Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond

By Essie Mae Washington-Williams and William Stadiem

In this historically momentous memoir, the segregationist senator’s mixed-race daughter speaks out about her life in the shadows.

Breaking nearly eight decades of silence, Essie Mae Washington–Williams comes forward with the dramatic story of her life. Her father, the late Strom Thurmond, had been the nation’s leading proponent of racial segregation. He famously undertook a twenty-four–hour filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, a desperate attempt to save the South from “mongrelization”. Her mother, however, was a black teenager named Carrie Butler who worked as a maid on the Thurmond family’s South Carolina plantation.

Set against the explosive civil rights era, this poignant memoir recalls how Essie Mae struggled with the discrepancy between the generous and even affectionate father she knew privately, and the Old Southern politician, railing against greater racial equality, who refused to acknowledge her publicly. From her richly told narrative, as well as the letters she and Thurmond wrote to each other over the years, emerges a fascinating portrait of a father who counseled and supported his daughter, yet would not break with the values of his Dixiecrat constituents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061743085

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Summer of ’38

I ALWAYS THOUGHT I had a fairly normal childhood, until I found out my parents weren’t who I thought they were. I grew up in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, a small town in the hills along the Brandywine River on the threshold of the rich farmland of the Amish country. We were only forty miles from Philadelphia, and the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad ran through our town. And yet Philadelphia might as well have been the moon. That was the Big City. Coatesville was nowhere, but for a little girl it was everywhere—it was all I had and all I knew. Coatesville was what was considered a one-horse town, but that horse was a very powerful steed called steel. The Lukens Steel Company dominated everything about our town. Its dozens of soaring smokestacks dominated the skyline. They were our own skyscrapers. Even the smoke belching from those enormous stacks was a point of pride, not pollution. That pungent, thick, black soot meant the mills were working full blast, that the little town was booming. It was the smell of money.

Like most men in Coatesville, my father, John Henry Washington, worked for the steel mills. Bethlehem Steel and Worth Brothers Steel had huge plants in Coatesville, but the colossus was Lukens Steel. Like an industrial octopus, Lukens had devoured its rivals and made them its own. The matriarch of the business was a legendary local character named Rebecca Lukens, known as The Woman of Steel. She was an independent woman, far ahead of her time, a Pennsylvania version of a steel magnolia. Rebecca was the driving force behind the expansion of her family’s Brandywine Iron Works into an international powerhouse. She was one of the first women in America to run a major company, and her daughter married a man named Huston. When I was growing up, the Hustons were Coatesville’s first family. They lived in a grand manor house called Terracina and were to Coatesville what the Kennedys or the Rockefellers are to America. Despite the small size of the town (15,000 people), I never met a Huston, and, by the same token, I never aspired to become a woman of steel. American women today have those sort of huge have it all ambitions, but growing up black during the Great Depression, I was perfectly happy to dream about becoming a nurse. That was a pretty big deal at the time, and I was more ambitious than most.

My mother, or at least the woman who I thought was my mother, kept house, while daddy worked on the assembly line. Mother had worked as a picker in the cotton fields of South Carolina and said that was enough hard labor for two lifetimes. I had a half-brother, Calvin Burton, who was my mother’s son by a previous relationship, which I later learned was not an actual marriage. Calvin was seven years older than I, and by the time I was thirteen, in 1938, he had left home to live in New York City. I had fantasies of following him there, to become a nurse in a big city hospital, but these were only fantasies. At thirteen, I still hadn’t gotten to Philadelphia.

We lived in a small, two-story, three-bedroom row house in a neighborhood called The Spruces, named after the tree, which was populated by other black steelworkers. Most of them, like my family, hailed from the South. I had my own room, which seemed like a castle to me. The house was heated with coal stoves, and there was no running water or any bathrooms. We had to use an outhouse in the back and take tub baths in the bedroom using water we’d carry from an outside pump. It sounds primitive, but it seemed normal then, although the winters were awfully cold, and the day of the week the big sanitation trucks would come to clean the outhouses was the smelliest day you could imagine. We’d all try to stay away from home on that day. I remember visiting the home of a white girlfriend. The house wasn’t any nicer than ours, but it did have an indoor toilet. It seemed like the ultimate in high technology at the time.

