https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272781/demskkkcon-lloyd-billingsley
Virginia governor Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist, had barely finished publicly touting infanticide last week when a page from his 1984 medical school yearbook suddenly went viral. The page showed a photo of a man in blackface standing beside a man in a Ku Klux Klan robe. The Virginia Democrat acknowledged he was one of the men but didn’t say which. Northam then denied that he was in the photo but acknowledged he once darkened his face to look like Michael Jackson. Northam apologized for his actions and Democrats were divided about how to respond.
As CNN reported, “Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner refrained from calling on him to resign,” but freshman Virginia Democrat Rep. Elaine Luria called for Northam to step down. Sen. Kamala Harris, a candidate for president, declare “the stain of racism should have no place in the halls of government” and called for Northam to step aside. So did former vice president Joe Biden, who said “Northam has lost all moral authority.” As the career of another prominent Democrat shows, this type of outrage is a new development.
West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, a mentor to Hillary Clinton, served in the U.S. Senate for a record 51 years, and as Senate majority leader from 1977-1981 and 1987-1989. Before election to the Senate in 1958, Byrd served six years in Congress. And before that, he served as a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1942, Byrd formed a new Klan chapter in Sophia, West Virginia, and in 1944 wrote to segregationist Senator Theodore Bilbo, Mississippi Democrat, “I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side. 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.” Byrd rose to the rank of Exalted Cyclops and in 1946, wrote to the Klan’s Grand Wizard, “The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia and in every state in the nation.”