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| Civil Rights activist Essie Mae Washington-Williams died in Columbia, South Carolina. It was confirmed by her family. |
Black History Month is a part of American history. Today we learned that the "love child" of 1948 United States presidential candidate and formerly devout segregationist Strom Thurmond passed away today! It's been about 10 years since the death of the South Carolina senator who rose to fame as the southern politician who had a hate of integration and Civil Rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
James Strom Thurmond was born on December 5, 1902 in the Edgefield, South Carolina. He was an American politician who served for 48 years as a United States Senator. He also ran for the Presidency of the United States in 1948 as the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party (Dixiecrat) candidate, receiving 2.4% of the popular vote and 39 electoral votes. He was the 103rd governor of the state of South Carolina.
Thurmond represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1954 until 2003. Originally he started as a Democrat. After the Democratic Party supported the landmark Civil Rights Act, Thurmond conversion to Republican came. He switched because of his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, disaffection with the national party, and support for the conservatism of the Republican presidential candidate and Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.
He left office as the only senator to reach the age of 100 while still in office and as the oldest-serving and longest-serving senator in U.S. history (although he was later surpassed in length of service by Robert Byrd and Daniel Inouye).
Thurmond holds the record at 14 years as the longest-serving Dean of the United States Senate in U.S. history.
In opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957, he conducted the longest filibuster ever by a lone senator, at 24 hours and 18 minutes in length, nonstop.
In the 1960s, he opposed the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965 to end segregation and enforce the voting rights of African-American citizens. He always insisted he had never been a racist, but was opposed to excessive federal authority.
He notably was quoted as saying that "all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement."
He attributed the movement for integration to Communist agitators.
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| Essie Mae Washington-Williams meets with people. |
Starting in the 1970s, he moderated his position on race, but continued to defend his early segregationist campaigns on the basis of states' rights in the context of Southern society at the time, never fully renouncing his earlier viewpoints.
Six months after Thurmond's death in 2003, it was revealed that at age 22, he had fathered a mixed-race daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, with his family's maid, Carrie Butler, a 16-year-old black girl.
Although Thurmond never publicly acknowledged Essie Mae, he paid for her education at a historically black college and passed other money to her for some time. His children by his marriage eventually acknowledged their father bore a child outside of marriage.
TPM reports that Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the biracial daughter of the former presidential candidate who ran on the segregationist platform of the Dixiecrat Party. The Dixiecrats were conservative based group of Democrats who supported Jim Crow legislation to keep separate facilities for Whites and non-White citizens.
Washington was the natural daughter of Carrie Butler, who was 16 when her daughter was born, and Strom Thurmond, then 22. Butler worked for his parents as a domestic servant. She sent her daughter from South Carolina to her older sister Mary and her husband John Henry Washington to be raised in Coatesville, Pennsylvania.
She was named Essie after another of Carrie's sisters, who fostered her briefly as an infant. Growing up, Essie Mae lived with a cousin seven years older than she, who she believed was her half-brother.
Washington was unaware of the identity of her biological parents until 1941, when she was 16, when her mother told her and took her to meet Thurmond in person.
Washington-Williams and her mother met infrequently with Thurmond after that, although they had some contact for years.
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| Strom Thurmond |
After high school, Washington-Williams worked as a nurse at Harlem Hospital in New York City, and took a course in business education at New York University.
She did not live in the segregated South until 1942, when she started college at South Carolina State University (SCSU), a historically black college. Thurmond paid for her college education. After having grown up in Pennsylvania, Washington was shocked by the racial restrictions of the South. She graduated from SCSU around 1946 with a degree in business.
When Washington-Williams announced her family connection, it was acknowledged by the Thurmond family.
In 2004 the state legislature approved the addition of her name to the list of Thurmond children on a monument for Senator Thurmond on the South Carolina Statehouse grounds.
