My Senators have finally come into the fold endorsing Ned (Boxer and DiFi) but it was not immediate and it took a lot of calls and letters (especially DiFi – just announced her endorsement last Friday).

This is one of the first pro-Byrd threads I’ve seen so I decided to come out of the closet for my first post! Love the site.

Published: August 18, 2006 09:42 pm

NAACP members hear ‘touching’ message from Sen. Byrd

By Bill Archer
Bluefield Daily Telegraph
HARPERS FERRY — People attending the opening sessions of the NAACP’s Niagara Movement Centennial Commemoration at the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park received an unexpected albeit sincere apology from West Virginia’s senior statesman, U.S. Senator Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va.

Byrd “apologized three or four times for belonging to the Ku Klux Klan,” Bluefield attorney J. Franklin Long said. Long is also second vice president of the West Virginia Conference of Branches of the NAACP. “He said he grew up in southern West Virginia and in a southern culture. He complied with the things that were required of him as someone who grew up in that culture,” Long said.

“I know it’s an election year and that Senator Byrd is running for office, but I don’t think his remarks had anything to do with that,” Long said. He really put a lot of feeling into his remarks, and by the comments I heard afterward, the people attending the program thought he was being truly sincere. It was so touching.”

Long said that George Rutherford, president of the Jefferson County Branch of the NAACP, invited Byrd to serve as keynote speaker at a program Thursday evening. “Senator Byrd related a very personal story of how his grandson died in 1982, and of how that experience caused him to think about how terrible it would have been if he would have been denied access to services.

“He said it was a life changing experience,” Long said. “Before that, he hadn’t thought much about belonging to the Ku Klux Klan. He said he did not realize the negative effect racism might have on another person. You could hear the grief in his voice and see it in his body language. I think that event was an awakening for him.”

Long said Byrd referred to himself as “the prodigal son,” and remarked that the “NAACP was so forgiving” by inviting him to serve as keynote speaker. “I recall his words. ‘You invited me. You invited me. You invited me,’ he said,” Long quoted Byrd. “It was a very moving moment.”

Bluefield Mayor Garry Moore said the historic gathering should be a time to reflect on history in order to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

“It’s something we need to do as human beings,” Moore said. “We need to reflect on the historic background that brought people to Harpers Ferry in 1906 for the second meeting of the Niagara Movement, and we need to hope to God that injustice like that never happens again.”

Moore, pastor of Bluefield’s Scott Street Baptist Church attended the Friday morning session of the event that marks the 100th anniversary of a meeting in August of 1906 involving W.E.B. Du Bois and several African American leaders of the era who wanted to put an end to widespread lynching in the South as well as federally sanctioned segregation and Jim Crow laws that maintained an American apartheid from the late 19th Century through the first half of the 20th Century.

Moore said he was most impressed by the racial unity he observed at the Friday meeting. “It’s really positive to see so many people working together in the struggle for racial equality,” Moore said. “It wasn’t just black people who were in the struggle. White and black people worked together to move the civil rights cause forward.

“We are making progress in Bluefield,” Moore said. “When I first came here 16 years ago, I saw a city that was divided by the railroad tracks that separated the haves from the have nots,” he said. “I believe the city has changed. Back then, I would often here white people say: ‘Some of my best friends are black.’ Now, I only here people refer to their friends without making reference to their race.”

Byrd issued a press release early in the day on Thursday noting that the Niagara Movement “changed the course of history,” and that the organizers of the movement resolved to demand their rights, overcame overwhelming odds and found that through commitment and determination: “Mountains can be moved. Prejudice can be overcome and the course of history can be changed.”

The Niagara Movement was an essential predecessor to the formation of the NAACP. Byrd provided $300,000 in federal funding legislation to help cover some of the costs of the event. Park officials estimate as many as 20,000 people will attend the centennial observance.

— Contact Bill Archer at barcher@bdtonline.com

I hope this article will help others to fell as many of us in West Virginia do about supporting Senator Byrd.

Byrd has a pretty bad record when voting on women’s issues. It’s like he’s pissed he can’t be a good ol’ boy racist anymore so he really enjoys putting women in their place. And it seems everyone just lets him off the hook because he’s older than dirt….’I can understand his voting that way against women….after all, he’s from a different generation.’ Yeah, the KKK generation.

He bugs me.

One of the other things we’ve been covering is a grandfather named Ed Wiley who is walking 455 miles to DC to talk with Senator Byrd because his daughter is being poisoned by coal dust AT her school, which sits right under a 2.8 billion gallon sludge pond.

Congratulations Senator! And a big thank you!

That may be true, but that’s because ever since the “Southern Strategy” the GOP welcomed the rest of the old racist “Dixie-crats” of that era with open arms and has been kissing up to that percentage of the population who still haven’t gotten over General Lee’s Surrender at Appomatox ever since.

Hell, I could forgive Mel Gibson in due time too, racism is easy way, and its much easier when you are born into a overtly racist household. It takes a real man or woman to rise above it. I was raised around subtler racism and it wasn’t until I was older and had moved that I realized I had racist thoughts that I wasn’t even aware of.

I grew up near Rush Limbaugh, he is an example of what Byrd would of turned into if he had followed the easiest path to what his family and peers around him would reinforce in him at every turn. Limbaugh was never in the KKK but he’s a lot younger. BUT, in the year 2006 Limbaugh is still fanning the fires of division and Byrd isn’t. Byrd rose above it Limbaugh didn’t.