A Book Review from a Devoted Reader

Essie Mae Washington-Williams was raised in Pennsylvania believing that her aunt and uncle were her parents. Imagine her shock when her aunt’s younger sister came to visit and announced she was actually Essie Mae’s mother. Imagine her shock several years later when she was introduced to her biological father, Strom Thurmond. Like Tiger Woods, who is half Chinese, quarter American Indian, and quarter black, Washington-Williams is what so many Americans are, products of the melting pot of America.  She is black and white and has come to embrace that fact, but it took a long time to reach that conclusion.

In Dear Senator: a Daughter’s Memoir co written by William Stadiem, Washington-Williams recalls how she wanted to hate her father after meeting him and learning about his ancestry. The grandson of a general who was with Robert E. Lee when he surrendered at Appomattox, and the son of a lawyer who was the point man for Ben “pitchfork” Tillman, a patrician segregationist who became a much feared governor of South Carolina, Strom Thurmond didn’t have the pedigree to impress his daughter. Later, when he ran as a Dixiecrat for states’ rights during the 1948 presidential election, Washington-Williams was appalled that her father defended segregation laws as “essential to the racial protection and purity of the white and Negro races alike.”

But Washington-Williams found her father to be very complicated. She was convinced her parents loved each other, but couldn’t express it in the segregationist South. He took care of both her mother and her in private. Thurmond paid for his daughter’s college education and later supplemented her income, especially after her husband died. Strom Thurmond had a paternal feeling for black South Carolinians and insisted they were not inferior, but “different.” They could not have the respect and admiration of their white counterparts until they were properly educated. And he believed education was the key to success, having started the first law school for blacks in South Carolina. Washington-Williams’ husband could never forgive Thurmond after his Dixiecrat candidacy, and Thurmond couldn’t understand why he was so hated by black Americans. He was a product of the old South, yet he wanted to improve the lives of all South Carolinians

After Thurmond became a Goldwater Republican in 1964, he never mentioned segregation again and turned his attention to the economy and the threat of Communism. He was one of the first southern senators to hire a black aide, who was a former union organizer and a NAACP voting drive leader. The press said it was tokenism, but Thurmond seemed to be changing along with the times, and Essie Mae Washington-Williams hoped she was influencing him. In 1974, Thurmond became the first southern senator to appoint a black to a federal judgeship. He was trying to right wrongs, but many Americans could never forget the wrongs.

Theirs was never a close father-daughter relationship. They both felt they had to “know their place.” But after Thurmond died and Washington-Williams came out publicly as his daughter, she came to know his family and her desire to know the history of blacks in America became insatiable. In Dear Senator: a Daughter’s Memoir the very confusing psychology of the South is at least partially explained and a lot of history that is not covered in school is presented. It is a satisfying read.