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Title details for Dear Senator by Essie Mae Washington-Williams - Available

Dear Senator

A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond

by Essie Mae Washington-Williams
William Stadiem
ebook
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In this historically momentous memoir, the segregationist senator’s mixed-race daughter speaks out about her life in the shadows.
Breaking nearly eight decades of silence, Essie Mae Washington–Williams comes forward with the dramatic story of her life. Her father, the late Strom Thurmond, had been the nation’s leading proponent of racial segregation. He famously undertook a twenty-four–hour filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, a desperate attempt to save the South from “mongrelization”. Her mother, however, was a black teenager named Carrie Butler who worked as a maid on the Thurmond family’s South Carolina plantation.
Set against the explosive civil rights era, this poignant memoir recalls how Essie Mae struggled with the discrepancy between the generous and even affectionate father she knew privately, and the Old Southern politician, railing against greater racial equality, who refused to acknowledge her publicly. From her richly told narrative, as well as the letters she and Thurmond wrote to each other over the years, emerges a fascinating portrait of a father who counseled and supported his daughter, yet would not break with the values of his Dixiecrat constituents.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 18, 2023

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

      • ISBN: 9780061743085

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780061743085

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780061743085
      • File size: 1034 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 3, 2005
      "Every girls wants her daddy," says the recently revealed daughter of an affair between 23-year-old Strom Thurmond and the family's 15-year-old black maid, "and I wanted mine." In this surprising and sometimes poignant memoir, Washington-Williams reveals how, when she was 16, she learned that her real father was "a handsome, charming, and rich white lawyer." Washington-Williams was raised by an aunt; her biological mother, who died at 38 in a hospital's poverty ward, rarely appears. But Washington-Williams fashions her a kind of love story: "I knew loved my mother. I believed he loved me, after his fashion." His fashion, as he lives out his political career—governor, presidential candidate, senator—involves surreptitious visits marked by vacuous advice and extravagant gifts. Much that others might have found bitter is given a rosy spin: as a great-aunt remembers slavery, "The massahs all looked after their children, no matter who birthed them." As Washington-Williams has it, Robert E. Lee was a "great American" and "Strom Thurmond turned out to be right about a lot of things, though segregation wasn't one of them." Washington-Williams asserts, "I am every bit as white as I am black, and it is my full intention to drink the nectar of both goblets," and notes that she has sought to join the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Readers are left to sort out the contradictions for themselves. Photos.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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