Reply #4: "a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds," he wrote.

[WilliamPitt]

http://www.da.wvu.edu/archives/990904/news/990904,03,02.html

Byrd again grapples with Klan connection

CHARLESTON (AP) — A recently discovered 54-year-old letter has prompted Sen. Robert Byrd to return to a part of his past he says he’d rather forget.

Byrd, D-W.Va., said his membership in the Ku Klux Klan as a young man has “emerged throughout my life to haunt and embarrass me and has taught me, in a very graphic way, what one major mistake can do to one’s conscience, career and reputation.”

The seven-term senator responded to written questions from the Charleston Daily Mail, which reported his comments Thursday. Byrd’s membership in the Klan, which was an issue in his first campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1952, was raised in a recent book, “When Jim Crow Met John Bull” published by St. Martin’s Press.

Author Graham Smith found a 1945 letter from Byrd to the late Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo, who strongly backed segregation.
Byrd, who was 28 when he wrote the letter, told Bilbo he would never fight in an integrated armed forces.

“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,” he wrote.

President Harry Truman dismantled race barriers to the armed services in 1948. Byrd, 81, said he did not recall writing the letter but did not deny it. “I will not dispute the quote, though I consider it deplorable,” he said. “I am ashamed to be associated with such despicable sentiments.”

“Becoming involved with the KKK was the most egregious mistake I have ever made,” Byrd said. “Upon introspection, I find the entire episode difficult to understand. The only conclusion I can draw for myself is that I was sorely afflicted by a dangerous tunnel vision, the kind of tunnel vision that, I fear, leads young people today to join gangs or hate groups.”

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