USA Today: Strom Thurmond's biracial daughter sheds life of secrecy [View All]

[truthpusher]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-01-26-thurmond-cover_x.htm?csp=34

Posted 1/26/2005 11:17 PM Updated 1/26/2005 11:18 PM



Strom Thurmond's biracial daughter sheds life of secrecy
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.

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