Mixed Race Studies

Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond

HarperCollins
2005
240 pages
Trimsize: 6 x 9
Trade Paperback ISBN: 9780060761424; ISBN10: 0060761423

Essie Mae Washington-Williams and William Stadiem

Breaking nearly eight decades of silence, Essie Mae Washington-Williams comes forward with a story of unique historical magnitude and incredible human drama. Her father, the late Strom Thurmond, was once the nation’s leading voice for racial segregation (one of his signature political achievements was his 24-hour filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, done in the name of saving 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 explosively changing times of the civil rights movement, this poignant memoir recalls how she struggled with the discrepancy between the father she knew—one who was financially generous, supportive of her education, even affectionate—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 nuanced, fascinating portrait of a father who counseled his daughter about her dreams and goals, and supported her in reaching them–but who was unwilling to break with the values of his Dixiecrat constituents.

With elegance, dignity, and candor, Washington-Williams gives us a chapter of American history as it has never been written before—told in a voice that will be heard and cherished by future generations.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams dies at 87; black daughter of segregationist Strom Thurmond

The Los Angeles Times
2013-02-04

Elaine Woo

In 2003 the retired L.A. schoolteacher unburdened herself of a secret: Her father was Sen. Strom Thurmond, the legendary South Carolina politician who had built a career as a champion of segregation.

A week before Christmas in 2003, a retired Los Angeles schoolteacher stood before a phalanx of news cameras and 250 reporters in a South Carolina ballroom and declared, “I am Essie Mae Washington-Williams, and at last I am completely free.”
 
After more than 60 years, Washington-Williams had chosen to unburden herself of a secret: that she, a black woman, had been fathered by a white man — Sen. Strom Thurmond, the legendary South Carolina politician who had built a long Washington career as a champion of segregation.
 
Thurmond had died five months earlier at age 100, having never acknowledged that his liaison with a family maid when he was 22 had produced a daughter. At 78, Washington-Williams decided she owed it to history to speak up.

“My children ultimately convinced me that history needed to know about Thurmond and that I should set the record straight,” she wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2003. “I am not doing this for money. I am not suing his estate. I just want to tell the truth.”
 
Washington-Williams, 87, died Monday of natural causes in Columbia, S.C., said her attorney, Frank K. Wheaton. After more than 40 years in Los Angeles, she moved back to South Carolina a few years ago when her health began to deteriorate…

Read the entire obituary here.

Paranoid Interpretation, Desire’s Nonobject, and Nella Larsen’s “Passing”

PMLA (Publication of the Modern Language Association)
Volume 119, Number 2 (March, 2004)
pages 282-295

Brian Carr

Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) has occasioned a great deal of paranoid interpretation, in large part because the novel is about nothing. I use nothing in the sense of no thing or a non-object, both of which are irreducible to the familiar meaning of nothing as inconsequential or strictly nonexistent.’ In the framework of paranoid interpretation, desire and knowledge imaginarily coincide with an object much that everything, imagined to include nothing, becomes something. Paranoid interpretation is less a property of Passingthan a transactional dynamic between the novel and the critical work on it, a dynamic activated in large part by many critics’ “hateloving” attachment to Passing’scentral character, Irene Redfield. Reading Irene’s interpretations of her life as paranoid delusions, many critics have an inverted and corrective investment in her. As if to resolve yet sustain Irene’s wild interpretations, the contemporary scholarly archive on Passing is virtually unified in its belief that her paranoid apprehensions can be submitted to a proper reading that will furnish the positive knowledge Irene systematically misses.

Critics are not strictly wrong in their characterization of Irene as, in Deborah E. McDowell’s words, “clearly deluded” (xxvi). And yet, the fact that many critics work to procure for themselves the clarity they need to assign paranoid delusion to Irene leads one to wonder, how “deluded” are the critics? If paranoia, through delusion, converts nothing into something, the bulk of the critical work on Passing is in reach of paranoia, since the work, too, impulsively confounds something with nothing, truth with what at best can be only half told, desire with what Kaja Silvermanaptly calls its “impossible nonobject”(39). Critics often find that Irene’s delusional mentality and Larsen’s manifest text of racial passing and heterosexual jealousy collaborate to occlude a latent homosexuality, which neither Larson nor…