. {But} I can't erase what happened."
In 1964 Byrd joined a group of senators including determined segregationists like Mississippi's James Eastland and Georgia's Richard Russell in filibustering against that year's Civil Rights Act, which featured then-sweeping reforms that included banning discrimination in employment, opening up restaurants and hotels to people of color, and enabling the Justice Department to more fairly register black voters in the deep south. However, he later voted in favor of the similarly progressive Civil Rights Act of 1968.
An enthusiastic supporter of the Vietnam War in the mid-1960's, Byrd was later openly critical of the senate's 2002 resolution which authorized then-president George W. Bush to launch his ill-considered and costly invasion of Iraq the following year. He based his objections on his strong belief in maintaining the power of the legislative branch of the government, commenting at the time that the senate's action "...amounted to a complete evisceration of the Congressional prerogative to declare war, and an outrageous abdication of responsibility to hand such unfettered discretion to this callow and reckless president." Irrefutable evidence of his devotion to the legislative body in which he served for more than half a century came in 2007 when Byrd's ceremonial portrait was unveiled. On that occasion he was asked by a former colleague how many presidents he had served under. His response: "None. I have served with presidents, not under them!"
Over the years Byrd directed billions of dollars worth of projects to people of West Virginia who had battled poverty for generations. In his autobiography he wrote, "It has been my constant desire to improve the lives of the people who have sent me to Washington time and time again."
Byrd was born 15 months before America's first black major league baseball player of the 20th century, and outlived him by nearly four decades. But if one agrees with Jackie Robinson's epitaph ("A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives"), it's not unfair to put one of America's acknowledged civil rights pioneers in the same category as a one-time avowed segregationist who acknowledged his mistakes while in the process changing both himself and his nation for the better. Return to main page
June 28, 2010
Font size: