Robert Byrd and the Klan

Robert Byrd died Monday, and as he probably expected, his obituaries will all make reference to the fact that he was a member of the reorganized Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s. Most of us who follow politics were aware of this fact, but Byrd was a good Democrat who spoke out against the war and in favor of Barack Obama, so his time in the Klan was more baffling than troublesome. Most obits seem to mention this part of his life out of the fear that passing over it would be bad journalism, but they also imply that his record in recent years exonerates him.

Should we forgive Robert Byrd, then?

Make no mistake, we are all participants in the injustices, historical and ongoing, of our nation. We all benefit from racism and inequality in tangible and intangible ways. But some of us are more directly involved than others, and the KKK is one of those vanguard forces that continually expands the farthest reaches of American iniquity. We may all be guilty, but they are among the most guilty.

But the question of Robert Byrd’s forgiveness can’t be one of degrees. Robert Byrd can be forgiven by degrees, for all the good he did later in life. This is a question of absolutes, which is to say, a question without a compact answer. The question is not what good deeds he did or how many. The question is whether they matter at all.

In more concrete terms, the question is this: did Robert Byrd, by joining the klan at age 24, sign away in some indelible way his right to sit with the rest of us on the side of humanity that doesn’t string people up in trees, cut them in half with barbed wire, burn children alive in churches, and drag them from the backs of speeding trucks until their bodies disintegrate into their unrecognizable constituent parts?

I didn’t say this was going to be a fun one to read.

The fact is that we do not draw such a line in this country. Racism isn’t so much a stain as it is a passing fancy in the ledger of American sin. We like to imagine that we make firm distinctions, we may damn individual acts of racism and violence, but we allow the Klan to persist because we are afraid that the greater evil would be to round them all up, give them shovels, and settle things in a fashion that would seem oddly familiar to them, but that they would never expect.

There has never been a greater evil in this country than the one that the Klan embodies, the idea that white men are in some ineffable way better than everyone else, more deserving, more noble. Robert Byrd wrote in 1944:

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 throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.

Those are most certainly the words of an unrepentant Klansman. I can’t remember, do we forgive Klansmen in this country? Do we take their word for it when they say they’ve moved on? Byrd would later characterize this time in his life as youthful indiscretion, saying:

I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times… and I don’t mind apologizing over and over again. I can’t erase what happened.

How gracious.

If there is a God in heaven, then Robert Byrd will have nothing to fear from him, because Byrd’s God was likely a forgiving one. But there is no God, there are only the mistakes we make, and Robert Byrd spent a considerable part of his long life regretting and being embarrassed by his time in the Ku Klux Klan. Whether this punishment was the one he deserved is moot. It’s the only punishment Robert Byrd received, and the one we all finally judged acceptable by our silence.

Comments

[Casey]

Good essay, Mxrk... amen. And for the record, I repent of all my former racism too.

But no really, you're striking some sonorous chords here.

[Mxrk]

I thought it would be remiss of me not to point out some of the hooting racism in my own party, but don't worry, the GOP still has the controlling interest.