Byrd License

"You can't go to heaven if you hate anybody. We practice that. There are white ni**ers. I've seen a lot of white ni**ers in my time." Sen Robert Byrd (D) of West Virginia, March 2001.

Byrd was a member of the Ku Klux Klan for a period of time in the early 1940s. In a letter he wrote in 1946, he said, "The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia."

Nearly four months after the Senate's most influential Democrat, former majority leader Robert Byrd, defended the Ku Klux Klan in his autobiography, Byrd has yet to offer an apology - and fellow Democrats have not asked him to make one.

According to the eight-term West Virginia Democrat, the Klan he remembers in his autobiographical writings was "a fraternal group of elites – doctors, lawyers, clergy, judges and other 'upstanding' people."