I’ll never forget the wonderful dinners we’d have: fried chicken, biscuits, lots of fresh vegetables, and the sweetest pies made with local peaches, strawberries, apples, and plums. Every night was like Thanksgiving. My mother, who was tall and slim and a great cook, always wore a kerchief around her head. That seemed old-fashioned at the time, as did her habit of chewing tobacco and expelling it into a spittoon. I gathered that it was an old southern custom she’d brought with her. I didn’t question her about it. In fact, I didn’t tend to question things at all. My parents were of the children should be seen and not heard school. As a little girl I started out quite chatty, but one day my mother warned me that mouth of yours can get you into trouble, after which I learned to keep it shut.

We never talked much at those fine dinners, partly because we were all listening to the radio all through the meal. That was our ear to the world. Despite all the bad news that seemed to be coming through the airwaves—the seemingly endless Depression, the rise of the Nazis in Europe, disasters like the Hindenburg airship explosion—the feeling around the table was very positive. My father, a handsome man who always came to the table after a hard, dusty day at the mills immaculate and smelling deliciously of soap and cologne, always said a blessing of thanks, for the food, for his job, for his wonderful family, and for funny or odd things, like Shirley Temple, or Charlie Chan, or Heinz ketchup. And then we’d listen to comedy shows like Edgar Bergen and his puppet Charlie McCarthy or the big band music of Benny Goodman. There wasn’t much need to talk; the radio said it all.

And then came 1938—a big year for me for a lot of reasons. First of all, my parents got divorced. My father, apparently, was not only a hard worker but also a hard drinker, haunting the many taverns of our town, rarely during the week but frequently on weekends. Steelworking and hard drinking seemed to go hand in hand. Prohibition had ended in a big way, and there was a bar or whiskey house on every corner, many of which seemed to have been frequented by my father. There were no problems at home that I ever noticed, but there must have been plenty. One day, daddy was gone, and I never saw or spoke to him again. In keeping with my mother’s philosophy of the fewer questions, the better, I never asked her about my father’s departure, much as I would have loved to do so. Nor did she sit me down for a heart-to-heart about why he left. He was gone, and that was that. I missed the confident, comforting masculine presence of my father. He made me feel safe in an increasingly turbulent world. I felt lost without him but learned to keep that kind of emotion deeply to myself, and eventually the pain died down.

Not too long afterward, my mother remarried. My new stepfather, James Bowman, wasn’t as tall or handsome as my real father, John Henry Washington, but he had the virtue, at least in my mother’s eyes, of not drinking. He also was a devout churchgoer, which daddy was not. Because he was one of the rare people in the area who didn’t work for Lukens Steel, James Bowman was outside of the hard-drinking steel-driving culture of Coatesville. He seemed a little dull, but my mother liked that. James Bowman had a job as a cement finisher for a local contractor. He built everything, from bridges to houses. I also called him daddy, although I never really felt that kind of bond. I warmed up to him when he moved us to a new house in the Newlinville area, named after the farmer who sold the land for the subdivision. We had a peach orchard as our back garden, and my stepfather himself installed a bath, toilet, and sink. To me, it was the ultimate in luxury. I felt like a little princess, every bit the equal of the lords of steel in their palace at Terracina. I enjoyed watching my stepfather work. I admired his craftsmanship. But he was more a man of deeds than words, and we never spoke very much. I became even more glad for that radio.

Nineteen thirty-eight was also a watershed year in that it marked the first time I had to attend a segregated school. Before this, my elementary school was completely integrated. There were thirty students in my grade, half black and half white, and we all got along fine. In our early years during the Depression, we all wore the same gray flannel welfare uniform and all ate the same rations of peanut butter and powdered milk. We were all poor, but we were together. Most of the whites were the children of eastern European immigrants who worked for Lukens—Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Slavs, all with long oski names that were hard to pronounce. The other half were black kids whose families had moved to Coatesville from all over the South. My folks were from Edgefield, South Carolina, and there were dozens of other Edgefieldians around. I guess when one family found a place up north, they sent for their kin and friends, and a little community was born.

My friends were both white and black. In 1938, however, all the blacks in our county were herded into one huge regional junior high—for just one year of school—while the whites went to several others. I’m still not sure why they split us up. It had something to do with administrative efficiency, cost savings, whatever. This was the first time my black friends and I had ever been defined by our race. When school started, we found ourselves staring at each other, trying to make sense of it. But none of us said anything about it, even as a joke. Apparently, all of us had been raised in the same school of mouth-shut acceptance of the way things were. I think all of us were glad to be getting an education, and an excellent one at that. If anything, the all-black faculty paid more attention to us than the white teachers had. I never had more caring teachers. But there was no sense of black unity, no stirrings of what later became known as black power. We were just a bunch of local school kids herded into a school where everyone happened to be black. We didn’t have time to reflect on the deeper implications—the term was over in a flash. But it did make its mark.

