Strom's secret offense

Chicago Tribune: When Strom Thurmond died at age 100 last June, the South Carolinian was recalled as the longest-serving member of the U.S. Senate, a once-fiery opponent to civil rights laws, a father of four.
Now the world knows that Thurmond clung to a secret. He sired five children, not four.
Essie Mae Washington-Williams, a 78-year-old retired teacher from Los Angeles, confirmed this week what had been suspected for years: She is the late senator's daughter, never publicly recognized because her mother was black.
In telling her story, Williams has displayed uncommon grace. Though she once suffered through bankruptcy, she seeks no part in her deserved share of Thurmond's estate, once valued at $2 million.
Thurmond's family was decent enough to acknowledge a family tie about which they must have long known. Thurmond's nephew, chief bankruptcy judge for South Carolina, now says that for years he served as a go-between for money dispatched by the senator for Williams.
The grace of his family has somewhat softened the public criticism of Thurmond. People in his home state apparently are reluctant even to say he was a hypocrite for preaching racial segregation while bedding a black woman.
Hypocrite
Of course he was a hypocrite. But he was much more than that. He was a sexual predator. Carrie Butler was just 16 when Thurmond's unacknowledged child was born. She was a maid in the grand Thurmond home who lived in a dirt-poor section of Edgefield, S.C. He was a 22-year-old college graduate living at the time with his prominent parents, preparing for a law career that would see him elected governor and U.S. senator. He was old enough to know that what he was doing was wrong. She almost certainly knew that refusing the son of her employer would carry grave consequences.
The nation's history and Thurmond himself make this a tale of rich, resounding ironies. He suffered no consequences for preying on the family maid. Yet black men in young Thurmond's Deep South were hanged just for looking the wrong way at the wrong woman. Let's see, Emmett Till was murdered because he allegedly whistled at a white woman about 30 years after Strom Thurmond bedded Carrie Butler.
While some in this country were fighting institutionalized racism stemming from slavery, Thurmond resisted.