Strom's Skeleton - The late segregationist's black daughter. By Diane McWhorter: "Strom's Skeleton
The late segregationist's black daughter.
By Diane McWhorter
Posted Tuesday, July 1, 2003, at 12:11 PM PT





Thurmond: curiouser and curiouser
In all the words spent on Strom Thurmond's life and times since his death last week, I have seen no acknowledgment of the most interesting of his sundry racial legacies. She is Essie Mae Washington Williams, a widowed former school teacher in her 70s, living in Los Angeles. Presumably she did not show up for any of the obsequies even though Strom Thurmond was almost certainly her father. Williams is black.

Jack Bass and Marilyn W. Thompson present persuasive evidence in their 1998 biography, Ol' Strom, that Thurmond sired a daughter in 1925 with a black house servant named Essie 'Tunch' Butler, with whom he reputedly had an extended relationship. Though 'Black Baby of Professional Racist' would seem to sail over the man-bites-dog bar of what is news, the story has never really gotten traction. The particulars of this family saga simply do not fit into the 'redemption narrative' Americans tend to impose on our more regrettable bygones: Better that ol' Strom 'transformed' from the Negro-baiting Dixiecrat presidential candidate of 1948 to One of the First Southern Senators To Hire a Black Aide in 1971."