When we entered the fully integrated regional high school, where there were 300 students to a grade, the lines had been drawn. I only had black friends. There were blacks on the sports teams, but none were allowed to be cheerleaders. The idea of having a white boyfriend, or girlfriend, would have never occurred to any of us. Although I had been held back in the first grade because of an awful scalp disease that afflicted all the kids in our neighborhood, I had been making up for lost time ever since. I had been at the head of my class each year in elementary school and would go on to be an honor student in high school. But that one year in junior high branded me, in my own mind, as a second-class citizen.

That feeling was reinforced by Coatesville. Although the thousands of blacks who had come up from the South may have seen Coatesville as a kind of promised land, offering good jobs and equality that just didn’t exist below the Mason-Dixon Line (in Maryland, only twenty miles from us), the reality of Coatesville fell short of these ideals. Steelworker wages were low, and equality was a myth. Blacks could shop at Santee’s Drug Store, but we weren’t allowed to sit at the soda fountain and have their fabulous-looking ice cream floats and sundaes. Nor were we allowed to swim at the public pool. If we wanted to swim, we were told to go jump in a creek, quite literally. The YWCA was likewise off limits, which didn’t seem like a good Christian attitude.

There were two movie theaters in town. At the Auditorium, we blacks had to sit in the colored balcony, while at the Palace, we were sequestered in a cordon of narrow seats in the rear of the theater. I tried not to let it detract me from watching my favorites, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and heartthrobs Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, and Gary Cooper, but sitting up there in the auditorium made me feel strange about having girlish crushes on these white movie idols. If I couldn’t even sit in a normal seat, how could Clark Gable respect me, or (in my dreams) love me? So my girlfriends and I had our own little protest by sneaking down into the white seats. Once the ushers caught us and ordered us back upstairs. I held up the line and demanded our money back. The ushers gave it to us, relieved to see us go. That may have been gutsy for a thirteen year old, but that was as radical as I got.

For the most part, however, I was happy. I had my family and my friends, I loved school, I had a private bathroom, and I could call my friends on our telephone. We had that radio on which I could listen to President Roosevelt and all kinds of serials, and we had a Victrola where I could play, over and over, Ella Fitzgerald’s hit A Tisket, A Tasket. I adored that song. I also liked My Heart Belongs to Daddy, though at the time I had no idea how significant that title would soon become in my life. Outside of the house, aside from going to the movies, I enjoyed hiking in the beautiful woods around Coatesville, picking violets, blackberries, and hickory nuts, and I actually preferred the fresh creeks to any old swimming pool. I even made my own money in the summer, getting up at 4 A.M. to pick strawberries. If I filled fifty baskets, I would make a dollar, and that seemed like a fortune to me.

I joined the church at age twelve. My stepfather went to the AME Methodist Church every Sunday. Mother, like her first husband, was a member of the Bernardton Baptist Church in The Spruces, but wasn’t very religious and liked to sleep late. So I went with my stepfather, at first to get out of the house, and later, because I loved singing the hymns, like The Old Rugged Cross, Just a Closer Walk with Thee, and Amazing Grace. I soon joined the church myself, my mother’s Baptist church, to try to get her to attend more often.

My mother, who didn’t take churchgoing that seriously, was a bit surprised by my decision. How, she wondered, had I become so religious all of a sudden, and without her to inspire me? Nevertheless, she had a deep respect for the Lord. Because of her lax attendance, she wasn’t sure she was worthy and she wasn’t sure about my worthiness either, in that my conversion seemed to have come out of thin air. You have to be ready to accept Christ, she told me. It was a major life commitment, not to be taken lightly. "I am ready," I answered. The Bible was all white, but so were the movies. I loved them both. The whiteness I just accepted, just like a lot of other things. Acceptance was our way of life, as there didn’t seem to be much point, or hope, of trying to change the system.

