Jackson Free Press

"And 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 negro race into our theatres, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches."
— Strom Thurmond, 1948

It is the age-old story of miscegenation, possible rape and illegitimacy. Essie Mae Washington-Williams has now come out of father Strom Thurmond 's closet for all the world to behold. She is living proof that staunch racist Thurmond—the granddaddy of so much race hatred in the South—had sexual relations at age 22 with his family's 16-year-old black maid.

As revealing as it is, for some pundits this unveiling came a day late and a dollar short. Why now? Why not when Thurmond was powerful and prominent, and loudly supporting policies that would hurt the plight of black Americans?

Much of the speculation about the timing seems to take the focus away from the part that Thurmond played in this and lands a suspicious eye on his daughter. One comment that particularly disturbs me was printed in Salon.com, an online literary magazine. Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy, an African-American thinker and author of "Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity and Adoption," said: "Maybe she was ceding to her biological father's wishes, being dutiful and generous. A less generous way to look at it is to say that maybe she waited until he was out of the way." Then, maybe, her father paid her off, he speculated.

My question back to Kennedy and others is why does it matter? It's not important why she failed to speak up until now. Shifting the focus to her only lessens the impact of what Thurmond himself did: Whether she kept her personal life private because she felt bad for her dad or because he coerced her to with hush money, the point is that Thurmond is her father. He slept with her mother. The newsworthiness of such a rabid segregationist having a black daughter is driven by the stench of hypocrisy in the air.

The narrative is simple: Thurmond had no problem becoming intimately close to a 16-year-old African-American girl but was publicly dead set against "Negroes" gaining the economic equality that would mean them moving into white communities. Before he fanned the flames of racism by screaming about miscegenation—using the fear of race-mixing to try to keep white power in place and empowering race terrorist groups—he had fathered a child with a young black woman.

Still, much of the focus is on the daughter's motives and timing. Columbia, S.C., resident Vivian Breedlove told The Washington Post: "I have respect for [Washington-Williams] and the fact that she didn't want to cause trouble, but I wish she had made it public while he was alive, just so he could recognize it publicly and put it to rest that there was no shame there."

Are you serious? No shame? What evidence whatsoever points to Thurmond not being ashamed of this entire situation? Yes, he put this young lady though school and took the occasional visit to her campus—but look what else he did during the same period of time. He spoke at a 24-hour-and-18-minute Senate meeting against the Voting Rights Bill of 1957 that would positively affect the lives of many African Americans across the country, not to mention his own daughter. He ran for the presidency on a platform that blatantly stated the following: "We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race." To quote Alanis Morrisette, "Isn't it ironic, don't you think."

It is certainly paradoxical that this man harbored so much hatred for African Americans and yet he made the most intimate connection with an African American that one human being can have with another: they had a child.

Let's get real. With the amount of publicity Williams' story has received now, after her father's death, imagine what it would have been like for her and her children when Thurmond was alive and kicking. What sane person would knowingly turn over their lives to the hungry media circus? I believe that Washington-Williams did what she felt was right for herself and her children. After all, it was only after her children's insistence that she has come forward now to share her story and to expose her father's actions for all to consider.

The sole focus in this story should be the hypocrisy of another racist politician who did not want to legally allow other people to do what he had done. The story should also focus on the possibility of others like Thurmond who fear that their heavily bolted closet doors will be thrown wide open. How many more politicians want the freedom to "love" anyone they choose even as they support policies that will hurt those same people?

Ironic, indeed.

Ayana Taylor is a senior at Tougaloo College. She is the recipient of an Association of Alternative Newsweeklies diversity grant to work as a news intern with the JFP.