Posts Highlighting Robert Byrd’s Involvement in the KKK Are Being Reposted

Is the viral photo showing Joe Biden standing next to the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan? An old photo showing Biden with the late Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia is spreading on social media again.

“This is your Democratic Party, people! This is who they are!” one post reads. Attached is a photo of Biden standing next to Byrd. “Biden with the Grand Wizard of the KKK,” we read. “So who is playing you again, lying to you, exploiting you for votes, the Creators of the KKK, opposing black civil rights. Yes, it’s the Democratic Party.”

The photo and its accompanying caption likely first appeared in late 2019, early in Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.

The photo of Biden and Byrd is real, and Byrd’s affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan is well-documented, but the caption exaggerates Byrd’s level of involvement in the organization. Byrd was a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1940s, but he was not the organization’s Grand Wizard, a title given to its national leader.

The original photo was taken on October 24, 2008, by Associated Press photographer Bob Bird. It shows Biden alongside then-West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin and West Virginia Senators Byrd and Jay Rockefeller at a campaign rally in Charleston, West Virginia, in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election.

Born in 1917, Byrd organized a 150-member Ku Klux Klan chapter in the early 1940s, which he led for several years. In his 2005 memoir, Byrd claimed that his chapter never engaged in racial violence or demonstrations, but admitted that it reflected “the fears and prejudices I had heard all my boyhood.” In 1944, Byrd wrote in a letter that “never in the world (would) be convinced that race-mixing in any field is good.” He also stated that he “would never submit to fighting under (the flag) with a Negro at his side” and that he would rather “die a thousand times and see this old glory trampled in the mud, never to rise again, than to see this beloved land degraded by racial mongrels, reverting to the blackest specimen of the wilderness.”

Byrd’s direct involvement with the Ku Klux Klan ended when he ran for Congress in 1952, although it is not known exactly when he left the organization. But his previous membership in the hate group became a persistent problem throughout his long political career. “It came up all my life to haunt and embarrass me, and it taught me in a very graphic way what one serious mistake can do to a person’s life, career, and reputation,” Byrd wrote in his memoirs. “My only explanation for the whole thing is that I was afflicted with tunnel vision—a childish and immature vision—seeing only what I wanted to see, because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions.”

Byrd died in 2015, becoming the longest-serving senator in the nation’s history. He also served as Senate majority leader twice.

If you have a claim that you would like us to fact check, please send us an email at [email protected]. If you would like to suggest a correction to this or another text, To arrange article, please contact me by email [email protected].

Read more at The Dispatch

The Dispatch is a new digital media company that provides engaged citizens with fact-based reporting and commentary based on conservative principles. Sign up for free.