A Very Grand Opening

My skin crawls everytime I read anything about Strom Thurmond and the daughter born of a relationship between he and the family maid's daughter. He lived a full life to age 100, while this woman feels that her life began at 78.

"Thurmond said segregation laws were needed to protect the purity of the races.

'I wasn't sure if this was my father talking or the ghost of Adolf Hitler,' she wrote.

When Thurmond ran for president as the State's Rights Party candidate during the 1948 election, he said: 'All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the army cannot force the Negro race into our theaters, our swimming pools, our schools, our churches, our homes.'

Nearly a decade later, he set the Senate record for filibustering when he spoke against a bill to end discrimination in housing.

On one visit, Williams asked Thurmond how he could say such things about blacks. She said blacks were treated unfairly, but he defended it as the culture and custom of the South.

Over the decades, Williams tried to reconcile the fiery politician with the man who treated her kindly, providing money for her and her family.

'It's not that Strom Thurmond ever swore me to secrecy. He never swore me to anything. He trusted me, and I respected him, and we loved each other in our deeply repressed ways, and that was our social contract,' she wrote.
Thurmond eventually softened his political stance and renounced racism.

Williams, who taught in public schools for 27 years, said Thurmond's death in 2003 at age 100 left her unsettled. Her own daughter encouraged her to make her story public, and Thurmond's family soon acknowledged her heritage. "In a way, my life began at 78, at least my life as who I really was, without the subterfuges of the previous 65 years," Williams wrote. "I may have called it 'closure,' but it was much more like an opening, a very grand opening."

As disgusting as it is, people manage to give Thurmond credit because he threw his child a few dollars while she was growing up. But, no doubt, those dollars couldn't pay for the years of being denied her heritage and birth rite and the ever present knowledge that her father considered she and her mother - through words and deeds - second class citizens.

I wonder if he's resting comfortably in a special place in hell?