Harry Byrd Quotes

I would give almost anything I own to be alive when that day comes, as it surely will, when Harry Byrd sees negro men and women sitting not at the back of the bus but riding free and equal through all the streets of Virginia. For that I would willingly be called that hateful epithet “nigger lover,” which I am sure I am called already in private by many,

Texas oil money. Chief among them was the owner of the Texas School Book Depository building and LBJ oil crony D. H. Byrd, the cousin of Senator Harry F. Byrd,

All of us must remember that in this world we have to do a lot of things we do not want to do and that the doing of these things makes better people of us.

White southerners who opposed racial equality and economic justice knew from their own region’s history that the only way they could protect their desired way of life was to keep federal power at bay, so that majoritarian democracy could not reach into the region. That is why Harry Byrd was Barry Goldwater’s “philosophical soul mate,” in the words of Byrd’s biographer.18