Synopses & Reviews
In
Dear Senator, Essie Mae Washington-Williams daughter of the late Senator Strom Thurmond breaks her lifelong silence and tells the story of her life. Hers is a story seven decades in the making, yet one whose unique historical importance has only recently been revealed. Until the age of sixteen, Washington-Williams assumed that the aunt and uncle who raised her in Pennsylvania were her parents. The revelation of her true parents' identities was a shock that changed the course of her life. Her father, the longtime senator from South Carolina, was once the nation's leading voice for racial segregation; he ran for president on a segregationist ticket in 1948 and once mounted a twenty-four-hour filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 in the name of saving the South from mongrelization. Her mother was Carrie Butler, a black teenager who worked as a maid on the Thurmond family's South Carolina plantation.
Set against the explosively changing times of the civil rights movement, Washington-Williams's memoir reveals a brave young woman who struggled with the discrepancy between the father she knew one who was financially generous, supportive of her education, even affectionate and the old Southern politician, railing against greater racial equality, who refused to acknowledge their relationship in public. She describes what it felt like to face overt racism, especially in the slow-to-change South, despite the fact that her father was the most powerful politician in Dixie. From her richly told narrative emerges a nuanced, fascinating portrait of a father who counseled his daughter about her goals, and supported her in reaching them but who was ultimately unwilling to break with the values of his Dixiecrat constituents.
With elegance, candor, and spirit, Essie Mae Washington-Williams gives us a chapter of American history as it has never been written before told in a voice that will be heard and cherished by generations.
Review
"[T]his memoir has its own voice and its own perspective. It's the story of a woman whose sense of her heritage is poignant, strangely distorted and hard-won indeed." Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Synopsis
The illegitimate daughter of Strom Thurmond and one of his family's black maids reveals her complicated yet devoted relationship with a father who epitomized the Old Southern resistance to racial equality. 16-page color photo insert.
About the Author
Essie Mae Washington-Williams worked as a teacher in the Los Angeles school district for twenty-seven years. The mother of four children, grandmother of thirteen, and great-grandmother of four, she lives in Los Angeles.