{"id":264,"date":"2003-12-20T07:52:00","date_gmt":"2003-12-20T07:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/?p=264"},"modified":"2020-01-30T23:06:48","modified_gmt":"2020-01-30T23:06:48","slug":"yes-he-did-strom-thurmonds-daughter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/yes-he-did-strom-thurmonds-daughter\/","title":{"rendered":"Yes, he did: Strom Thurmond\u2019s Daughter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Columbia, South Carolina
And all the laws did not prevent him<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It often happened in the segregated South a century or two ago: a powerful white man fathered mixed-race children with a black slave or servant. Until this week, Thomas Jefferson\u2019s relationship with Sally Hemings was the most famous of these once-secret liaisons. Now comes a rival: the late Senator Strom Thurmond, whose 24-hour filibuster against a 1957 civil rights bill is still the longest-ever speech on the Senate floor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On December 15th his family said that they \u201cacknowledge Ms. Essie Mae Washington-Williams\u2019 claim to her heritage.\u201d Her father died in June, a ripe 100. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ms. Washington-Williams, a 78-year-old former school teacher who lives in Los Angeles, had until now denied the relationship, insisting that she and the senator were merely \u201cclose friends.\u201d They had agreed to put it like this decades ago, she says, to save him embarrassment and protect his political career. If she stayed quiet \u2013 as she did \u2013 her father would help her with money. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Essie Mae was born in 1925 to a 16-year-old black maid, Carrie Butler, who worked in the Thurmond\u2019s family home in strictly segregated Edgefield, South Carolina. Strom, then 22, had been living at home and teaching at a local school. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The parentage of the light-skinned child was for years an open secret among local blacks. Whispers began among whites when Strom Thurmond, by then South Carolina\u2019s governor, arranged for his daughter to go to the all-black South Carolina State College in the 1940s. He visited her there a number of times, arriving in his gubernatorial limousine. Later, annual meetings at his Senate office in Washington, and regular financial payments, apparently continued until his death. But he never admitted publicly that she was his daughter, even when a South Carolina newspaper said in 1972 that he had \u201ccoloured offspring.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This week his daughter said that \u201cwithin his heart, I don\u2019t really think he was [a racist]\u201d, blaming all that on his political career. Thurmond was quite a liberal state governor: he denounced lynching and called for more money to be spent on black schools. But he changed when he ran for the presidency in 1948, declaring that \u201con the question of social intermingling of the races, our people draw the line. And all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches\u2026.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He married a former beauty queen in 1968 and had four legitimate children, three of whom are still living and were mentioned in his will. His black daughter was not, but she has \u201cno intention\u201d of contesting her father\u2019s will. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It often happened in the segregated South a century or two ago: a powerful white man fathered mixed-race children with a black slave or servant. Until this week, Thomas Jefferson\u2019s relationship with Sally Hemings was the most famous of these once-secret liaisons. Now comes a rival: the late Senator Strom Thurmond, whose 24-hour filibuster against a 1957 civil rights bill is still the longest-ever speech on the Senate floor. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jan-collins.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}