>From Chicago tribune
Strom's secret offense. Talk about hypocracy.
Published December 19, 2003
When Strom Thurmond died at age 100 last June, the South Carolinian was recalled as
the longest-serving member of the U.S. Senate, a once-fiery opponent to civil rights
laws, a father of four.
Now the world knows that Thurmond clung to a secret. He sired five children, not four.
Essie Mae Washington-Williams, a 78-year-old retired teacher from Los Angeles,
confirmed this week what had been suspected for years: She is the late senator's
daughter, never publicly recognized because her mother was black.
In telling her story, Williams has displayed uncommon grace. Though she once suffered
through bankruptcy, she seeks no part in her deserved share of Thurmond's estate, once
valued at $2 million.
Thurmond's family was decent enough to acknowledge a family tie about which they must
have long known. Thurmond's nephew, chief bankruptcy judge for South Carolina, now
says that for years he served as a go-between for money dispatched by the senator for
Williams.
The grace of his family has somewhat softened the public criticism of Thurmond. People
in his home state apparently are reluctant even to say he was a hypocrite for
preaching racial segregation while bedding a black woman.
Of course he was a hypocrite. But he was much more than that. He was a sexual
predator. Carrie Butler was just 16 when Thurmond's unacknowledged child was born. She
was a maid in the grand Thurmond home who lived in a dirt-poor section of Edgefield,
S.C. He was a 22-year-old college graduate living at the time with his prominent
parents, preparing for a law career that would see him elected governor and U.S.
senator. He was old enough to know that what he was doing was wrong. She almost
certainly knew that refusing the son of her employer would carry grave consequences.
The nation's history and Thurmond himself make this a tale of rich, resounding
ironies. He suffered no consequences for preying on the family maid. Yet black men in
young Thurmond's Deep South were hanged just for looking the wrong way at the wrong
woman. Let's see, Emmett Till was murdered because he allegedly whistled at a white
woman about 30 years after Strom Thurmond bedded Carrie Butler.
While some in this country were fighting institutionalized racism stemming from
slavery, Thurmond resisted. "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," he once declared. "On the question of social
intermingling of the races, our people draw the line."
Later, it was said, he had reformed. Why, he even supported the Martin Luther King
holiday.
Thurmond was a rank hypocrite, and worse
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