The longest serving member of the U.S. Senate would have been a title cherished by Robert Carlyle Byrd, who became, among other things, an historian. Byrd’s beginnings were from the white Southern poor, and he hailed from a family of coal miners. Despite this poverty, Byrd had a prodigious memory, and he excelled in high school. But Byrd, being politically ambitious, was much more than a bright school boy. By his young adulthood, he was a ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan, the white terrorist arm of the Southern Democratic Party.
In West Virginia this was a ticket to high political office, and Byrd punched his ticket well. He began as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1953. Six years later, he entered the Senate, and except by death, never left. From 1959 to 2010 he became the embodiment of West Virginia, and the state became a reflection of him. There are so many roads, schools, airports and government buildings named after him that the state might best be known as Byrdsylvania, or Byrdistan. His hagiographers cite his KKK membership as a youthful indiscretion, a passing fancy almost. But Byrd, historian that he was, made history of a sort when he opposed the elevation of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967.
Marshall was, at that time, one of the most successful lawyers in America, winning twenty-nine of thirty-two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including Brown v. Board of Education. He was an appeals court judge in New York for five years, and was U.S. Solicitor General for two. Why did Byrd oppose Marshall, perhaps the most distinguished lawyer of his generation? Because he didn’t want to see a Black man on the court.
Youthful indiscretion? Byrd was fifty when he voted against Marshall’s confirmation. Senator Robert C. Byrd, born Cornelius Calvin Sale, Jr. in North Carolina, was a man of his time and place. He rose from humble beginnings with pluck, smarts and dogged determination. He held onto office like a pit bull on a bone. He played the fiddle with considerable skill, but he was a Klansman at heart. From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
