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lawd!
I left for NCA&T in 93, so I didn't know his daughter had died. I was in a pageant with her! Whoa.
This is an interesting viewpoint... Read on.
Strom's Skeleton
The late segregationist's black daughter.
By Diane McWhorter
Posted Tuesday, July 1, 2003, at 12:11 PM PT
In all the words spent on Strom Thurmond's life and times since his
death last week, I have seen no acknowledgment of the most interesting of
his sundry racial legacies. She is Essie Mae Washington Williams, a
widowed former school teacher in her 70s, living in Los Angeles.
Presumably she did not show up for any of the obsequies even though Strom
Thurmond was almost certainly her father. Williams is black.
Jack Bass and Marilyn W. Thompson present persuasive evidence in their
1998 biography, Ol' Strom, that Thurmond sired a daughter in 1925 with
a black house servant named Essie "Tunch" Butler, with whom he
reputedly had an extended relationship. Though "Black Baby of Professional
Racist" would seem to sail over the man-bites-dog bar of what is news, the
story has never really gotten traction. The particulars of this family
saga simply do not fit into the "redemption narrative" Americans tend
to impose on our more regrettable bygones: Better that ol' Strom
"transformed" from the Negro-baiting Dixiecrat presidential candidate of 1948
to One of the First Southern Senators To Hire a Black Aide in 1971.
In contrast to, say, George "I Was Wrong" Wallace, Thurmond has always
been an ornery redemption project. He did not repent. Even so, his
illegitimate daughter further complicates the moral picture. Does she mean
that he was even more heinous than we knew? Or that—dude!—he wasn't
such a racist bastard after all?
We need not dwell on the obvious mind-boggling hypocrisies here: that
someone who ran for president on an anti-pool-mixin' platform was party
to an integrated gene pool. Or that Thurmond's other signature
political achievement—the 24-hour-without-bathroom-break filibuster against the
Civil Rights Act of 1957—was done in the name of sparing the South from
"mongrelization." This form of duplicity has been a Southern tradition
dating back to those miscegenating slave owners. Their peculiar
conflation of shame and honor was captured in 1901 Alabama, at a
constitutional convention called to disfranchise blacks. A reactionary old
ex-governor known for being good to his mulatto "yard children" was aghast that
the insincere anti-Negro propaganda fomented by him and his peers might
bring actual injury to its objects. He demanded to know why, "when the
Negro is doing no harm, why, people want to kill him and wipe him from
the face of the earth."
Even as Thurmond was making a career of segging against his own flesh
and blood, he himself wasn't a complete cad. If he didn't exactly claim
Essie Mae Williams, neither did he disown her. He gave her money and
paid her regular visits (and probably tuition) at the black South
Carolina college where she was a "high yaller" sorority girl while he was
governor of the state. And in some ways, Williams has played the dutiful
daughter, insisting over the long years that Thurmond was merely a
"family friend." (Efforts to reach her failed.)
I do not pretend to fully understand these dynamics—and urge those
interested in the nexus of race and sex to consult Joel Kovel's White
Racism: A Psychohistory. But I know this: Thurmond's secret interracial sex
life was complementary to the conspicuously virginal choices he made to
be his public consorts. The year before being named the Dixiecrat
nominee in 1948, the 44-year-old Thurmond was photographed by Life standing
on his head for his lovely 21-year-old fiancee. Caption: "Virile
Governor." Thurmond's second bride, young enough at 22 to be the 66-year-old
senator's granddaughter, was a former Miss South Carolina. Both wives
(No. 1 died of a brain tumor at 33) were the proverbial "flower of
southern womanhood," the ideal that justified segregation's direst form of
social control, the ritual castration of lynching. Those fair and nubile
white women gave Thurmond's ugly politics a shiny emotional gloss that
blinded the Southern conscience to the shame of the Essie Mae
Williamses.
The reason the South is the most interesting region in the country is
that it's the only place where the psychic landscape is parceled out
equally among Marx, Freud, and God. Thurmond straddled all three
provinces, hard though it has sometimes been to distinguish them under the
ground cover of race. (For a different angle on this, see Clarence Thomas.)
The Marx part of Thurmond's story is the best-known: The States Rights
Party ("Dixiecrat" was the coinage of a waggish newspaper editor) that
drafted him for president in 1948 was a top-down junta of oligarchs who
had been plotting their bolt from the New Deal Democratic Party since
1941, when Franklin Roosevelt created the Committee on Fair Employment
Practice to eliminate race discrimination in war industries.
Racial conflict as a diversion from class conflict is nothing new, of
course. But somehow Thurmond's subterranean Freudian life—significant
relationships with a black daughter and her mother—brings a fresh level
of appall to the immorality of his demagoguing. That it was just
"bidness" may account for why Strom Thurmond never felt compelled to ask the
forgiveness of a race he devoted so much public capital to making
miserable—a race that included members of his own family. Then again, he had
always been an integrationist.
As for God, I can't help but wonder if Thurmond felt he had been
forsaken by the all-merciful Christian deity and stumbled into the tragic
realm of Greek fate when, in 1993, a drunk driver hit and killed the
22-year-old white daughter he did acknowledge, just before she was to enter
the Miss South Carolina contest. In any case, if Thurmond seemed to
continually elude the harsh verdict of history, now he faces divine
judgment. In Doug Marlette's recent editorial cartoon, the angel greeting Ol'
Strom at heaven's gate is black. And the sign reads: "We reserve the
right to refuse service to anyone."
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