Robert Byrd, Democratic Party, U.S. Representative from 1953 - 1959, United States Senator from West Virginia -In office January 3, 1959 – June 28, 2010
“........In Byrd’s first campaign for the House in 1952, his opponent released a letter that Byrd had written to the Klan’s imperial wizard in 1946. The date is important because Byrd claimed to have cut ties with the racist organization — today we would call it a terrorist group — in 1943. “The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia,” Byrd wrote.
This was in the days when the South was a solid Democratic stronghold — and when the default position of Southern Democrats was to advocate separation of the races. In 1964, Byrd joined other members of his party, led by Richard Russell of Georgia, in trying to kill the Civil Rights Act. Back then, would-be obstructionists were required to stage a filibuster rather than just threaten one. Byrd held the Senate floor for 14 hours in an effort that was ultimately as futile as Pickett’s Charge.
“Men are not created equal today, and they were not created equal in 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was written,” Byrd declaimed during his peroration. “Men and races of men differ in appearance, ways, physical power, mental capacity, creativity and vision.”
Byrd also opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and most of Johnson’s anti-poverty programs, saying that “we can take the people out of the slums, but we cannot take the slums out of the people.”.............
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/28/AR2010062803119.html
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Joe Biden: “A very close friend of mine, one of my mentors, a guy who was there when I was a 29-year-old kid being sworn into the United States Senate. Shortly thereafter, a guy who stood in the rain, in the pouring rain, freezing rain outside a church as I buried my daughter and my wife before I got sworn in ... We lost the dean of the United States Senate, but also the state of West Virginia lost its most fierce advocate and, as I said, I lost a dear friend.
“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” Biden said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/31/biden.obama/
WASHINGTON — Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader, apologized on Saturday for once predicting that Barack Obama could become the country’s first black president because he was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/us/politics/10reidweb.html