[THEFEDERALIST] While monuments and building names said to be stained by racism are being erased across the country, one former Ku Klux Klan organizer remains virtually untouchable.The late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat and Senate majority leader who organized a Klan chapter in 1941 and filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is celebrated in the state, his name gracing over three dozen public works projects, including two federal courthouses, a dam on the Ohio border, libraries, community centers, roads, bridges, schools, and several university buildings throughout the state.Byrd’s still-hallowed legacy came into question this month when tiny Bethany College, in the state’s narrow Northern Panhandle between Ohio and Pennsylvania, removed Byrd’s name from its health center. In a statement, school President Tamara Rodenberg said, "The last few weeks, and well before the conversations and calls for change took hold, we recognized as a campus that the name of our Robert C. Byrd Health Center created divisive
...politicians call things
divisivewhen when the other side sez something they don't like. Their own statements are never
divisive,they're
principled...
ness and pain for members of Bethany community, both past and present."
Twenty-nine of the college’s 35 board officers are from outside West Virginia. The move came even though a petition effort on Change.org failed to achieve its goal of 1,000 signatures.
The state’s politicians have not expressed similar concern, and Byrd’s tarnished past has failed to gain any traction as a 2020 election issue in West Virginia. Nothing has been proposed in the Republican-controlled legislature to rescind Byrd commemorations, and the 14 sitting Democratic state senators, all white, have been silent.
None of the latter responded to emails or calls from RealClearInvestigations about what should happen, if anything, to Byrd’s many tributes, notably a larger-than-life bronze statue in the state capitol whose design was backed, when he was a state senator, by West Virginia’s most prominent politician, Democratic U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin.
Also declining to comment was State Democratic Party chair Belinda Biafore, who in 2017 commemorated what would have been Byrd’s 100th birthday with a tribute on the party’s website, saying that "he represented fairness, strength and integrity."
"Silence is a sign that there is some other force operating," said Wilfred McClay, a historian and a professor at the University of Oklahoma. That’s explained in part by Byrd’s role as a master of pork during his record-setting Senate tenure (from 1959 until his death in 2010), bringing an estimated $1 billion to his home state, and state politicians’ gratitude expressed by placing his name on projects delivered.