Strom's SkeletonThe late segregationist's black daughter.
Posted Tuesday, July 1, 2003, at 3:11 PM ET
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.
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StumbleUponJack 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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Remarks from the Fray:
The story took me on two opposing speculative tangents. This is, of course, assuming that Thurmond actually fathered the woman in question. On the one hand, throughout history, sex has been an used as a weapon of politics and power. Possession of the women has been the symbol of domination over a vanquished tribe or race. In its most extreme form, rape has been used as an instrument of ethnic cleansing even of late, as in the Balkans. Of course, Thurmond didn't indulge in anything quite so crass. But did he, at least subliminally, equate sex with power? On the other hand, I'm reminded of the character played by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List. The Nazi concentration camp officer, a brute of a man, regards his Jewish maid as an animal, as his indoctrinated mind has been trained to believe, yet at the same time, feels an overwhelming desire and tenderness for her. Fiennes wonderfully portrays his emotional confusion. Is it possible that Thurmond ran into the same dilemma—that the abstraction of bigotry he socially inherited ran up against the complexity and warmth of actual human contact? Maybe the brain is the true site of federalism—the raging emotions in the hypothalamus refuse to take instructions from the prejudices lodged in the frontal cortex. I wish, for Thurmond's sake, it is the latter. It makes him human, even in his Dixiecrat days. It may earn him a few weekend trips through the gates of heaven.
--Sissyfuss1
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Assuming the lady in question actually were the daughter of the late Sen. Thurmond and his family's black servant woman (who herself more than likely carried some white genes, as nearly all American Negroes do), why does Miss McWhorter label the lady in question as "black"? She would in fact be at least one-half white in her genetic inheritance, and, as I indicated just previously, more than likely more white in her genetic make-up than she would be black, or Negro, to use the older term. To characterize such a person as "black" is reflective of an old, extremely racist categorization that took the view that even a drop of black blood (genetic inheritance) present in a person somehow indeligibly makes the person "a black"--as if the presence of even a small number of black genes automatically nullified the reality that he or she is a person of mixed race. This view only makes sense from the perspective of the old-time racialists of the US, who regarded even one pair of black genes being present in a person's genetic make-up as somehow besmirching that person, making them racially exclusively a Negro. Obviously McWhorter resorted to the old racialist categorization in charactering the lady in question because doing so served her larger purpose of pouring ridicule upon the late Sen. Thurmond and attacking his personal character. In other words, McWhorter, in her hatred and ideological scorn for the dead Sen. Thurmond, did not hesitate to launch her vicious mischaracterization of the man, even if to do so in the way she did might cause his alleged mixed-race daughter great personal embarrassment and shame. McWhorter's vile attack upon Sen. Thurmond tells me much more about Diane McWhorter's character than it does about the character of either Sen. Thurmond or the lady in California she alleges to be his daughter. If one assumes that the lady in fact actually is Strom Thurmond's daughter, why is the relationship between Sen. Thurmond and his daughter any of Diane McWhorter's business? Obviously, it is not. But then for McWhorter, the infernal itch to pour obloquy on the late Sen. Thurmond and calumniate him in death easily overrode any scruples about embarrassing his presumed daughter. And what if Miss McWhorter is wrong in her speculation? She doesn't care a whit about that possibility, one way or the other. All she's bent upon is trashing Sen. Thurmond, thereby parading her own "enlightened" and morally superior virtue and giving her own "journalistic" career a boost.
--franzkyberg
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(7/2)