A Personal Reflection on Senator Robert C. Byrd in the Age of Black Lives Matter

By Ray Smock

It was ten years ago this month that Senator Robert C. Byrd died on June 28, 2010. He was given the rare honor of lying in repose in the Chamber of the U. S. Senate. His funeral service in Charleston, West Virginia, was attended by tens of thousands of people, white and black, many of whom, the evening before, had walked along Kanawha Boulevard behind the senator’s horse-drawn casket on the way to the gold-domed Capitol. The world, today, always changing, seems so distant from 2010, when Barack Obama was the last of eleven U.S. presidents that knew and worked with Senator Byrd. ​

Byrd Center Director Ray Smock with Senator Robert C. Byrd at the center in 2005. 

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