1.29.2005
Strom Thurmond's Biracial Daughter Sheds Life of Secrecy (Yahoo! News--USA Today)
By Wendy Koch, USA TODAY
The daughter grew up in a house without indoor plumbing, rode the back of the bus and attended a college for blacks only.
The father was raised in a stately home with black servants - one of them her mother - and later became South Carolina's governor and ran for president, espousing racial segregation.
One family, two Americas.
The story of Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the biracial daughter of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, reveals how two people, bound by blood and duty, lived separate, unequal lives. They developed a limited relationship that, despite the anguish it caused her, she kept secret his entire life.
"I did love my father. He was very good to us," Washington-Williams, 79, says in an interview to promote today's release of her autobiography, Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond.
She first disclosed that he was her father to The Washington Post in December 2003, six months after he died. The Thurmond family has since acknowledged her as his daughter, and her name was added last year to a Thurmond monument on the statehouse grounds in Columbia, S.C., alongside the names of his white children.
(More ... Yahoo! News - Strom Thurmond's biracial daughter sheds life of secrecy) ¶ 16:28
The daughter grew up in a house without indoor plumbing, rode the back of the bus and attended a college for blacks only.
The father was raised in a stately home with black servants - one of them her mother - and later became South Carolina's governor and ran for president, espousing racial segregation.
One family, two Americas.
The story of Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the biracial daughter of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, reveals how two people, bound by blood and duty, lived separate, unequal lives. They developed a limited relationship that, despite the anguish it caused her, she kept secret his entire life.
"I did love my father. He was very good to us," Washington-Williams, 79, says in an interview to promote today's release of her autobiography, Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond.
She first disclosed that he was her father to The Washington Post in December 2003, six months after he died. The Thurmond family has since acknowledged her as his daughter, and her name was added last year to a Thurmond monument on the statehouse grounds in Columbia, S.C., alongside the names of his white children.
(More ... Yahoo! News - Strom Thurmond's biracial daughter sheds life of secrecy) ¶ 16:28