The racial divide did become much more dramatic to me in the summer of 1938 because of a dreadful incident that shattered the normal calm of our town and forever changed the way I perceived Coatesville, even as a teenager, as a good and wholesome place to grow up. Helen Moore, a white teenager a little older than I was, had been walking in the woods near her South Hill neighborhood when she was attacked by a man. Coatesville didn’t have that much excitement, so this was a big deal for us. The girl was unconscious. When she came to, she couldn’t remember who attacked her. Everybody had a theory, everybody wanted to solve this mystery. However, within a short time the rumors started spreading that a young black man had attacked the girl and that he had raped her. Because my parents hadn’t talked to me about the birds and the bees, I wasn’t sure what rape was, but I had an idea, and it wasn’t good.

The town went crazy over the black man, a steelworker, who was arrested and taken to the jail. Within hours, a huge mob of white people assembled on Main Street and began talking about lynching the suspect. They had guns, knives, and rope, and they meant business. There were hundreds of white men, maybe more. I remember my stepfather going a little crazy himself, though on the other side. This ain’t gonna happen again, he swore. I had no idea what the again meant.

My father had a brother who had a rifle that he used to shoot groundhogs, which we fried and ate. On that hot day in 1938, my stepfather and his uncle got that rifle and joined a mob of black men who went out to stop the mob of white men before they hanged the accused black man. My mother begged him not to go, warning him that he would get killed himself. I had never seen her so emotional, weeping and screaming. Don’t be a fool! she entreated him. "They’ll kill you and then they’ll come kill us!" Suddenly I got scared, not just of losing my stepfather, but for my mother and myself as well. My mother thought I was in my room. When she saw me listening, she marched me back to my room and closed the door. Emotional outbursts were forbidden in this household, and certainly not for my eyes. So I holed up and listened to the screaming, followed by an endless silence. All I could do was shudder and pray for my family.

A few hours later, my prayers were answered. My stepfather returned with good news, which I heard that night only by eavesdropping, and later by gossiping with my friends. What I learned was that there had been a showdown on Main Street, right near the jail. It was something out of the Wild West, like I had seen in the movies. The Gary Cooper part was played by the Coatesville chief of police, a tall, brave, white man, who faced the two mobs and declared that justice had to be served and this was not the way.

What stopped everyone short was when the chief warned that Coatesville didn’t need another Zack Walker. Coatesville, he said, had been the shame of the nation. It would be even worse this time. The mere mention of the name Zack Walker was like a magic password that somehow silenced the violent, white mob and vindicated the black one. The men all put down their weapons, and the crowds dispersed. The black prisoner was taken away to another city by the chief of police for his own protection. Within a week, another man was arrested who confessed to the rape of Helen Moore. He was white.

The again my stepfather had referred to got me very curious. And who was this Zack Walker? I had never heard his name mentioned before, but after this awful incident, he was all that folks in Coatesville talked about for months to come. It was the town’s dark secret, and now it was out of the bag. In a way, I wish I had never known.

Zack Walker was the name of the victim of a horrible tragedy that occurred in Coatesville twenty-seven summers before, in 1911, but what happened seemed more out of Europe’s Dark Ages or the worst barbarities of the Roman Empire, when Christians were fed to the lions. He was a young, black man from Virginia, who, like my family and so many other black southerners, was lured to Coatesville by the prospects of a good job and greater freedom than at home in Dixie. Like my father John Henry Washington, Zack Walker worked on the steel assembly line. His employer was Worth Brothers, later taken over by Lukens. Like my family, Zack Walker lived in The Spruces, then a shantytown for black workers. Nice houses like the one I grew up in were built in the Roaring Twenties, when the mills were at the height of their prosperity. It was a Friday in August, during the Harvest Home Festival, when Walker was walking home from a bar on Main Street. He was supposedly drunk; it wasn’t at all unusual for workers, like my father, to celebrate when the ghost walked, which was steelyard slang for getting your paycheck. Walker was carrying a gun, which, too, was not that unusual for steelworkers, especially as times then were much rougher than they were when I was a girl. Again, Coatesville wasn’t Dodge City, but it wasn’t that far from it.

