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Strom Thurmond's Black Daughter (MSN.com nastiness alert!)
msn.com ^ | July 1, 2003 | Diane McWhorter

Posted on 07/03/2003 1:36:54 PM PDT by Saundra Duffy

Strom's Skeleton The late segregationist's black daughter. By Diane McWhorter Posted Tuesday, July 1, 2003, at 12:11 PM PT

Thurmond: curiouser and curiouser

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."


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Government; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: black; daughter; strom; thurmond
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We report; you decide. Please excuse me if this is a duplicate/multiple post. I did a FR search and didn't find it. Pretty interesting! Does sound a tad bit bitter, however. Sheeeeeesh.
1 posted on 07/03/2003 1:36:54 PM PDT by Saundra Duffy
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To: lager
DNA test seems to be in order, wouldn't you think?
2 posted on 07/03/2003 1:37:33 PM PDT by Saundra Duffy (For victory & freedom!!!)
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To: Saundra Duffy
The blacker the berry the sweeter the juice. Ol Strom had good taste.
3 posted on 07/03/2003 1:38:39 PM PDT by zarf (fuggetaboutit)
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To: Saundra Duffy
"....a widowed former school teacher in her 70s, living in Los Angeles"

If she is in her 70's that means that Ol' Strom fathered her
when he was a Demo. A fact that shouldn't be surprising to anyone.

At least there would be no doubt if it was "sex" or not.....

4 posted on 07/03/2003 1:42:30 PM PDT by ThreePuttinDude (Muslim Terrorists, fighting the world since......1095 AD)
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To: ThreePuttinDude
Ol' Strom fathered her when he was a Demo

That was soooo funny! LOL!!

5 posted on 07/03/2003 1:44:13 PM PDT by Saundra Duffy (For victory & freedom!!!)
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To: zarf
The blacker the berry the sweeter the juice. Ol Strom had good taste.

Good point. I like it.

6 posted on 07/03/2003 1:44:58 PM PDT by Saundra Duffy (For victory & freedom!!!)
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To: Saundra Duffy
Thurmond was almost certainly her father

"Almost Certainly?" What the heck does that mean? Was he "ALMOST" her father or was he ?CERTAINLY" her father? Was her mom "KINDA PREGNANT" or was she "REALLY PREGNANT?"
7 posted on 07/03/2003 1:45:32 PM PDT by DH
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To: Saundra Duffy
... was almost certainly...

This is why it isn't making the headlines, because it is not a certainty. Such rumor-mongering is best left to the tabloids. Interesting that the author refuses to accept the alleged daughter's veracity when she says that they are family friends. Could it be that a black mature woman could not be counted on to tell the truth? Foreshame.

8 posted on 07/03/2003 1:46:13 PM PDT by Ruth A.
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To: Saundra Duffy
Can't wait for Diane McWhorter's commentary after KKK Byrd's demise.
9 posted on 07/03/2003 1:46:37 PM PDT by optimistically_conservative
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To: zarf
I wonder if Robert "KKK" Byrd fathered any Black children - not to mention Al Gore's Dad.
10 posted on 07/03/2003 1:46:59 PM PDT by Saundra Duffy (For victory & freedom!!!)
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To: Saundra Duffy
Please excuse me if this is a duplicate/multiple post

Pity the poor sap who subsequently and diligently searches for "skeleton" (as in "Strom's Skeleton", the actual title on the source article) to avoid duplicating this thread...

11 posted on 07/03/2003 1:48:24 PM PDT by newgeezer (We learn by trail and errror. :-)
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To: Ruth A.
I know. The article is written in such a mean tone. Makes you wonder. Maybe it's just a bunch of bitter democRATS trying to hurt a dead man. If Strom was her father and denied her existence all these years, though, that is pretty darn sickening.
12 posted on 07/03/2003 1:49:17 PM PDT by Saundra Duffy (For victory & freedom!!!)
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To: Ruth A.
In other words ...

Though an almost certainly "Black Baby of Professional Racist" would seem to sail over the man-bites-dog bar of what is news

Doesn't quite sound as "fer shure" does it?

13 posted on 07/03/2003 1:49:31 PM PDT by optimistically_conservative
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To: Saundra Duffy
Is Robin Quivers related to Strom Thurmond? Howard Stern needs to ask her that.
14 posted on 07/03/2003 1:50:48 PM PDT by PJ-Comix (He who laughs last was too dumb to figure out the joke first)
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To: Saundra Duffy
Could this story be "payback" for the recent story on the Kennedy's Jr.? More scandalizing the dead who cannot defend themselves? Do we retaliate by again bringing up the "Clinton fathered a black boy" story?

-PJ

15 posted on 07/03/2003 1:52:16 PM PDT by Political Junkie Too (It's not safe yet to vote Democrat.)
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To: Saundra Duffy
Knowing those white Southern guys pretty well, I'm sure he did. Forbidden fruit is always the sweetest.

In fact, forbidden fruit always gets me in a jam.

16 posted on 07/03/2003 1:52:29 PM PDT by zarf (fuggetaboutit)
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To: zarf
forbidden fruit always gets me in a jam

Me, too. (Shhhhhhh)

17 posted on 07/03/2003 1:53:56 PM PDT by Saundra Duffy (For victory & freedom!!!)
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To: PJ-Comix
Is Robin Quivers related to Strom Thurmond? Howard Stern needs to ask her that.

LOL!! Who else could be Strom Thurmond's Black daughter?

18 posted on 07/03/2003 1:55:49 PM PDT by Saundra Duffy (For victory & freedom!!!)
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To: Saundra Duffy
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. ... 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

States Rights = Marxism? This author's conclusions are extemely light on facts.


19 posted on 07/03/2003 1:57:58 PM PDT by gitmo (We've left the slippery slope and we are now in free fall.)
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To: Saundra Duffy
He wasn't called Sperm Thurmond for nothing.
20 posted on 07/03/2003 1:59:50 PM PDT by billhilly
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