Robert Byrd Quotes

The Ku Klux Klan never dies. They just stop wearing sheets because sheets cost too much.

I am a former Kleagie of the Klu Klux Klan in Raleigh County and adjoining counties of the state, having been appainted to this office [by] Mr. J. L. Baskin of Arlington, Virginia, in 1942... It is necessary that the order be promoted immediately and in every state in the union.

When you think of the KKK, they actually have as their emblem a fiery cross. And they don't see any contradiction between the cross, an instrument of suffering that procured our reconciliation with God, and its use as a symbol for nefarious attacks on black people. But they believe that they are being obedient to God because they can read things that they see.

I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan.

It was headquartered in Michigan City, a long way off. I never saw Ku Klux Klan march.

Way back about nineteen-twenty there was a Klan... The Ku Klux's gone... It'll never come back.

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.

A Klaner KKK is a cat who gets out of bed in the middle of the night and takes his sheet with him.

As a matter of social class Ku Klux Klan would have been regarded as white trash.

The KKK members that I was dealing with never saw me because my interaction with them occurred over the phone. They were convinced that I was 1) white, and 2) a racial supremacist like them based strictly on my telephone conversation with them.

I hate niggas! I hate em! I wish they'd let me join the Ku Klux Klan!

I prefer the 1950s where people were like, "I'm a white supremacist, and that's who I am." Now people want to burn a cross on your lawn and call themselves not racists.

Sex and racism have always been tied together. Look at the thousands of black men who got lynched and castrated. The reason the Klan came into being was to protect white southern women.

It's not appropriate to joke about the Ku Klux Klan.

We must be clear. White supremacy is repulsive. This bigotry is counter to all America stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity.

I was born in the late '70s and grew up in the deep South, and I was very much still of an era where racism was a casual part of white people's public and private lives, though it had been pushed more into its own little echo chamber by then. As a five year old, I saw a fully costumed Klan circle, complete with burning cross, on a town square in rural Alabama at high noon.

Our clear goal must be the advancement of the white race and separation of the white and black races.

The whites were really brutishly ignorant, blitheringly, so they killed people sometimes - just came into the African-American community and maimed people because they didn't agree with God's choice for the colors of the people's skin.

The white man is by nature a devil and must be destroyed.

During my campaign, I had come across a small number of (mostly) young men, who had strongly racist views. They told me they would only vote for a party that was willing to get rid of black and coloured people from this country. What struck me as strange is that they weren't bothered about the thousands of white Europeans arriving from Central and Eastern Europe.

It especially annoys me when racists are accused of 'discrimination.' The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one 'race' to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.

Byrd, the former Klu [sic] Klux Klan Kleagle, is taking a stand over states' rights, or his rights over State, or some such. Whatever the reason, the sight of an old Klansman blocking a little colored girl from Birmingham from getting into her office contributed to the general retro vibe that hangs around the Democratic Party these days.

Actually, some of the things I experienced as a child still linger on; what the white man has done to the black people in the south!

The miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women. White men lynch the offending Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because he succumbs to the smiles of white women.

I never ever ran from the Ku Klux Klan, and I shouldn't have to run from a black man.