Washington-Williams said she would apply for membership in the United Daughters of the Confederacy, based on her heritage through Thurmond to ancestors who fought as Confederate soldiers. She encouraged other African Americans to do so as well, in the interests of exploring their heritage and promoting a more inclusive view of Southern history among lineage societies. She said,
"It is important for all Americans to have the opportunity to know and understand their bloodline. Through my father's line, I am fortunate to trace my heritage back to the birth of our nation and beyond. On my mother's side, like most African-Americans, my history is broken by the course of human events."
The lineage society is for female descendants of Confederate veterans of the American Civil War. As her father Thurmond had been a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, she could use his completed genealogical documentation of links to participating ancestor(s). She also intended to join the Daughters of the American Revolution.
In 2005, Washington-Williams was awarded an honorary Ph.D. in education from South Carolina State University at Orangeburg when she was invited to speak at their commencement ceremony. That year she had published a memoir, Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond (2005), written with William Stadiem. It explored her sense of dislocation based on her mixed heritage, as well as going to college in the segregated South after having grown up in Pennsylvania.
It was nominated for both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize.
Washington-Williams said that she intended to be active on behalf of the Black Patriots Foundation, which was raising funds to build a monument on the National Mall in Washington D.C. to honor American blacks who served in the American Revolutionary War.
Her death brought forth a legacy shattered by the notion of a colorblind society. Even though Strom Thurmond legacy was marred with controversy, I guess before he had died, he had a change of heart!
He voted in favor for the national recognition of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of National Service.
He voted for the James Brady Law in which it banned semi-automatic firearms.
He went on to hire his first Black staffer in 1971.
Thurmond still supported state's rights but toned down his rhetoric in later years. He was a big contributor to Ronald Reagan's electoral victory over Jimmy Carter, the incumbent president of the late 1970s. Thurmond was friends with late senators Ted Kennedy, Daniel Inouye, and Robert Byrd.
In 2002, then U.S. Majority Leader Trent Lott, the Republican from Mississippi caused a firestorm. While he attended the birthday of Thurmond. He fell from power after praising Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist Dixiecrat presidential bid. Lott said: "When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either.
That was the last controversy for Thurmond before he died later into 2003.
Essie Mae Washington-Williams didn't want to ruin her father's legacy as a decent man! She give him the opportunity to change his ways before he would have died. And today, I think her father would have been proud to have to see her help people of color succeed in America.
Today the United States has the first Black president and two members* of the United States senate who are Black. Ceiling are broken and legacies will be born!
We here at Journal de la Reyna send our condolences to the family of Essie Mae Williams-Washington.
Sidenote:
Democrat Barack Obama is the current President of The United States. He was elected to become the president in 2008. Previously Obama was previously elected as a United States senator from Illinois. Obama successfully won reelection in 2012 and is the first Black president. He was born by an African man and American white woman.
*Republican Senator Tim Scott was appointed to represent South Carolina after Jim DeMint resigned to become the president of the Heritage Foundation.
*Democrat Senator Mo Cowan was appointed to represent Massachusetts after John Kerry resigned to become the Secretary of State.
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The liberal wing of the Democratic Party continues to be at odds with the conservative wing of the party.
As we continue into modern politics, the Democrats from the South, Midwest and Mountains West are scared shitless. The conservative U.S. Senate Democrats from North Carolina, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Montana, Alaska, Nevada, Louisiana, Arkansas, Colorado, North Dakota and South Dakota are scared of the vindictive National Rifle Assocation over firearm regulations.
This week alone we have seen incidents that involved firearms. Many Americans lose their lives due to unregistered firearms in the hands of people who have mental issues.
From the comments on social networks to the guy holed up in the bunker, the gun nuts are out! The Republican, the NRA and conservatives relish in this paranoid fantasy that President Barack Obama is mounting a full-scale war against the Second Amendment.
They can't even accept the fact the president shoots a firearm. The Republicans and their conservative allies continue to waste their time and energy fighting a culture war. As the president keeps laying out traps, as expected they'll fall through them.
How many more people must lose their lives?
Is your firearm more important than your life?
How many Americans died at the hands of a gun?
