On Dec 12th, 2003, after over 50 years of denials, retired Los Angeles schoolteacher Essie May Washington-Williams held a press conference to announce that she was the African-American illegitimate daughter of the famously anti-segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), recently deceased. Producing check stubs and personal letters written by the Senator, Washington-Williams’s claim was acknowledged by the Thurmond family days after her statement.
It would be particularly easy to recognize the announcement of Senator Strom Thurmond’s illegitimate half-black daughter as just another link in the chains of a typically hypocritical and racist society. Of course, the self-proclaimed “Dixiecrat” senator from South Carolina would have a half-black child! Of course, the man who held the filibuster* record for his stand against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, would have tasted some chocolate! Of course, the man, who never apologized for his segregationist ways even at age 100, would have impregnated his 16 year old household servant! America didn’t seem surprised when the Thurmond family announced it would verify Essie May Washington-Williams’s claim, indeed the lack of controversy regarding the claim seemed to deflate the issue. Or did Americans simply want to continue believing that race can’t matter to their modern day society?
Unlike George Wallace who apologized for his blocking of Black children from the hallowed halls of southern education (after getting Jesus and a bullet), Strom Thurmond unflinchingly stood by his past actions as a leader of the southern right wing democratic movement that led the charge in 1948 to repel any civil rights legislation or programs for minorities. In 2002, when Trent Lott, the then Senate Majority leader toasted Strom Thurmond at his 100th birthday party, his toast to Thurmond’s failed presidency bid of 1948 sparked outrage and national press coverage. The announcement of Strom’s illegitimate child garnered a few articles, but the coverage was meek to say the least.
“Oh, you know he wasn’t Big Daddy’s father!” These words shock me from the usual restless random thoughts that often occur when at a family gathering. Big Daddy would be my father’s father who died when my dad was a kid. Big Daddy had a blowout of some kind with his father and not much was ever spoken about my paternal great- grandfather. “Auntie says he was a big time southern lawyer” an uncle remarks, and I wonder if everyone in the room is silently pondering the pictures of Big Daddy with his toffee colored skin.
The secret to race in America might be closer than you think, every skin color in the country betrays the fact, but why aren’t we really looking? Recent advances in DNA testing have spawned several television segments on what race can mean to the continuing evolution of our species. These shows always highlight a surprised White guy going “Sub-Saharan?!?!” or something of the sort, while at the same time pushing the Americana “melting pot” ideal. Doesn’t it seem distinctly American to gloss over the touchy issues of just how we all came to be so mixed together? If Americans are choosing to “move on” from their cultural rape history into a bright, spanking brand-new rainbow world, why aren’t the Essie May Washington-Williams’s embraced and celebrated from the covers of Newsweek or Time?
In 1998 when Thomas Jefferson was genetically proven to have fathered at least one child with his young slave, Sally Hemmings, a few hundred years of Jeffersonian pontification were thrown for a loop. Annette Gordon-Reed, author of "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings: An American Controversy" remarked that "All these historians did him a favor until we could get past our primitive racism. I don't think he
would have been on Mount Rushmore or on the nickel. The personification of
America can't live 38 years with a black woman." It was a pretty big favor, and in the end who did it end up costing?
There are so many things that make the Black family structure a lil different from other cultural backgrounds. Blacks have the highest rate of unreported adoptions for one. That means to say that African-Americans quite regularly take in cousins, nieces, or grandchildren to raise as their own. In the case of Essie Mae Washington she moved from her mother’s care at six months old into the household of her aunt and uncle, even taking their last name.
Is this familial structure wholly natural, or does it instead point to the legacy of slavery and its broken families? How often did a child arrive on a new plantation, farm or American home to begin his life torn from his mother by auction, bet or even a simple letter? Can this history provide an understanding of the differences between White and Black cultures when dealing with illegitimate offspring and the responsibilities of such? Or does a thread of oppression extend a silence unbroken by the still unfree?
Washington-Williams who has several grown children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren has said that she didn’t “want anyone to know she had an illegitimate father”. In our patriarchal society that passes property down through its male lines, our badly drawn racial boundaries depend on her silence. The cost to Essie May Washington-Williams was a lifetime of lies and a sacrifice that our newly “colorblind” society accepts without even recognizing her life signifies a coming reckoning for the racial politics of this country. Just take a look around you.