Senator Byrd concurred...
...but refused to say whether Ashcroft attends the meetings.
Publication: The New Republic;
Date: 02-22-1999;
Byrd's baggage
-SNIP
To the editors:
David Plotz's vignette of Senator Robert Byrd is searing but accurate. The former Ku Klux Klaner was one of six senators who had the privilege of escorting into the Senate chamber Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who as a young law clerk wrote opinions against the desegregation of schools, and who as a longtime jurist has never employed a black law clerk. The chief justice was then sworn in by Senator Strom Thurmond, former Dixiecrat and champion filibusterer against civil rights bills.
Plotz repeats, albeit incredulously, Byrd's old song and dance about joining the Klan to uphold "traditional American values" and to fight communism. But had the journalist dug deeper, he would have found proof that Byrd joined the hooded white supremacists because he loathed and feared African Americans. As cited in Graham Smith's When Jim Crow Met John Bull, Byrd, fearing the possible desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces in 1945, wrote the famously negrophobic Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi that he would "never submit to fight beneath that banner [the American flag] with a negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throw back to the blackest specimen from the wilds." A sexual past can trip up a politician but a racist past seems little hindrance to a long and glorious political career in America.
David W. Southern, Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri
-SNIP