USA Today has weighed in with a front-page story on the new
book, Dear Senator, by Essie Mae Williams, daughter of the
late Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Mrs. Williams had
refrained from revealing her identity until after the senator’s
passing, but his children have readily acknowledged that her claim
is factual. The newspaper report has been followed by an MSNBC
interview, so we may be justified in anticipating a
blitz of publicity surrounding the revelations in the book.
It would be reasonable to assume that the flavor of the
reportage will be redolent of the USA Today version. Their
read on the story is that it was necessary for the daughter’s
identity to be a secret because her mother was a black woman. This
is taken to reflect on the racial attitudes of the American South,
more radically in the 1920s when she was born, more subtly in later
decades.
Far be it from me to disparage the inequities that prevailed in
the South before the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and '60s.
My father hitchhiked cross-country in the late 1940s along with a
fellow Yeshiva student and they accepted a ride from a black man in
one of the Carolinas. Shortly thereafter, they were pulled over by
a State trooper who wanted to know what they were doing in the car.
It is my father’s belief to this day that he saved the driver from
a beating by insisting that they were together. The officer kept
suggesting that the teenagers get back on the road while the driver
accompanied him to the police station to clear up some matters. My
father refused to be separated from the man and eventually the
trooper backed down.
However, I don’t think that the case has been made that Mrs.
Williams received one iota of lesser treatment by virtue of her
race. If her mother had been white, she would not have been given
any greater advantage. If anything, it seems to me that Strom
treated her considerably better than the average Southerner of that
day would have treated a daughter whose fleece was white as
snow.
Consider: he was 22 when the daughter was born, while her mother
was 15. He did not get married until twenty-five years later, so
there was no family to adopt her into. Still, he always slipped her
mother money, amounts that were quite significant for the time.
After the mother died, he gave money directly to the daughter. He
helped her gain admission to a good college and visited her while
she was a student.
He kept up with her after she got married and had children, his
grandchildren. Later, when her husband died fairly young, he
assisted her with sizable sums. He also never told her not to
reveal that he was her father; that was a decision that she made of
her own volition, although it is a fair presumption that it
reflected his preference as well.
Now let’s be honest. Even if the mother and child were white,
how many men would have undertaken this level of responsibility and
acknowledgment back in 1925? It was not a matter of pride to have
fathered a child out of wedlock; this was a behavior that was
strongly discouraged by the culture for reasons that owe as much to
a need for social stability as they do to moral codes founded in
religiosity. This was true virtually anywhere in the country at
that time and more so in the South.
The actor Jack Nicholson thought that he was an orphan who was
being raised by a sister sixteen years older than himself. On the
night that he received an Oscar for his role in Chinatown,
she revealed that she was actually his mother. A similar thing
happened with a friend of mine who grew up to be a practicing rabbi
and Jewish communal leader. In both of those cases, as in many more
like them, the identity of the actual father seemed to have melted
into oblivion. This was the way that society ordered itself until
quite recently, and the children bought some dignity at the expense
of a fatherly presence in their lives.
The story of Essie Williams could be written with no slightest
variation if matters of race were not mentioned at all. She grew up
as a love child, but one more fortunate than most such offspring;
her father looked after her with a caring eye and an open wallet.
She was a college graduate in the 1940s, which placed her a hefty
cut above the average middle-class American kid. Her story leads us
to respect her a great deal and to label her Dad a man of no small
integrity. It should be painted not with harsh racial tar but with
a gentle human feather.
