MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A collection of documents, photos, mementos and more from the life of the nation’s longest serving U.S. Senator will be on display in Morgantown for the next month.
“These are mounted on cloth panels where you can really sort of look at the documents and get up close to them. It goes from his entire career starting out in the West Virginia coal fields and up through the U.S. Senate,” promoted Ray Smock, the director of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History & Education.
The traveling exhibit, “Robert C. Byrd: Senator, Statesman, West Virginian”, opens Thursday evening at WVU’s Wise Library on the downtown campus.
Smock said visitors to the exhibit will be able to follow the trail of federally funded and Byrd supported projects all over West Virginia.
“There’s a great big map of West Virginia in this exhibit that shows all the various projects Senator Byrd worked on. They called him the king of pork. Some said that derogatorily. Senator Byrd took it as a badge of honor.”
There are 26 projects alone identified for the region around Morgantown.
“Research facilities, medical facilities that he brought to WVU, infrastructure in Morgantown, the rapid transit system to get students around – all those things are things that Senator Byrd contributed to in one way or another,” Smock added.
The exhibit features digital representations of more than 100 documents and photographs from the extensive Robert C. Byrd Congressional Papers Collection, housed in the archives of the Byrd Center.
Documents have uncovered Byrd’s secret missions for various presidents and detailed his work with Jimmy Carter on the Panama Canal Treaty of 1977.
The traveling exhibit, first debuted at Shepherd University in April, includes information about Byrd’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
“We let him have the final word in his own words on that subject where he said his membership in the Klan will always be millstone around his neck and a blot he cannot remove from his own history.”
The traveling exhibit set up in 2017 at Wheeling Jesuit and Marshall Universities.
The effort culminates in November 2017 at the state capitol in Charleston with a celebration of the senator’s 100th birthday