All Strom's Children: Gender, Race, and Memory in the Modern South

     This essay analyzes the public reaction to the 2003 revelation by Essie Mae Washington-Williams that she was the daughter of U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond.  Despite some criticism, the press largely celebrated Washington-Williams for her restraint and lack of bitterness towards Thurmond.  This fact coupled with the family’s acknowledgement of her claim made for an uplifting narrative that cast Thurmond’s life and legacy in a new, more flattering light.  Adding to this perception was Washington-Williams’ memoir, published in 2005, which bore no grudges and presented Thurmond as a tragic figure, a lovelorn victim of a racist society that would not allow him to pursue his true feelings for Washington-Williams’ mother.  The tone of the memoir is celebratory.  Having unburdened herself of her long held secret, Washington-Williams is free to embrace her complicated past and celebrate her racial difference.
     Both the public commentary and Washington-Williams’ memoir show how celebrations of difference in an assumedly “post-racial” period offer an important perspective on the South in the national political imagery at the beginning of the twenty-first century.  Washington-Williams’ story must be placed within a longer tradition in the American South in which African Americans were celebrated for their loyalty to powerful whites.  This reading, combined with a consideration of Strom Thurmond’s “other children”—his white southern political progeny whose anti-government conservative ideology, forged in the battle against civil rights liberals and an activist federal government, helped remake the Republican Party in the 1980s and 90s—undermines the triumphant tone implicit in many of the accounts of Washington-Williams’ story.  In doing so, this essay re-connects Strom Thurmond’s life and legacy with a longer history of gender strife and racial polarization in the Jim Crow South.