Ferris Bueller:

This episode in Senator Thurmond's life is interesting to me.  I can imagine that he was conflicted about it through most of his life.

From what I read (the Internet is not always reliable) Storm Thurmond had an illegitimate daughter with Carrie Butler in 1925.  At the time Carrie Butler (an African-American woman) was working as a maid in the Thurmond family home.  Storm Thurmond was 22 and Carrie Butler was 16.  Their daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, was supported by Thurmond through much of her life.  Thurmond paid for her college education and in 1946 she graduated in business from South Carolina State University.  Later she went on to get a master's degree in education and became a teacher in Califormia in the 1960's.

Thurmond fiercely campaigned for seggragation and against the Civil Rights Act of 1957.  When his daughter approached him about it, he apparently brushed off her complaints.  I think he must have been conflicted about it for much of his life.  If one believes Senator Thurmond's family claims, he loved his daughter and cared for and supported her.  She was born when he was very young, before he became a politician.

I would not be surprised if his support of seggregation came as a result of his own sense of shame over having had a relationship with an African American woman, and wanting to maintain some sense of the master-slave mentality.  Before slavery was abolished it was not uncommon for owners of slaves to father children with their African female slaves.  In the culture of slavery such relationships were considered unacceptable, but they happened nevertheless.

Thurmond did moderate his views later in life.  I think that once the Civil Rights Act was passed, he did not need to maintain the same dogged fight for seggregation, or some pretense of it.

After Senator Thurmond died in 2003 his daughter publicly revealed her parentage.  His daughter claimed that she did not reveal it during his lifetime because it was not of any advantage to her or to her father and that she had kept silent out of love and respect for her father.  At first those who supported Thurmond spoke out against her.  Joe Wilson was one of them.  He said that he doubted that she was telling the truth and that she was trying to diminish Senator Thrumond's legacy.  After Thrumond's family acknowledged the truth, Wilson was forced to publicly apologize.

To me, if there is a reason why racism and seggregation are bad, it is a story like this.  The fact that a father and a daughter had to spend their entire lives away from each other, merely exchanging money.  All because of skin color.  It is one of the destructive things that racism does.  It divides human beings and turns them into something they should never be.

I don't know if Joe Wilson is a racist, but when it comes to other people family life, it is better to be silent.  If wilson made a mistake here, it was to pass judgement blindly.  I wonder if his objection would have been the same if Thurmond's daughter had been Caucasian.