“You will read it in my obituary that I was a member of the Ku Klux Klan,” lamented Senator Robert Byrd in 1993. Byrd died yesterday aged 92, and his prediction was proved right. A Democrat representing West Virginia, Byrd was the longest-serving senator in history, and held more leadership positions than anyone has done. Yet his youthful association with the Klan was never forgotten. Nor ought it to have been.
Byrd’s political evolution and unfeigned remorse at his bigoted past nonetheless symbolised something vital in the traditions of the world’s leading democracy. Racism is the great moral stain of American history. Segregation persisted till less than half a century ago. The Klan mobilised millions in the 1920s with racist, anti- Semitic and anti-Catholic demagoguery, and mounted murderous attacks on civil rights workers in the 1960s. Byrd was a Klan member in the 1940s. He took part in a filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet he changed. He eventually became a strong supporter of President Obama. His career is a microcosm, in extreme form, of the cultural shift in his state, his party and his nation.
The passage of civil rights legislation split the Democrats and fractured the party’s hold on the South. American government and the courts not only abolished discrimination but recognised that centuries of disadvantage needed to be addressed. Affirmative action programmes in education and employment, while controversial, helped to integrate American public life. Byrd, a devotee of the Constitution, came to recognise the affront to its values represented by racial injustice, and to repent of his own role in perpetuating it. Byrd’s is a salutary tale, and far from an ignoble one.