STROM THURMOND Family acknowledges mixed-race daughter

The woman said Thurmond had given her regular cash payments.
WASHINGTON POST
After decades of denials, the family of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., acknowledged Monday a claim made by a 78-year-old Los Angeles schoolteacher that she is the senator's mixed-race daughter, a charge that had dogged her throughout her otherwise quiet life and shadowed Thurmond during his public career as a leading voice of racial segregation.
"As J. Strom Thurmond has passed away and cannot speak for himself, the Thurmond family acknowledges Ms. Essie Mae Washington-Williams' claim to her heritage," the lawyer for the Thurmond estate, J. Mark Taylor, said in a brief statement in Columbia, S.C. "We hope this acknowledgment will bring closure for Ms. Williams."
Taylor told reporters he spoke for the Thurmond family but refused to answer questions about the lifelong relationship between Thurmond and Williams.
She disclosed to The Washington Post in an interview last week that she had received regular cash payments from the senator since college. When the senator's health began to fail, an unnamed close relative stepped in as the conduit for payments, Williams said. Thurmond, whose political life spanned 75 years, died in June at 100.
The quiet acknowledgement of Williams' claims comes as her lawyer, Frank K. Wheaton of Los Angeles, prepares for a Wednesday news conference in Columbia in which he plans to reveal documents and other details about the elaborate secrecy surrounding the relationship.
Wheaton said that when he told his client of the family's acknowledgment Monday, "Ms. Williams shed a sigh of relief. She said, 'I'm happy and very much surprised.'" Wheaton added that Williams may not release her alleged evidence because of the announcement. "There may be no need," he said.
Williams had said that, at the urging of her children, she wanted to disclose the relationship to "bring closure" to the issue during her lifetime. Wheaton insisted that she had no plans to make a claim against the senator's estate, which is now being settled in probate court.
But comments made by Wheaton and his legal associates in South Carolina had suggested other, more volatile legal strategies, including the filing of a paternity suit and a call for DNA testing, if the family challenged her claim. Wheaton had said they would go to "whatever extent" necessary to prove paternity, and in recent days, he dodged reporters' questions about whether those tactics could include a request for exhumation of the senator's remains, buried at a family plot in South Carolina.
Williams' lawyers said exhumation might not be required for DNA evidence since Thurmond had regularly submitted blood samples for medical treatment and he has three surviving children by his widow, Nancy Moore Thurmond.
The risk of family embarrassment included possible political impact on the career of J. Strom Thurmond Jr., his oldest son, who, with his father's help and over objections about his lack of experience, became the state's youngest U.S. attorney in 2001.