Was there ever a movement to force Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) to resign? He was actually a former member, but he kept winning elections until his death in 2010.

Tyler Lopez contrasted Byrd and Eich in his Slate article about Mozilla:

After years of publicly promoting virulently racist ideologies, Byrd came to see the harm he had caused, eventually noting in his memoir, "It has emerged throughout my life to haunt and embarrass me and has taught me in a very graphic way what one major mistake can do to one's life, career, and reputation." But he didn’t stop there. In fact, he never stopped apologizing, once saying in 2005: "I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times ... and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I can't erase what happened." By acknowledging his past racism so candidly and emphatically, Byrd salvaged not just his career but also his dignity.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/04/04/brendan_eich_h...

So here's something to think about: Why do people find it so easy to forgive Robert Byrd yet so hard to forgive George Wallace?

I personally hold both in extremely low esteem. I suppose their apologies would mean more to me if they weren't groveling for mercy of how people would remember them at the ends of their hateful lives. Not that it matters, but if they truly meant the words they said and were alive today, I would wish them peace, but the funny thing about legacies is that they're usually founded on what you did more than what you said. We put kids in prison for decades for crimes that impact virtually nobody but these monsters terrorized hundreds of thousands behind the force of government and got away with it.

It's an interesting point. The KKK was much more popular than it is now. He was a leader of a local KKK chapter (it is and has been much less centralized than most people realize) during his early 20s.

I would guess that most of us here during our youth have associated with people we don't care to associate with now. Should we be demonized and ostracized for the rest of our lives for youthful indiscretions? Or even for belonging to movements that were popular at the time, but have since fallen out of favor? The KKK had millions of members during the 1920s.

At the risk of blackballing myself, I signed up for a campus Trotskyist email list while I was in college. I didn't attend any events, grew tired of their rhetoric and eventually unsubscribed. Should I decline promotions for fear of being demonized by association with what most consider a radical left-wing group in my past, even though I don't associate or agree with them now?

If funny you say that, because one of the highest ranking Democrats in the Senate until his death in 2010, Sen Robert Byrd was an actual klansman with a long history of blatant racism, from fighting against racial integration in the military to filibustering the Civil Rights Act.