Free at Last: The secret of Esie Mae Washington Williams is out, but she still doesn’t have full control over her story

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, United States, Women on 2010-02-07 21:14Z by Steven

Free at Last: The secret of Esie Mae Washington Williams is out, but she still doesn’t have full control over her story

Bloomington Herald-Times
2004-02-14
Courtesy of: Black Film Center/Archive
Indiana University

Audrey T. McCluskey, Director Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center
Indiana University

After 78 years of harboring a less than well-kept secret, Essie Mae Washington-Williams proclaimed that by publicly naming South Carolina‘s Strom Thurmond, the once fiery segregationist senator and Dixiecrat presidential candidate as her father, for the first time she felt “completely free.” Her story garnered massive news coverage, not because the sexual exploitation of her 16-year-old black mother, Carrie Butler, by the 22-year-old Thurmond in whose household Butler worked as a maid was different from numerous other examples of lustful hypocrisy. The attention came because the late senator built his career on virulent racism, espousing the evils of race-mixing before moderating those views after he was well past his political prime. The kind of hateful rhetoric that Thurmond was good at caused many black men to lose their lives at the end of a rope, strung from a Poplar or Pecan or Live Oak tree. Their crime? It was to be accused of a liaison with a white woman or even of taking a wayward glance at one…

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