It was the appealing challenge I had been looking for.”īaskin proved to be a savvy judge of political talent. I was only 23 or 24 years old, and the thought of a political career had never struck me. “Somebody important had recognized my abilities. “Suddenly, lights flashed in my mind!” he wrote 60 years later. The country needs young men like you in the leadership of the nation.”īaskin’s encouragement electrified Byrd. “That was very evident from the way those men tonight wanted you as their leader. “You have a talent for leadership, Bob,” Baskin said. When he called for nominations for “Exalted Cyclops,” the highest-ranking official in the Klavern, Byrd was nominated and quickly elected by unanimous vote.Īfter the meeting, Baskin returned to Byrd’s house, where the Grand Dragon suggested to the Exalted Cyclops that perhaps he ought to try his hand at politics. Then the Grand Dragon supervised the election of local officers. The Klansmen gathered in Goodwin’s basement, where Baskin officially organized the local chapter or “Klavern” and administered the Klan oath. “Clyde” Goodwin, a former law enforcement officer. “I was impressed by his demeanor and bearing, and he was impressed by my enthusiasm and by the swiftness with which I had procured the applications and filing fees of 150 men.”īyrd’s house was too small to fit 150 knights, so he arranged to hold the ceremony at the home of C.M. “He was well dressed, a man apparently in his late fifties to early sixties, an active churchman,” Byrd recalled. The Grand Dragon drove to Crab Orchard one Saturday in 1942 to meet his hotshot new organizer and preside over the solemn initiation ceremony. He signed up 150 prospective Klansmen in no time and wrote back to Baskin, inviting him to come to Crab Orchard and swear them all in as knights of the “Invisible Empire.” Valedictorian of his high school class, he married at 19, fathered two daughters and took a job tending the meat counter at the local Carolina Supermarket, where he met nearly everybody in Raleigh County. His aunt and uncle, Vlurma and Titus Byrd, adopted him and renamed him Robert Carlyle Byrd. Sale in 1917, he was a year old when his mother died in the 1918 influenza epidemic. He proved to be an excellent organizer, which didn’t surprise those who knew him as a whip-smart and charming young man. The joining fee was ten dollars, as I recall, and the price of a robe and hood was three dollars.”īyrd promptly mailed in his 10 bucks, and began recruiting his neighbors into the Klan. The Baskin letter indicated that he would come to Crab Orchard whenever I had signed up 150 applicants, at which time he would officially organize a Klan chapter. Baskin’s letterhead, as I recall, bore the title ‘Grand Dragon of the Realm of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Delaware.’ This seemed most impressive.
Baskin,” Byrd remembered years afterwards. “Sometime later, I received a letter from Mr. Samuel Green of Atlanta, Ga., the Klan’s “Imperial Wizard.” Byrd begged the Wizard to make him a Klansman. In late 1941 or early 1942, Byrd-then a young butcher in Crab Orchard, W.Va.-wrote a letter to Dr. Growing up, he heard that the Klan defended the American way of life against the godless racemixers and communists, and that its members included many of the “best” people-doctors, lawyers, preachers. They were local members of the Ku Klux Klan.īyrd never forgot that spectacle. One Saturday in the 1920s, a small boy named Robert Byrd stood at a second-floor window in Matoaka, W.Va., and watched wide-eyed as a parade of men, including his adoptive father, marched past in white robes, white hoods and white masks. Robert Byrd Consorts With a KKK Grand Dragon | HistoryNet Close
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