A LEADER'S MISTAKE

      I once worked for a man who had been an Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan — and I’m proud of it. 

      My boss was U.S. Senator Robert Byrd, a Democrat from West Virginia. He joined the racist organization and recruited others to the KKK for a while in the 1940s, then found out how tough it was to remove the stain.

      But he certainly tried, and succeeded in almost every respect. By 1977, the coal miner’s son had risen from poverty to become majority leader of the U.S. Senate, and a poll of influential Americans rated him the fourth most powerful man in the country at that time. 

      And he never forgot where he started.

      On one prickly hot day 37 years ago, we were riding together in what we affectionately used to call the “Byrdmobile” van. It was a narrow dirt road that took us up a winding hollow until it halted abruptly in undergrowth at a wood-frame house. 

      “My house was a little further up the road,” said Byrd, adding that  “It burned down.”

      An elderly woman emerged from the house, puzzled at having visitors so far off the beaten path. Her bewhiskered grown son, with shotgun in hand, stood over to the side, eyeing us warily. 

      After stepping onto the porch, Byrd told the woman that he had often passed her house as a child -- on his way to the paved road several miles distant -- while going to school. 

      “So you’re that little boy, Robert? I always wondered what happened to him,” she said, surprised. 

      It was a campaign year. Byrd was again meandering through West Virginia on the way to an overwhelming victory. 

      On such trips, we'd stop by rural post offices, and sometimes he would get his fiddle out and play a few songs for a gathering crowd. It was a unique way of campaigning.

      “Everyone comes to the Post Office." he would say. "They’ll hear that Robert Byrd stopped by and tell others.”

       Byrd had come a long way from being a butcher in Raleigh County.  But he always regretted his association with the KKK.

      He thought he couldn't escape it, even though he had long refuted what it stood for and had allies in the Martin Luther King family as well as a sky-high favorable rating from the NAACP.

      Byrd once remarked that his association with the Klan would probably be remembered even after his death. And when former President Trump was running for re-election in 2020, he did make  an oblique reference to Byrd's history with the KKK.

      That was so unwarranted. I know.  I was at Byrd’s side for eight years, first as press secretary and then director of his Democratic Leadership Office. I traveled with him from the backroads of West Virginia to Moscow, Beijing, Cairo, Tehran and points in between.

      In short, Byrd met, warned, praised, and negotiated with leaders the world over. He prepared for his work in the Senate and for every trip abroad as hard as he did to earn the law degree which he received after being elected to the Senate. 

      And Byrd wasn’t just in the room when decisions were made. He influenced decisions, such as the time in Tehran when he called a disappointed President Carter on a secure line and told him there was no way the Shah of Iran could survive the current upheaval in his country. 

      I know some people wondered why a person like me --- a lifelong fighter for civil rights with a biracial son --  would work for a man who had been a low-level KKK organizer.

      It's always been an easy question for me to answer. 

      The transformation of Robert Byrd occurred long before I joined him. Here is how he put it in his own words: 

      “The greatest mistake I ever made was joining the Ku Klux Klan. And I’ve said that many times. But one cannot erase what he has done. He can only change his ways and his thoughts. That was an albatross around my neck that I will always wear.”

      In truth, Byrd’s contact with the KKK was not just a youthful indiscretion, or even based strictly on a racial motive.  He was urged to join for political reasons in a state where less than four per cent of the population then was African American population. 

      In league with old line southern senators, he also filibustered the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act. But  four years later, he voted for passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, and said his opposition to the 1964 act was his worst vote ever. 

      When Byrd died in 2010 after serving as a senator for more than 50 years, then-NAACP President Benjamin Jealous said he  “went from being in the KKK to being a stalwart supporter of the Civil Rights Act and many other pieces of seminal legislation that advanced the rights and liberties of our country.”

      And Democratic Congressman John Lewis, the iconic civil rights leader from Georgia, said this: “Senator Byrd sought change, and with that change he became one of the staunchest supporters of civil rights I had ever seen."

 J. Michael Willard is a writer, artist and consultant for authors, entertainers and business executives.