Robert Byrd and the Surprises of Change

(We're catching up here at Bad Hat Headquarters, and here's a comment by Arthur In Marin County on the recent demise of Senator Robert Byrd, and he adds a gentle diss of our fair city for which he shall have to pay.)


I had not known much about Byrd's earlier beliefs, except through allusions that he belonged to the Klan for a period of time. Eugene Robinson does a good job of tracing his career. It should be noted that there was a period during the teen and twenties when I had heard that the local Klan used to burn crosses on Skinner's Butte. It gives a rather different context to the lighted cross we grew up with, doesn't it? I doubt that the citizens of that bygone Eugene would recognize the one of today, just as the Robert Byrd toward the end of his long career hardly seems like the same man he was in his earlier life. He was, by the way, also an accomplished fiddle player and bluegrass musician. Again, who knew?

Here is a paper someone wrote on Oregon's checkered history of racial attitudes, which seemed to rely upon keeping African-Americans out of the state, whenever possible. I had never heard about blacks being excluded from living in Eugene until quite recently. Can that be true? It raises another question; when one was so unwelcome, why on earth would they have wanted to live in Eugene?

Arthur