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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 b-@-s-t-a-r-d 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."

Diane McWhorter is the author of Carry Me Home, a book about
Birmingham, Ala., where the Dixiecrat Party was born.

The Legend of Strom's Remorse

A Washington lie is laid to rest.

By Timothy Noah

Posted Monday, Dec. 16, 2002, at 9:09 AM PT

For many years, there's been a cherished Washington lie about Strom
Thurmond. The lie is that Thurmond, though once a leading
segregationist, later renounced that view as morally wrong. Trent
Lott repeated the lie at his Dec. 13 press conference.

Thurmond, he said,

came to understand the evil of segregation and the wrongness of his
own views. And to his credit, he's said as much himself. … By the
time I came to know Strom Thurmond, some 40 years after he ran for
president … he had long since renounced many of the views of the
past, the repugnant views he had had.

It isn't just conservatives who believe this fairy tale about sin,
remorse, and redemption. The New York Times buys into it, too. David
Halbfinger's story in the Dec. 15 Times pointedly quoted the above
passage from Lott's remarks and then noted that "when asked to
describe, and place in time, his own conversion from supporting
segregation to repudiating it, Mr. Lott demurred." (After further
prodding, Lott said, "Way back there," and attributed his change of
mind to "Maturity," "experience," and "learning.") The implication
was that Lott was reluctant to render the heartfelt public apology
that even mossy ol' Strom served up many years ago.

But there never was any such expression of remorse or plea for
forgiveness. Thurmond has never publicly repudiated his
segregationist past, and with his 100th birthday and a Senate career
behind him, it's doubtful he ever will. The legend of Strom's
Remorse was invented, by common unspoken consent within the Beltway
culture, in order to provide a plausible explanation why Thurmond
should continue to hold power and command at least marginal
respectability well past the time when history had condemned
Thurmond's most significant political contribution. Now that
Thurmond is finally leaving Washington, the lie serves no further
purpose and will fade away.

Is Chatterbox saying that the Strom of today (what's left of him) is
identical to the Strom who ran for president in 1948 on the pro-
segregationist Dixiecrat platform? He is not. Clearly, Thurmond made
shrewd accommodations late in life to changing times. In the 1970s,
he became the first Southern senator to hire a black staff aide and
to sponsor a black man for a federal judgeship. In the 1980s, he
voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act (not because he agreed
with it but in belated deference to "the common perception that a
vote against the bill indicates opposition to the right to vote").
Strom also came to support making the birthday of Martin Luther King
(about whom he'd once said, "King demeans his race and retards the
advancement of his people") a federal holiday. Thurmond didn't do
much else to promote equality among the races, but these token
gestures were enough to demonstrate that he was no longer the 1948
Dixiecrat who had said, "There's not enough troops in the Army to
force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the
Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our
homes, and into our churches." (Pedantic aside: Standard accounts of
the speech render "Nigra" as "Negro," but when listening to an NPR
sound clip, Chatterbox wondered whether the word Thurmond uttered
was "n-@-g-g-e-r." In transcribing, Chatterbox gave Thurmond, who
even in his worst days was not known publicly to throw that ugly
epithet around, the benefit of the doubt. To judge for yourself,
click here.)

Nor was Thurmond any longer the 1948 Dixiecrat who had invited
audiences to ponder working for a company or belonging to a union
forbidden by law to discriminate against blacks. "Think about the
situation which would exist," he said back then, "when the annual
office party is held or the union sponsors a dance."

Nor was Thurmond any longer the 1948 Dixiecrat who, when it was
revealed that he had invited the governor of the Virgin Islands to
visit him without knowing that he was black, hastily explained, "I
would not have written him if I knew he was a Negro. Of course, it
would have been ridiculous to invite him."

The quotations cited above demonstrate that Thurmond has quite a lot
to apologize for. But on those rare occasions when Thurmond can be
induced to talk about the 1948 campaign at all, his first line of
defense is usually to misrepresent it.

"In that race I was just trying to protect the rights of the states
and the rights of the people," Thurmond insisted to the Washington
Post's Jim Naughton in 1988. "Some in the news media tried to make
it a race fight, but it was not that." Around the same time, when
Thurmond biographer Nadine Cohodas asked him about the "troops in
the Army" speech, which is Thurmond's only likely future entry in
Bartlett's, Thurmond responded with "incredulity." When she
finally "convinced" Thurmond that he'd really said it, all he would
say was the following: "If I had to run that race again, some of the
wording I used would not be used. I would word it differently."
Early in 1991, Thurmond observed, "When I grew up, the black people
were just all servants. Now they've developed and developed and come
up and we've got to acknowledge people when they deserve to be
acknowledged, and the black people deserve to be acknowledged."
There's no hint in any of these statements that Thurmond believes,
much less will acknowledge, that his prior policies were morally
wrong.

Thurmond's much-hyped "reconciliation" with the black community over
the years has come about not because Thurmond became a civil rights
supporter—he clearly isn't—but because Thurmond bought off a few key
blacks with pork-barrel spending, political appointments, and the
like. (Thurmond was always the kind of conservative who believed in
the aggressive redistribution of wealth to his home state from the
other 49.) It hardly made Thurmond the candidate of choice among
South Carolina's African-Americans, but it muted black opposition
sufficiently to keep him from being voted out of the Senate.

Thurmond's refusal to treat segregationism as anything worse than an
outdated fashion may have helped convince Lott that he, too, would
never have to make a similar accounting for his own (far milder)
segregationist past. Conceivably Lott could have dodged that bullet
just as easily as Thurmond did. But Lott wasn't smart enough to
grasp something Strom understood even in his dotage: If you don't
want to apologize for something you did that was truly awful, try
not to discuss it at all.

SFG75 · Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2005 7:54 pm Post subject:

The man truly personifies teh neurotic nature of the south in many regards. Disdain for interracial relationships while engaging in it themselves, crying about murder and crime and committing it themselves, among countless of other problems. Thank goodness he's gone.

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