WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn said he remembers well how Strom Thurmond used to accuse civil rights leaders of communist ties — a fact reiterated in pages of the file on the late U.S. senator released by the FBI last week.

But the South Carolina political legend was never held accountable, said Clyburn, a Democrat from Columbia.

“Many people in South Carolina seem to have decided that Strom Thurmond is not to be held accountable for anything,” he said.

Thurmond, the files show, in 1965 suggested to the FBI that the bureau discredit Martin Luther King Jr. as a man “controlled by communists.”

Fans of Thurmond counter that the senator, who was born in 1902 and died at 100 in 2003, was a product of his times and changed with the times. In 1983, they remind, he voted to make Martin Luther King Day a national holiday.

Clyburn, a veteran of the civil rights movement, said it was all too common in the 1950s and 1960s to target those fighting for racial equality as communists. It happened to him, he said, and the accuser was his own congressman — the late Mendel Rivers, the Democrat who represented Charleston from 1941 to 1970.

Some people didn’t like the idea that Clyburn, a black man, was appointed in 1968 as executive director of the S.C. Commission for Farm Workers.

Clyburn said Rivers was trying to please constituents when he began spreading the rumors.

Clyburn said he and Rivers reconciled before Rivers died in 1970. And after his death, Rivers’ widow, Margaret Middletown Rivers, began showing up at fund-raisers for Clyburn in Charleston.

This at first puzzled the congressman. When he asked her why she came, he said, she replied, “You were always one of my favorites.”

LEGISLATION WATCH

• Actual title: RU-486 Suspension and Review Act

• More fitting title: “Let’s Take A Closer Look at the Abortion Pill” Act

• Intent: To take the “day-after” pill off the market at least until a study can be done to make sure the Food And Drug Administration took all proper steps before approving it

• Sponsored by: U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C.

• Why do it? In 2003, Holly Patterson of California died after taking RU-486. Though abortion-rights supporters argue that taking the drug is safer than bringing a pregnancy to term, DeMint and others who oppose abortion say RU-486 was put on the market without adequate scrutiny.

• Will it pass? In the last session of Congress, the bill enjoyed a considerable number of co-sponsors — 84 in the House and eight in the Senate — but it never came up for a vote.

VERBATIM

“It creates suspicion about why he would pick one agenda item over the other. But his stature has grown. That’s the test of any potential leader: Over time, do you get bigger or do you get smaller? He’s gotten bigger.”

— U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on the “upside and downside” of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s announced interest in running for president

Reach Markoe at (202) 383-6023 or lmarkoe@krwashington.com