Strom Thurmond’s Daughter
The Trent Lott-Strom Thurmond Controversy
Reflections on the benefits and curse of hypocrisy in a civil society
“Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour: so doth a little folly him that is in reputation for wisdom and honour.” (Ecclesiastes 10:1.)
James Strom Thurmond’s daughter, Mrs. Essie Mae Washington-Williams, along with Senator Thurmond’s descendants, Wanda and Jason Terry at a news conference in Columbia, South Carolina in December 2003.
I grew up in a home where Strom Thurmond
was revered. Probably after George Washington and Robert E. Lee, my family
held no figure in higher regard. My father’s brother, Charlie, graduated
from Clemson with Mr. Thurmond in 1923, and when Thurmond became governor
of South Carolina, he made my father an honorary
colonel on his staff in 1947. A devout Baptist, Senator Thurmond
served for many decades on the board of Fundamentalist bastion, Bob
Jones University – he even wrote
my father encouraging him to send me there.
Strom Thurmond appreciated beautiful women. The only private conversation
I ever had with him was in 1965, at a beauty contest that was part of the
state American Legion convention – we were both bachelors – he was a
judge, and I was the male vocalist. Always a bit flirtatious, he seemed to
revel in his reputation as a lady’s man the older he got. In his
November 2002, farewell address to the United States Senate, Mr. Thurmond
said, “I love all of you – and especially your wives.” A few days
later, at his now infamous one-hundredth birthday party, a former Thurmond
staffer, Thad Strom, joked: “I see so many people here today whose life
Strom Thurmond has touched – and some he even squeezed.” Thad Strom
continued, “There are several things Strom would never miss: a Peach
parade, a Senate vote, or the opening of a new Hooters franchise.” And
Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott, responded: “What is Hooters, if it’s
not about breasts, if it’s not about the women’s physiques?” Former
Senator, Republican Presidential nominee and Viagra spokesman, Bob Dole,
then told Thurmond that he could set him up with his Pepsi advertising
partner, twenty-one-year-old Britney Spears. At the time this must all
have seemed to be in perfectly good taste to the “good old boys” of
the United States Senate, but their humor reflected an underlying
knowledge of Senator Thurmond’s tastes.
Mr. Thurmond met his first wife after he became governor of South Carolina
while she was still in college. Jean Crouch had competed in a beauty
contest, and Governor Thurmond recruited her to come to the state capitol
to serve as his secretary after she graduated. They were married in 1947;
he was forty-four, and she was twenty-one. But Jean Thurmond died of a
brain tumor in 1960, and they had no children together.
Mr. Thurmond ended his eight-year bachelorhood in 1968, when he married
twenty-two-year-old, former Miss South Carolina, Nancy Jean Moore. He was
sixty-six. They had four children: Nancy, who was killed by a drunk
driver, Strom Jr., Julie and Paul. The children were all his. Strom
Thurmond had been a fitness buff all his life. I remember a photograph of
him in The State, doing pushups on the steps of the U. S. Capitol.
I think it was after somebody questioned him about retirement from the
Senate in view of his age.
As I said, his Senate colleagues recognized him as a fitness buff and lady’s
man. I remember a comment former Indiana senator, Birch Bayh made to me
while I was escorting him and his wife to a television interview in
Philadelphia. I had told him that I was from South Carolina, and he
commented on Senator Thurmond’s marriage to a woman who was forty-four
years his junior: “He’s found somebody to practice his pushups on.”
I’m sure the Indiana Democrat was simply repeating a joke he’d heard
in the cloakroom of the Senate.
Until December of 2003, I never thought about why such a physically fit
man with such an eye for the ladies remained a bachelor until he was
forty-four. Little did I know that Senator Thurmond had joined himself to
a young woman when he was twenty-two, much less that he had a daughter
from that union. But his physical union was not accompanied by the verbal
act that would have made this a legal marriage. Shortly after graduating
from Clemson, Strom Thurmond became involved with his family’s Black
housekeeper, Carrie Butler. When little Essie Mae was born to them on
October 12, 1925, Miss Butler was sixteen. Neither was married at the
time. It was the same year that the devout Baptist, Thurmond, became a
Master Mason in the Concordia Lodge Number 50 of Edgefield, South
Carolina.
What should a young man do in the face of such a situation? The Bible is
very clear as to the obligations that a man has both to his children and
the woman through whom they are born. When a man steals a woman’s
virginity, he has taken from her that which she can surrender but once.
Moral purity is so cherished by God that under the civil code of Israel,
if a woman deceived her husband at the time of marriage regarding her
virginity, she could be executed. (Deuteronomy 22:13-21.) While our civil
laws do not exactly follow those of ancient Israel, these laws do
demonstrate divinely inspired principles of fairness: “If a man seduces
a virgin who is not pledged to be married and sleeps with her, he must pay
the bride-price, and she shall be his wife.” (Exodus 22:16.) “He must
marry the girl, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long
as he lives.” (Deuteronomy 22:29)
Strom Thurmond should have married Carrie Butler and given his name to
their daughter. However, back in those days, South Carolina civil law
absolutely forbad marriage between Blacks and Whites. So, rather than
moving to a state where he could fulfill his moral obligation, Mr.
