• A Christmas story A Christmas story The late Sen. Strom Thurmond’s family acknowledged last week that yes, Essie Mae Washington-Williams was the senator’s daughter, and yes, what had been whispered around South Carolina for decades was true: The one-time
• A Christmas story
A Christmas story
The late Sen. Strom Thurmond’s family acknowledged last week that yes, Essie Mae Washington-Williams was the senator’s daughter, and yes, what had been whispered around South Carolina for decades was true: The one-time segregationist had fathered a child with a black teen-ager.
There’s breathtaking hypocrisy, and something even more venal, in the fact that Thurmond never publicly acknowledged his daughter, even though he lived to be 100 years old. For much of that time, he was busy appealing to the worst instincts of the Old South, running as the Dixiecrat candidate for president in 1948, filibustering the 1957 Civil Rights bill, and denouncing the intermingling of the races.
And yet, somehow, this is a Christmas story.
In the soft light of the season, family and forgiveness overcome a lot of evil. At 78, it is less important to Essie Mae Washington-Williams what her father was to the world than who he was to her. He was 22 years old when she was born in 1925, the daughter of the Thurmond family’s 16-year-old maid, Carrie Butler. The parallel tracks on which the lives of Thurmond and Butler traveled will no doubt make illuminating reading, once that story is told. But according to Washington-Williams’ version of family history, her father stood by her as well as his public life allowed, got her into college and supported her financially, and played host to her each year in his Washington office. Washington-Williams loved him, and didn’t want to embarrass him.
Perhaps she is a victim. Perhaps not. Certainly she is kinder and more forgiving than she had any earthly reason to be. The thing about redemption is that love is blind.
St. Louis Post Dispatch
