Ol' Strom and Me By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, AlterNet December 15, 2003 The skeleton that rattled in the late South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond's closet with the revelation that he may have fathered a black child also rattled for me. If Essie Mae Washington-Williams is indeed his daughter, and she claims to have documents and has offered to take DNA tests to prove it, then my two granddaughters who are her great granddaughters are Strom Thurmond's great-great granddaughters. That raises troubling concerns for me. The girls are 8 and 2 years old, and I don't want them exposed to the public rancor and bitterness that has raged between the black and white descendants of Thomas Jefferson. But they need to know the truth about their heritage. It's well known or strongly suspected that a slew of prominent, wealthy and politically connected Southern slave masters – and that almost certainly included Jefferson – kept black mistresses, fathered black children, and even supported them. The sexual hijinks between these men regarded as pillars of Southern society and black women didn't end with slavery. Some of them voluntarily contributed to their children's upkeep. It appears that Thurmond dutifully gave financial support to Washington-Williams. But many others didn't. In the decades after the Civil War, black women made countless legal claims against these men for financial and child support for their racially mixed illegitimate children. When the story broke nationally about Thurmond and his possible relationship to my granddaughters, my oldest granddaughter asked me about him. Segregation, states rights and conservatism, the things that Thurmond mightily championed, are alien concepts to her, and I told her simply that he was an important Southern Senator. But she deserves to know the full truth about her presumed great-great grandfather's political legacy. When she's old enough I'll tell her that Thurmond did more than any other Southern politician to resuscitate a moribund Republican Party in the South and transform it into a dominant conservative force in national politics. Thurmond's one-man crusade for states rights and against federal intrusion in the South's racial business stoked white fury against the national Democrats in the 1960s. In the eyes of many white Southerners, the Democratic Party became the hated symbol of integration and civil rights. The big break came with Republican Barry Goldwater's presidential bid in 1964. Thurmond adroitly read the political tea leaves, stumped for Goldwater and urged Southern Democrats to do the same. In the process, he dropped the racially inflammatory rhetoric that had long been his and other Southern politicians' stock in trade. Instead, he and Goldwater railed against welfare, crime in the streets, permissiveness and big government. He branded the Democrats the party of "regulation," "control," "coercion," "intimidation" and "subservience." This was racial code speak but it worked. It ignited the first big exodus of Southern whites from the Democratic Party into the Republican Party. The stampede got even bigger in 1968. President Nixon, with Ol' Strom's endorsement and active support, crafted his "Southern Strategy," that is, woo white voters, while saying and doing as little as possible about civil rights. That strategy became the indispensable cornerstone of Republican politics in the South. In the years to come, Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and the elder Bush also made masterful use of Nixon's Southern Strategy to win elections and tighten the Republican grip on the South. But President Bush also has greatly benefited from the Southern Strategy. In the 2000 presidential election, he bagged the electoral votes of all the states of the Old Confederacy. Without the granite-like backing of these states, Democratic presidential contender Al Gore would have easily won the White House, and the Florida vote debacle would have been a meaningless sideshow. Bush will benefit again in the 2004 election from Thurmond's radical remake of the Republican Party in the South. White males by whopping margins still favor Bush over any of the Democratic presidential challengers, and that includes North Carolina senator John Edwards. Despite much talk that Thurmond did a racial mea culpa in the latter days of his political reign, he still remained a die-hard conservative. His voting record was pro-defense and anti-government social programs. In his final campaign for his eighth Senate term in 1996, he ranted against the "the 40-year wrongs of liberalism." Thurmond helped ensure that the Republicans would be major players for decades to come in national politics. Bush and the Republicans owe Ol' Strom an eternal debt of gratitude. That's not the debt that my granddaughters owe their presumed great-great grandfather. However, when they're old enough to understand I'll talk candidly with them about the racially indelible political stamp that he put on the nation. link
I guess what I expect is that the people who read it, like it, copy and paste it to make a point might change their mind after they read it.
Senator Strom Thurmond's Not-So-Secret Black Daughter By BRENT STAPLES African-Americans and white Americans are so deeply entangled by blood that racial categories have become meaningless. When discussing the issue in public, I typically offer my own family as an example. We check "black" on the census and appear black to the naked eye, but we are also descended from white ancestors on both sides. Despite appearances, I told an audience not long ago, "I am as `white' as anyone in this room." White people — mainly blank-faced and perplexed — typically don't get it. But black people get it fine: they chuckle, cover their faces in mock embarrassment or nod in quiet agreement. Racial ambiguity is a theme they have heard discussed in their families and communities throughout their lives. Black families have always talked openly about white ancestors and relatives. In hotbeds of race-mixing like New Orleans or Charleston, S.C., black and white branches of a family sometimes lived so close at hand that they ran into one another on the street, and black children were warned that their pale relatives could react violently if approached. Black parents who passed on news of white ancestry to their offspring were not trying to arrange family reunions. They were debunking racism by showing their children that black families and white families were more closely connected by ancestry than racists liked to admit. White families, by contrast, were terrified by blackness in the family tree. Relationships that could not simply be ignored were deliberately buried. The cover-up hatched 200 years ago by Thomas Jefferson's family was blown away a few years back after genetic evidence showed that Jefferson almost certainly fathered Sally Hemings's final son, Eston, born in 1808. This led historians to conclude that Jefferson fathered all of her children in a relationship that lasted more than 35 years. The big lesson for historians in the Hemings-Jefferson case was that the oral histories passed down by slaves and their descendants were more reliable than the official written record. This put historians on notice that they should give the oral tradition more credence, especially when working on issues of interracial intimacy. The point was underscored dramatically when the family of Strom Thurmond, the former United States senator, dropped decades of denials and acknowledged that Mr. Thurmond, who died last summer at the age of 100, had fathered a daughter with a black maid in the family household in 1925. The daughter, a retired teacher named Essie Mae Washington-Williams, 78, had periodically denied Mr. Thurmond's paternity for the public record but had passed on the truth to her children, who pressured her to come forward after Mr. Thurmond's death last June. Like most stories of its kind, this one would have died out long ago had it not been carried for nearly a century on the tongues of black South Carolinians, who recognized the story of Strom Thurmond and Essie Mae Washington-Williams's mother as a universal story of black families across the state. It was not, however, the official story. The biographer Nadine Cohodas dismissed it as a "legend in the black community" a decade ago in her book "Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change." Another writer of the South described it as apparently without foundation — a phrase that is used all the time to dismiss the black oral tradition as apocryphal. In the 1998 biography, "Ol' Strom," however, a journalism professor, Jack Bass, and a Washington Post reporter, Marilyn Thompson, went back to the oral stories of black South Carolinians, some of whom knew the household, as well as the accounts of a black elevator operator who recalled seeing a light-skinned black woman riding the elevator to visit Mr. Thurmond when he was governor. How could Mr. Thurmond, who sought the presidency on a segregationist platform in 1948, have lived publicly as a racist while secretly helping to support a black daughter? This was a common practice in the South, where slaveholders and their descendants produced mulatto children. While some white fathers treated their mixed-race children like dirt, others supported and educated them. They refused to acknowledge them to keep the nonexistent barrier between the races firmly intact. Like the Jefferson story, this one seems more sensational because of who Strom Thurmond was. In truth, it is the story of the entire American South — and the great secret of race that until just recently dared not speak its name.
The one of the more distressing thing here is .. he was 22+ and the mother was like 16 Rocket River she looks alot ole Strom