Thurmond committed himself secretly to seeing to it that his little girl
would never do without, and Miss Butler gave up their daughter for
adoption. Her Aunt Essie’s sister and brother-in-law, Mary and John
Washington, adopted little Essie Mae Thurmond. But Strom Thurmond followed
her life and eventually helped her get into college, where she met and
married a law school student, Julius Williams. Through the
Washington-Williams marriage, Strom Thurmond came to have four
grandchildren – what a strange irony that a man should have
grandchildren before his first legitimate child was born!
It was not the only irony of this tale of the old South. The affair
between Strom Thurmond and Carrie Butler profoundly illustrates the
contradictory world into which they were born, a world where not only was
it illegal for Blacks and Whites to intermarry, but where justice was
never administered evenhandedly. Although Mr. Thurmond did break his
state’s laws against miscegenation,
the sexual union was evidently consensual – if one may ever regard sex
in a situation so pregnant with inequities as consensual. Therefore
Thurmond did not commit rape under the laws of South Carolina at the time,
because Miss Butler was over the age of fourteen, the statutory age of
consent in 1925. And once the pregnancy was known, had both Thurmond
and Butler been White, probably Thurmond would have married her. Had
Thurmond been Black and Butler White, Thurmond would probably have been
summarily executed by lynching. But in the South of the early twentieth
century, Miss Butler had few legal rights against a White person,
especially the son of a judge.
It is also profoundly ironic that a man with an African-American daughter
should have been the greatest Senatorial defender of segregation – he
set the Senate’s filibuster record by speaking for twenty-four hours and
eighteen minutes in a futile attempt to block the 1957 Civil Rights Act
from becoming the law of the land – and the only presidential candidate
of the Dixiecrat Party. It underscores that the
real horror behind the anti-miscegenation laws was never simply about
sex between the races. It was about keeping Black men away from White
women. White men have had sex with Black women from the earliest days of
slavery, sometimes raping them with impunity.
However, unlike many White men who impregnated young Black women, Thurmond
did take an interest in his daughter and made sure that she was able to
attend college. This was before the days of DNA testing, and I believe
that it is an indication that Mr. Thurmond did love his daughter, even
though his love was profoundly defective. Observing the now
public, Mrs. Washington-Williams, one is struck with her grace and
humility in how she honored her late father by keeping the family secret
as long as he was alive.
One is also struck by the cowardice of
Senator Thurmond. Why could not a man who flew a glider into Normandy on
D-day have had the moral courage to have recognized his daughter and
brought her into his family before his death? What would it have cost him
to do this near the end of his political career? It would have spared the
rest of his family much humiliation had the patriarch been the instrument
of reconciliation, instead of the coward who knew what they would likely
face after his death. It would have given substance to the claim that he
was a changed man. And his now greatly tarnished reputation as one of the
greatest hypocrites in history would have been replaced by that of a
humble man who had the moral courage to acknowledge his frailties and
embrace his family in their need.
Some of Thurmond’s speeches now seem almost unbelievable in light of his
family’s acknowledgment that Essie Mae Washington-Williams is the
Senator’s daughter, as when he addressed the 1948 States Rights
convention: “But I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s
not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down
segregation and admit the N.i.g.g.e.r.* race into our theaters, into our
swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.” (*Some
folks state that Senator Thurmond used the word “Negro” or “Niggrah?”
Listen to the voice clip and
decide for yourself.)
How in the world could a man who knew he had a Black child and Black
grandchildren have become the driving force in splitting the Democratic
Party over Harry Truman’s 1948 civil rights package, fighting Truman
over such issues as a Federal anti-lynching law?
As I think of the hypocrisy of the hero of my childhood, I am reminded
that there is something worse than hypocrisy – a
hypocritical society at least has some consciousness of sin. But a society
that has turned its back on the very concept of sin and flaunts its
immorality without shame, is a society most ripe for the judgment of God:
“The look on their faces testifies against them; they parade their sin
like Sodom; they do not hide it. Woe to them! They have brought disaster
upon themselves.” (Isaiah 3:9.) “Are they ashamed of their loathsome
conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to
blush. So they will fall among the fallen; they will be brought down when
they are punished, says the LORD.” (Jeremiah 6:15; 8:12.) At least
the covert racism of modern America affords African-Americans
opportunities undreamed of in the past.
I will not judge Senator Thurmond by what I imagine that I might do in
similar circumstances – anybody who would do that is simply a fool. In
the final analysis, he is not significantly more morally bankrupt than the
rest of humankind, certainly not more than me. My only hope is the Lord
Jesus Christ and God’s “amazing grace that saved a wretch like me.”
If Strom Thurmond, in spite of his sins and hypocrisy, truly repented of
his sins and put his trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, then he is in heaven.
If not, then he would gladly trade all of the power and fame that he
possessed in this life to be given one last opportunity to escape the
judgment of a holy God.
The beauty of the gospel is that the Son of God, without ceasing to be God, became a real human being, just like you and me, except for sin. He died on the cross as our Substitute, taking the guilt and the consequences of our sins on himself. He arose from the dead and sent the Holy Spirit that we might enjoy a changed life. The moment that a person turns from his sins and embraces the Lord Jesus in simple faith, his sins are put to Christ’s account, and Christ’s righteousness is put to his account. Instead of standing on the pedestal on your own self-righteousness, condemning Senator Thurmond, why not turn from your sins and cast yourself on God’s mercy in Christ?
“All that the Father gives me will come
to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away.” (John 6:37.)
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you
rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble
in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and
my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28.)
Written on December 22, 2003, Revised on December 13, 2004 to include a link to Mrs. Washington-Williams’ soon to be released memoir, Dear Senator