Robert Byrd: Rising Up Out of a Racist Past

Like another long-serving senator, South Carolina's Strom Thurmond, West Virginia's Robert Byrd was once an unrepentant racist. He was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and, as senator, filibustered the Civil Rights Act for 14 hours and then voted against it. In a 1945 letter, Byrd wrote of his fears that he might "see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels."

In 2001, in a nationally televised interview, he used the phrase "white [n-word]."

But Byrd worked hard to distance himself from his racist past, and did so (unlike Thurmond, who bolted to the GOP) within the Democrat Party, which lost its stranglehold on Southern politics once President Lyndon Johnson, another Southerner, passed the Civil Rights Act.

From a distance of 40 years, Byrd said that his vote against the Civil Rights Act was the one he most regretted in his long Senate career, which lasted 51 years.

Of joining the KKK, he wrote: "It 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 life, career and reputation." And for the 2001 incident he apologized: "The phrase dates back to my boyhood and has no place in today's society."