STANLEY CROUCH Silence on Thurmond aided bigotry in U.S.

Now Strom Thurmond, with his black daughter, has joined up with Thomas Jefferson in the "Southern White Man's Sexual Follies," which have gone on for quite some time.
You may recall that after years of heated debate and arrogant denials, recent DNA evidence proved that one of the slaveholding Founding Fathers was sneaking over the fence to get next to a black woman in an erotic way.
Now, of course, old Tom is catching hell from all of those who wish to bring him down to normal size, which is to say to the size of a racist redneck with highfalutin ways and good words but bad deeds. I think that's going a bit far.
Jefferson was a racist who owned slaves and who fathered children by at least one. But he was also a genius whose ideas about American democracy have far outlasted his affairs on the black end of the street. He helped provide the tools that eventually would tear down slavery. So boo for the bad guy, but hooray for the thinker. Hard for some to swallow, but that's the way life goes.
Race card
Strom Thurmond, on the other hand, was either a bigot or an opportunist who played the race card to achieve power through those who would elect him to office, where he could fight "the lost cause" as long as possible. He would defend the good old Southern segregated traditions and argue against such things as the Negro getting too close to that white woman because ... well, you know.
But Thurmond did some fence-hopping himself, and that leap into the lap of a black woman resulted in a child whom he sent to school, visited at college and, essentially, paid nearly a million dollars to keep her mouth shut. Now, however, she has come out, perhaps because the checks have stopped arriving and there is no need to hold back the truth.
'Closure'
When it was time to talk, Essie Mae Washington Williams kept her mouth shut. Now she and her family want "closure." Well, isn't that nice? What she should do is ask the forgiveness of the entire United States, since her silence aided one of those who, at his worst moments, embodied every single thing this country has had to fight against to raise itself up from hard-core bigotry.
So take your "closure," lady. I hope you can live with it.
X Stanley Crouch is a columnist for the New York Daily News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.