strom-thurmonds-black-daughter-a-flesh-and-blood-symbol-of-americas-complicated-racial-history

On August 30, 1957, United States Senator Strom Thurmond spoke for 24hrs 27m against civil rights. His oldest child was born to Carrie Butler, a 16-year-old African-American girl who worked as a household servant for Thurmond's parents. Thurmond was 22 and unmarried. Thurmond became a Republican when the Democratic Civil Rights bill passed as did many other Southern Dixiecrats. An excerpt from the article:

"Essie Mae Washington-Williams lived for 87 years. But, in her own words, she was never “completely free” until she could stand before the world and say out loud that Strom Thurmond, the one-time segregationist South Carolina senator, was her father. That was in 2003, after she had spent more than 70 years being denied what we all deserve – her true name and birthright. “In a way, my life began at 78, at least my life as who I really was,” Washington-Williams wrote in her life story. She has died.

Thurmond’s oldest child — born when he was a 22-year-old man and her mother, Carrie Butler, a 16-year-old black maid in his father’s house – had kept the senator’s secret, an open one rumored about but never revealed when he was alive because, she had said, “He trusted me, and I respected him.” As in the case of Thomas Jefferson, another successful southern politician who was father to black children, stories shared among African Americans were long disbelieved until they turned out to be true.

As a young woman in 1948, Washington-Williams protected her father’s career when he was making his mark as a Dixiecrat presidential candidate, a renegade from a Democratic Party inching away from segregation. He defiantly pledged then, “There’s not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the n—– race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.”

She kept her public silence when, in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957, her father conducted a nonstop filibuster that lasted more than 24 hours, and when he continued to oppose every piece of civil rights legislation that came before him. Washington-Williams said she never wanted to harm the man she must have loved, even as he made his name and reputation hurting his own flesh-and-blood and everyone like her."