Essie Mae Washington-Williams, 1925–2013

The black daughter of a famed segregationist

Essie Mae Washington-Williams didn’t air her secret until she was 78. In December 2003, the retired public school teacher revealed what she had kept hidden her entire life—that she, a black woman, was the unacknowledged daughter of white segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. “At last,” she said, “I am completely free.”

Washington-Williams was born to Carrie Butler, a maid who worked in Thurmond’s family home in Edgefield, S.C., said the Los Angeles Times. Her mother was 16 at the time of her birth, and Thurmond was 22. She was 16 herself when her mother took her to meet her father for the first time in his law office. Thurmond said she resembled his sisters, but “that was as close as he got to acknowledging they were kin.”

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