Eulogizing A Domestic Terrorist

     As a child, I remember watching my dad getting his gun to make sure that our church had not been firebombed during the 1960’s by the Ku Klux Klan. I also remember sitting our church scared that we would be killed like the little girls in Alabama. In those days, media pictures of men in white sheets struck fear in the hearts of me and my friends. Politically, almost everyone in my neighborhood voted democrat. John Kennedy was a near messianic figure.

     Now, fast forward over four decades to the memorial service of the late Senator Robert Byrd. Both former President Bill Clinton and President Barak Obama gave this scourge of civil rights a pass. Clinton had the audacity to suggest that Byrd did what he did to get elected. Obama also inferred that Byrd had “seen the error of his ways” and changed in his latter years. Had this been the funeral of a Strom Thurmond or some other segregationist, would this duo have been so gracious? Trent Lott lost his job for just complimenting Mr. Thurmond. Yet Clinton and Obama nearly canonized this former domestic terrorist.

     I was raised as a democrat and most of my family still votes the party line. Yet most of them would not be as kind as Mr. Clinton and Mr. Obama probably because of their experiences with some of Mr. Byrd’s comrades.

     I forgave him for what he did. However, I am against Clinton and Obama making more of a man in his death than in his life. Mr. Byrd was a politician who would do whatever it took to get elected irregardless of who might get hurt in the process. Sadly, today’s terrorists have traded their white robes for black robes of academia and they have the potential to do more harm to blacks than men of Mr. Bryd’s ilk.