The Scarred Stone: The Strom Thurmond Monument Joseph Crespino
analyzes the addition of Strom Thurmond's African American
daughter's name to his South Carolina State House statue. In
2003, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, a retired African American
schoolteacher from Los Angeles, held a press conference in which
she announced that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the
longtime U.S. Senator from South Carolina and an icon of racist,
reactionary politics in civil rights era America. Thurmond
emerged on the national scene in 1948 when he ran as the third-
party presidential candidate of the States Rights Democratic
Party, a political organization founded to oppose civil rights
legislation introduced by President Harry Truman. In 1954 he was
elected on a write-in campaign to the U.S. Senate, a feat
unmatched before or since. In the 1950s, Thurmond spearheaded
some of the most high profile acts of white resistance to the
modern civil rights movement. He was the initial author of the
1956 Southern Manifesto, a d