And so it was not entirely surprising to white or black Southerners when news came that Strom Thurmond–segregationist, Dixiecrat, race-baiter–had a daughter by his family’s African-American maid, a daughter with whom he maintained cordial ties until his death this year. Essie Mae Washington-Williams met her father when she was 16; he gave her money, visited with her, wrote her cards and encouraged her to attend college. They rarely discussed politics, Williams recalled, but in one conversation with his daughter, Thurmond attributed his segregationist creed to habit and inertia: “Well, that’s the way things have always been,” he told her. (Thurmond’s family acknowledged Williams’s “claim to her heritage.”)
In the age of slavery and then Jim Crow, many Southerners lived by a code that drew a distinction between what white folks said about blacks as a race and what they thought about (and did with, obviously) the blacks they knew well. Thomas Jefferson most likely fathered children by a slave, and until very recently, black men could be imprisoned and lynched for having relations with white women while white men thought nothing of having black mistresses. The hypocrisy was repugnant, yes, and condescending, and wrong, but there it was, for a long, long, long time–even, we now know, in Thurmond’s case, into 2003.
It is hard to remember some-times what a young country we are. This year saw the death not only of Thurmond but of Lester Maddox, a man who became governor of Georgia while wielding a pickax handle and swearing that blacks would be kept down. The same week Maynard Jackson, the first black mayor of Atlanta and an avatar of the New South, also died; their lives symbolized the worst and the best of the South’s, and America’s, tangled racial history. “Thousands and thousands of black people born in the South during that time could tell my story,” Williams said of her father. She’s right, and it is a story of ambiguity and affection–a story that is at once Southern and inescapably American.
