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Strom Thurmond
Strom Thurmond
James Strom Thurmond (December 5, 1902 – June 26, 2003) was an American politician who served for forty-eight years as a United States Senator. He also ran for the Presidency of the United States in 1948 as the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party (Dixiecrat) candidate, receiving 2.4% of the popular vote and 39 electoral votes. Thurmond later represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1954 until 2003, at first as a Democrat and after 1964 as a Republican. He switched out of support for the conservatism of Republican presidential candidate and Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who shared his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He left office as the only senator to reach the age of 100 while still in office and as the oldest-serving and longest-serving senator in U.S. history (although he was later surpassed in the latter by Robert Byrd). Thurmond holds the record for the longest-serving Dean of the United States Senate in U.S. history at 14 years.
He conducted the longest filibuster ever by a lone senator, in opposition to the
Civil Rights Act of 1957, at 24 hours and 18 minutes in length, nonstop. In the
1960s, he continued to fight against civil rights legislation. He always
insisted he had never been a racist, but was merely opposed to excessive federal
authority. However, he infamously said that "all the laws of Washington and all
the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our
schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement", while
attributing the movement for integration to Communism. Starting in the 1970s, he
moderated his position on race, but continued to defend his early segregationist
campaigns on the basis of states' rights in the context of Southern society at
the time, never fully renouncing his earlier viewpoints.
Six months after Thurmond's death in 2003, it was revealed that at age 22 he had
fathered a daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, with his family's
African-American maid Carrie Butler, then 16. Although Thurmond never publicly
acknowledged his daughter, he paid for her college education and passed other
money to her for some time. His other children eventually acknowledged her.
His Daughter Essie Mae
Essie Mae Washington-Williams (born October 12, 1925) is the
oldest child of former United States Senator and former Governor of South
Carolina Strom Thurmond. Of mixed race, she was born to Carrie Butler, a
16-year-old black household servant, and Thurmond, then 22 and unmarried. After
a 30-year career as a teacher, Washington-Williams published her autobiography
in 2005, which was nominated for the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.
She did not reveal her true father's identity until she was 78 years old, after
Thurmond's death in 2003.
Washington was the natural daughter of Strom Thurmond and his parents' young
black servant, Carrie Butler. Butler, only 16 when her daughter was born, sent
her to be raised in Coatesville, Pennsylvania by her older sister Mary and her
husband John Henry Washington. She was named Essie after another of her mother's
sisters, who fostered her briefly as an infant. Growing up, she had a cousin
seven years older than herself, whom she believed to be her half-brother.
Washington was unaware of her biological parents until the age of 16, when her
mother told her about it and took her to meet Thurmond in person. That meeting
took place in 1941.
Washington and her mother met infrequently with Thurmond after that, although
they had some contact for years. Washington-Williams worked as a nurse at Harlem
Hospital in New York City, and took a course in business education at New York
University. She did not live in the segregated South until 1942, when she
started college at South Carolina State University (SCSU), a historically black
college. Thurmond paid for her college education. After having grown up in
Pennsylvania, Washington was shocked by the restrictions of the South. She
graduated from SCSU around 1946 with a degree in business.
During the late 1950s and 1960s, the years of national activism in the civil
rights movement, Washington occasionally tried to talk with Thurmond about
racism. He brushed off her complaints about segregated facilities. He was
notorious for his long political support of segregation.
Washington later moved to Los Angeles, California, where she earned a master's
degree in education at the University of Southern California. She went on and
had a 30-year career as a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District
from 1967 through 1997.
Washington-Williams still lives in Los Angeles. She is a longtime member of
Delta Sigma Theta sorority, which she joined while at South Carolina State
University.
In 1948 Washington married Julius T. Williams, an attorney. They had two sons
and two daughters together. Three live in the Seattle, Washington, area, and one
daughter lives near Los Angeles. Her husband Julius T. Williams died in 1964.
She has numerous grandchildren.
four removed, five added
Essie Mae added below
When Washington-Williams announced
her family connection, it was acknowledged by the Thurmond family. In 2004 the
state legislature approved the addition of her name to the list of Thurmond
children on a monument for Senator Thurmond on the South Carolina Statehouse
grounds.
Washington-Williams said she would apply for membership in the United Daughters
of the Confederacy, based on her heritage through Thurmond to ancestors who
fought as Confederate soldiers. She encouraged other African Americans to do so
as well, in the interests of exploring their heritage and promoting a more
inclusive view of Southern history among lineage societies. The lineage society
is for female descendants of Confederate veterans of the American Civil War. As
her father Thurmond had been a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, she
could use his completed genealogical documentation of links to participating
ancestor(s).
In 2005, Washington-Williams was awarded an honorary Ph.D. in education from
South Carolina State University at Orangeburg. That year she published a memoir,
Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond (2005), written with
William Stadiem. It explored her sense of dislocation based on her mixed
heritage, as well as going to college in the segregated South after having grown
up in Pennsylvania. It was nominated for both a National Book Award and a
Pulitzer Prize. Washington-Williams said that she intended to be active on
behalf of the Black Patriots Foundation, which was raising funds to build a
monument on the National Mall in Washington D.C. to honor American blacks who
served in the American Revolutionary War.
Text from Wikipedia
Clinton Clemson Columbia Covered Bridges Cowpens Gaffney Greenville Greer Strom Thurmond Walhalla
