Saying Farewell To An Old Warrior. And Friend.

Today is Martin Luther King’s birthday. He’s been gone more than 50 years, but he’d be 97 today if he were still alive. Even though his official national holiday is not until next Monday, today is a good day to pause and think about his greatness.

This also seems like a good day to say goodbye to an old friend, someone who actually knew, albeit briefly, the legendary civil rights leader.

So goodbye Byron Knutson. You, too, had years of greatness. We’ll miss you.

Byron left us about a month ago. He was 96. His family has been pretty quiet about his passing. I think they’re writing a tribute to him to let the world know. I think I’m going to pay a little tribute here.

I met Byron face-to-face for the first time in 1978 outside the elevators in the Capitol building in Bismarck. He was the North Dakota Insurance Commissioner, with offices on the 5^th floor. I had just started work as an tto North Dakota Agriculture Commissioner Myron Just, one floor up, on 6. We became friends

Oh, I had known about him for a long time, because we were both active in the Democratic-NPL Party. He started a lot earlier than me. He was elected to the North Dakota House of Representatives in 1958, when he was just 28 years old. He was just a few years out of college, and I think was working for the railroad. He served two terms, and I’m not sure why he left the Legislature in 1962, but his District 20 House seat was taken over in 1963 by another legendary Democrat, S.F. “Buckshot” Hoffner, who went on to have his own lengthy political career.

But my path and Byron’s had never really crossed until we were both working in the Capitol. And here’s what I didn’t know about him at the time. He had marched with Dr. Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery, in Alabama, in March of 1965, the most famous civil rights march in our nation’s history.

This week I found a newspaper account of that trip he took, taking leave from his railroad job to travel all those miles and walk 54 miles alongside Dr. King on behalf of rights for negroes in the south. In fact, he was one of the volunteer organizers of the march, directing traffic, and helping marchers find food and places to sleep, picked because he had military experience as a U.S. Marine. He was arrested once on that march, and spent a night in a big barn under armed guard before being released and proceeding on with the march. Just months after Martin and Byron did that, Congress passed, and President Lyndon Johnson signed, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Byron was part of the work that made that happen.

 After that, Byron came back home and worked for the railroad and got involved in North Dakota politics again. Byron held two statewide elective offices, Insurance Commissioner and Labor Commissioner. Both were perfect matches for his longtime involvement in the struggle for human rights. And looking out for the “little guy.”

And many years later, in 2019, he was recognized, and given a standing ovation by North Dakota State Senators on the floor of the North Dakota Senate, in a resolution introduced by his own State Senator, Erin Oban, for his civil rights work.

He was elected Insurance Commissioner in 1976, the year that was a pretty good election for Democrats in North Dakota. As Insurance Commissioner, he wasn’t afraid to pick up the phone, after his office received a complaint about an insurance claim, and call the president of an insurance company and tell them they better do something about it, or they were going to be in court. One of his former staff members back then told me he got millions of dollars in insurance settlements for North Dakotans by doing that. (If there’s anybody reading this who was one of those beneficiaries, let me know and I’ll pass the story along.)

He did end up in court a few times, and he wasn’t afraid to take on the “big boys.” Twice he took the insurance industry all the way to the North Dakota Supreme Court over his denial of rate increases requested by industry giants like Allstate, and twice the Court ruled against him. Interestingly, because of the way North Dakota government is structured, he was represented in court by then-Attorney General Allen Olson’s Assistant Attorneys General. The same Allen Olson who had earlier issued an opinion ruling against Knutson on a similar matter (and, coincidentally, the same Allen Olson who also died last month, just a couple weeks after Byron). But that didn’t stop Byron from using the resources available to him to try to look out for consumers instead of insurance providers. He was always the champion of the “little guy.”

After being defeated for re-election as Insurance Commissioner in the Reagan landslide election of 1980, Byron kept his hand in, running unsuccessfully for Labor Commissioner in 1982 and Secretary of State in 1984. He lost both of those elections, but in 1986 he ran again against the guy who had defeated him for Labor Commissioner in 1982, Ike Hagen, and beat him. But that was just another four-year term in office, losing a bid for re-election in 1990.

He briefly made another attempt to run once more, this time in 1992, seeking his party’s nomination when Sen. Quentin Burdick died in office, but Kent Conrad got the nod and spent the next twenty years in the Senate.

That was it for Byron in politics, at least elective office, but he was always present when a battle needed to be joined in staving off the forces of evil (read: Republicans) after that. He and Bernice settled in Bismarck. He spent a lot of time at the Kennedy Center, the state Democratic-NPL Party headquarters, making phone calls and stuffing envelopes. And he showed up at every Democratic-NPL meeting and fundraising event he could find.

And in 2024 his party rewarded him for his years of service by making him one of our state’s three Democratic Presidential Electors for Kamala Harris. Sadly, and we’re all getting sadder every day now about the outcome of that election, he did not get to cast his vote in the Electoral College because Harris didn’t carry North Dakota.

I think he suffered from dementia in his last years (although a lot of his close friends would say “How would we know?” – sorry, Byron, I just couldn’t resist) and spent his last months in a Bismarck nursing home. I don’t know how he died. I’m sure Bernice will tell us one of these days. I think she and the girls, Rebecca and Harmony, are getting ready to tell their version of Byron’s life pretty soon. They’ve been carrying a pretty heavy burden for the last month. I’m eager to hear what they have to say. They all have my deepest sympathy. But then again, they got to spend most of their lives with a pretty great man.

Anyway, as I saw we were approaching Dr. King’s birthday, I thought it seemed like a good time to sit back and think about him and Byron, and then write some stuff down. They were both champions. I hope they’re getting together somewhere today.