Before he crossed the Brandywine Bridge that led across the river to The Spruces, Walker encountered two Polish steelworkers he knew from Worth Brothers, and, as a joke, fired his gun over their heads. It was all in fun—the kind of fun you might have in a steel town in 1911. However, it may not have seemed that amusing to Edgar Rice, a security guard for Worth Brothers, which stood right near the bridge. Rice, who had been a city policeman before he became a private one, may have forgotten that he was now in the private sector. Burly, powerful, and white, Rice pursued Walker across the bridge into The Spruces and tried to arrest Walker for carrying a concealed weapon. Drunk, afraid, and aware of his guilt, Walker tried to get away from Rice, but the security guard wouldn’t relent. A struggle ensued. Rice drew his revolver and fired. Walker drew his own and fired back. In the end, Rice lay dead, and Walker fled to his cabin in The Spruces.

Officer Rice had been a minor local politician who had once run for constable and nearly won, despite being a Democrat in solid Republican territory. He was extremely well liked, and his death came as a terrible shock to Coatesville. When the Polish workers reported to the police that the tragedy had been ignited by Walker’s firing his gun, all of Coatesville was quickly up in arms. Numerous search parties were assembled to locate and arrest the man quickly renamed the black fiend. One of these posses, from the fire department, soon found Walker hiding in a tree. So terrified was the Virginian that he took his gun and shot himself in the face, hoping to end it all. But he failed. Instead, the badly bleeding man was taken to Coatesville Hospital, the place where I always dreamed of working at as a nurse when I grew up.

At the hospital, Walker, underwent emergency surgery. He was bandaged up like a mummy. When he awoke, he immediately admitted to police officers that, yes, he had shot Rice, but only in self-defense. Rice, acting far beyond his authority, had viciously attacked him, Walker claimed. He was simply trying to save his own life. No one in Coatesville, at least no one white, would buy Walker’s alibi. The day after the shooting, August 12, in what amounted to an extension of the Harvest Home Festival, a huge lynch mob of over a thousand white men stormed the grand pillared portico of Coatesville Hospital. They smashed down the doors. Then, pushing aside nurses and orderlies too terrified to resist them, they found their way to Walker’s room. To prevent any possible escape, the police had put him in a straitjacket and chained his leg to the footboard. The police at the hospital did nothing to quell the mob. None of them, though, had the key to Walker’s chain. So the mob ripped off the footboard, and dragged Walker, blood gushing from his recent head surgery, down the halls and down the steep front steps of the hospital. Outside, a crowd, estimated to be 4,000—a great part of the town—cheered Walker’s appearance and began chanting Burn him! Burn him! Burn him!

The mob then pulled Walker, his white bandages and straitjacket red with blood, nearly a mile through unpaved roads to the Newlin farm, the site of where I now lived. There they tied him to a wooden fence, created a bonfire of straw and hay, and set the man on fire. When the flame first caught, Walker begged his tormentors for mercy. He reiterated his claim of self-defense. Miraculously, he was able at one point to escape the inferno, even with the footboard still shackled to his leg. He must have seemed like a zombie and terrified the crowd. But they could not be swayed from their purpose. Someone beat him over the head with a stray fence post, and they tossed him back into the flames. Still he would not die. Apparently, he escaped a total of three times, until a group of men tied a rope around his neck and brought him back to the fire, like a lassoed steer to be branded. He once more begged them to spare his life, even though he wasn’t white. In his final moments on earth, Zack Walker considered that mercy was reserved for whites,

Reviews for Dear Senator

[krazy4katz · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an amazing memoir by Strom Thurmond's Black daughter, Essie Mae. Yes! That Strom Thurmond. Her mother was a 16-year old Black maid in Strom Thurmond's employ. Whether he loved Essie Mae's mother as much as was claimed in the book cannot be judged without bias. However, her writing suggests that Thurmond loved both of them and it was just politics that kept him from acknowledging them. It was certainly shocking that the Southern champion of separate-but-equal had a loving relationship with his hidden family, but that is what is written and there is no reason not to believe it. As a teacher and lover of history. Ms. Washington-Williams brings life to the reality that was the United States — both North and South — in the 1940's through the end of the century. Through the eyes of a Black person she talks about segregation, racial inequality, her father's love, which grew in expression over the years, and her own love of her father, despite the circumstances. It is an extraordinary story, especially to those of us who looked upon Strom Thurmond as one of the worst of the worst of Southern segregationists. This honest and heartfelt story of Ms. Washington-Willams's story is an amazing story and well worth reading.

