When Essie Mae Washington Williams, a 78-year-old mixed-race woman, walked out in front of the television cameras last week, she gave public voice to a secret she had hidden all her life.
‘My father’s name is James Strom Thurmond,’ she said into a microphone that amplified the emotions wobbling in her voice.
In the American South the significance of those words and that name cannot be underestimated. Senator Thurmond was one of the most infamous defenders of racial segregation, running for President in 1948 as a ‘Dixiecrat’. He was the last political power broker from the Old South to wield real influence in the United States.
Now Williams and her large black family are to meet Thurmond’s lily-white descendants in a unique family gathering. Her decision to go public with the name of her father, who died while still serving as a Republican senator at the age of 100 this year, has not been challenged by the Thurmond estate. Instead of segregation, the message now is of family reunion.
‘The extended Thurmond family wants to arrange a meeting with Williams and her children as soon as practicable in a quiet setting,’ a spokesperson for the family said. Thurmond’s son, Strom Thurmond Junior, has welcomed Williams into the fold, saying he wants to establish a relationship with his new half-sister, away from the glare of publicity. ‘As far as emotions or how I feel, I feel good, because that’s a feeling you get from doing the right thing,’ he told a South Carolina newspaper last week.
Williams’s story is laden with the racial politics of the Deep South, when blacks were barred from voting and lived in fear of lynching. Her mother, Carrie Butler, was a maid at the Thurmond house. She was 16 when she gave birth to her daughter in 1925, the product of an affair with the 22-year-old Thurmond. This was a time when sexual relations between the races was taboo and the Ku Klux Klan boasted 4,5-million members. Many lynchings were caused by rumours of black men having affairs with white women.
Some black political commentators have labelled Thurmond a rapist. ‘In the Twenties an affair between a white southern ”gentleman” and his maid was no romance. If Strom Thurmond made sexual advances towards Carrie Butler, what power did she have to say no,’ said black columnist Karen Hunter of the New York Daily News.
Yet Williams maintains her parents’ relationship was a loving one. She has always known who her father was and the two had regular contact for more than half a century, even when Thurmond was spearheading attempts to block civil rights legislation in the Senate in the 1950s.
Williams met Thurmond for the first time in 1941, as her mother was dying of kidney disease. In a meeting at the Thurmond family law office, she said Thurmond called her a ‘very lovely daughter’.
It was the start of a relationship that saw the two meet each other regularly, with Thurmond helping out financially, especially with college tuition fees. At least once a year Williams would go to Washington to meet her father and Thurmond would drop in on her and her family when he visited her adopted home of California. Thurmond once gave her a private tour of the Senate building.
However, until last week, and despite rumours about the story, all sides had always denied that the pair were father and daughter. Perhaps that was not surprising given Thurmond’s political career. In his native South Carolina he had built up a formidable political machine based on opposing black civil rights. After his failed presidential bid, he became the most high-profile segregationist in America. He once vowed: ‘There’s not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the negro race into our theatres, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.’
If his supporters had realised his pronouncements did not extend to his own bedroom, his career would have ended. Behaviour such as Thurmond’s has a long history in the South, however. Cases of affairs between masters and slaves were common. Slave girl Sally Hemings was long thought to have had children with Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, although recent DNA evidence has cast doubt on this.
Williams has avoided condemning her father’s political beliefs, while not condoning them. She insists she has no claim on Thurmond’s wealthy estate. She only wanted her four children, 13 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren to know the truth about their place in America’s troubled racial history, she said.
The old woman — who looks uncannily like her father — has received numerous offers from publishers for her life story. Williams is considering a deal. – Guardian Unlimited Â