In the last year of his life, Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) taught, not for the first time, the most important lesson of his long and storied public service.
Senator Byrd’s career demonstrates it is possible to – with integrity – change a publicly held position. In Byrd’s case there was in fact more integrity because he found the courage decades ago to reverse his racist position on segregation, denounce his affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan and become one of the stalwart defenders of civil rights.
In December 2009, Senator Byrd made an equally profound shift. After fighting his entire life on behalf of West Virginia’s coal industry, he concluded in December 2009 that he and his state must prepare to move on. In Coal Must Embrace the Future, Byrd wrote “Change is no stranger to the coal industry. Think of the huge changes which came with the onset of the Machine Age in the late 1800’s. Mechanization has increased coal production and revenues, but also has eliminated jobs, hurting the economies of coal communities. In 1979, there were 62,500 coal miners in the Mountain State. Today there are about 22,000…
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