[jwood652 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the most prominent Southern politicians and segregationists in American history, Strom Thurmond, has a relationship with a slave culminating in the birth of a daughter. Finally, his daughter shares her story. This incredible story offers insights into not only Essie Mae Washington-Williams and her personal life but also delivers a unique view into American history and politics as it relates to race. We gain a good exploration of the history and Southern viewpoints. Essie Mae doesn't just tell us about her life and meetings with her famous father but helps us understand, her father, Strom Thurmond, and how he did right by her despite the constraints of his leadership and upbringing in the American South.

[cathysusanne · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a wonderful lady Essie Mae Washington Williams was. Her love and respect for her father is evident in this eye opening book about her life and her father, Senator Strom Thurmond.

[casabooks · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If you haven't read this - it's a Recommend !
Essie Mae Washington
Bi-racial illegitimate daughter of Strom Thurmond
2005 book. She born in 1925, found out he was her father in 1941.
Did not go public until after his death.
What an incredible true story.
Read in 2006.

[carterchristian1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Essie Mae Washington-Williams wrote these memoirs with the help of a writer, experienced in telling the stories of those associated with celebrities, so there is some question to what extent everything in this book is from the perspective of Thurmond's daughter. However, in any case this successful educator, almost 80 years old at the time of writing, hurried to get it into print in time to capitalize on the recent death of the Senator, probably provides most of the interpretation. She is telling the story of many, many biracial children from the South, as far back with the offspring of Sally Hennings and the emotions must be common to most of them. There is the dream of a mother who figures as a romantic figure caught in a trap of cultural biasis starcrossed as any Juliet. Essie Mae insists her father did not marry until after he thought her mother was herself married to another. She does not become bitter because her father gave her hope,whatever his motives, that she could have a successful life, and she did.However, it is not the Senator but the daughter who is most important in this story. He was clearly a flawed figure, in fact a failuer in politics, despite his elections, it was she who became the success, holding true to her ideals.It is a good read and leaves on thinking about how politicians compartmentalize their lives and exclude family members.

[onnaday · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is Essie Mae’s story and a living historic chronicle of the life and times intertwined with her real life situation. Williams's story can be viewed as a tragedy of the American south with its unenlightened prejudices and hypocrisies; but it also can be viewed as a story of family ties, of love and honor. Her restraint and respect for her father in an ugly period of our history--one that included segregation, racism and Jim Crow is incredible, which help to mitigate the harsh realities of her circumstances. An argument can be made that since her mother, Carrie was in the employ of the Thurmonds, their sex may not have been entirely consentual (much like Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings). Strom Thurmond didn't have to do any of the things he chose to do for his mulatto daughter and he risked a lot by making special trips to see Essie Mae and giving her cash. He also can't be blamed for his daughter's long silence. He never told her to not tell anyone. That was Essie Mae's choice alone. Essie Mae shows herself to be far more forgiving than most other people would be. Accepting her father's shortcomings whilst never agreeing with his policies and ideals but most poignantly of all she proves herself to be a good and loyal daughter, something that Strom Thurmond did not deserve in my opinion. There is one moment that I had to question in this book. When Essie Mae leaves her children in California to attend her husband, Julius’ funeral. I understand the financial part (help from her father at this time would have been then) but the emotional deprivation of saying goodbye to their father seemed crucial. Still, Washington's story is one of courage, perseverance and grace.I would have liked to see pictures of her mother, aunt and uncle in “Dear Senator” and she never explains what happens to relatives including her brother Willie, Father/Uncle and Cousin Calvin.This is an amazing story by Washington of learning to accept and love her father and the legacy of her birth. The story is well written, fascinating and bittersweet to read. This book is not only personal but very factual. This is an interesting historical document. “Dear Senator is written with candor, honesty, sadness and spirit.

[clik4 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Breaking a code of silence, Essie Mae Washington–Williams writes her story within the history of the United States Senate. Ms. Washington-Williams’; the daughter of South Carolina’s Senator Strom Thurmond, lived a hidden life from the spotlight of the political drama of one of the leading voices for racial segregation. Essie’s mother was a black teenager who worked as a maid in the Thurmond household and was taken care of by Thurmond - silently.Essie lived a dicotomous life loving the father she met at 16 years of age; a financially generous, educationally supportive man contrasted with his belief in the old southern philosophy of racial inequity and complicated by a dual hidden life. Essie emerges as the voice of harmony and higher character, a woman who accepted her father as flawed, continued to honor him while managing an affectionate peace with the the man and the conflict.