L.A. Woman Says Strom Thurmond Was Her Father

An attorney representing a Los Angeles woman said Saturday that she would “bring some closure to her life story” and announce Wednesday that she is the daughter of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond and a black teenager who worked in his family’s South Carolina home.

The attorney, Frank K. Wheaton, said that 78-year-old Essie Mae Washington Williams, a retired teacher who has lived in Los Angeles since 1964, had “irrefutable” evidence of Thurmond’s paternity.

Wheaton, contacted by The Times after an article about the alleged connection was published by the Washington Post, said the country “could only benefit from the rich and wonderful story” that Thurmond, once known as one of the country’s staunchest segregationists, had fathered a child by a black woman.

Thurmond died in June at age 100.

The Post, which published the article on its Web site Saturday and in its print editions today, said the account was based on extensive interviews with Williams and personal documents. As a sample of her evidence, Williams provided The Post with a copy of a 1998 Thurmond letter thanking her “for the nice Father’s Day note you sent me.”

In Los Angeles, Williams would not speak to a Times reporter at her home in the southwest part of the city.

Thurmond’s son, J. Strom Thurmond Jr., also declined to comment to The Times.

Wheaton said that Wednesday’s planned news conference would be “an international coming-out party for a woman who has respected a very closely guarded family secret.”

He said that Thurmond had always treated Williams “as the daughter she was” and that he had provided her with some financial support.

In The Post, Williams is quoted as saying she met with Thurmond and received money at least once a year in sessions arranged by his Senate staff. In recent years, as the senator’s health declined, she said, financial assistance was passed through a prearranged conduit, a Thurmond relative in South Carolina. Wheaton told The Post that Williams was ready to submit to DNA tests if challenged by the Thurmond family.

The Post said that Williams’ mother worked as a maid in the home of Thurmond’s parents, where he lived when he was 22. Williams was born Oct. 12, 1925, to a 16-year-old, unmarried mother.

Williams told The Post she first met Thurmond around 1941 when she was 16 and he was a public official. She had returned to Edgefield, S.C., from Pennsylvania, where she was raised by a relative, to visit her ill mother.

She told The Post that Thurmond called her a “lovely daughter.”

“I was very happy. I knew I had a father somewhere, and it was wonderful to meet him,” she told The Post.

After her 1945 high school graduation, Williams said that Thurmond, who was then governor, covered her expenses at the all-black South Carolina State College in Orangeburg. She said he arrived in his official car to visit. Again, Thurmond gave her money, Williams said.

Raising her four children on death benefits after her husband died, Williams turned to Thurmond, who, she told The Post, said that “he would help me until the children were grown.” He was then leading a fight against civil rights bills from the Senate floor, including the staging of the nation’s longest filibuster.

Williams told The Post she and Thurmond “never talked politics,” although she said she questioned him about segregationist comments that had upset her friends. “He said that’s just the way things were. That was his life. He was pleasing his supporters,” she said.

She described his asking a memorable question: “How does it feel to have your father as governor and not be able to claim him?” Williams said she told Thurmond it felt fine.

That Thurmond might have had a daughter out of wedlock had long been rumored. Both Thurmond and Williams had denied that she was his daughter.

By the early 1990s, Thurmond’s staff conceded to a Penthouse magazine writer that the senator had frequent visits in Washington from his friend “Essie Williams,” The Post said.

“Anyone who knows anything about this would have to be in the very inner circle” of Thurmond aides, said Nadine Cohodas, a Thurmond biographer who also spent 10 years reporting on Thurmond for the Congressional Quarterly. “If this is true, this would suggest even more than people thought that Strom Thurmond was a man of his times, that history in the South is replete with men of a certain station having these kinds of relationships with women who worked for them.”

Williams, quoted in The Post, said she decided to reveal the connection before she dies. “African Americans should hear it. Everybody should hear it.”

Wheaton told The Times that Williams is “a very regal, proud, dignified African American woman who’s well educated and well spoken and very certain about her position in life.”

Wheaton said Williams, who was widowed in 1964, raised “four successful children,” one a doctor. Williams also has 13 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, Wheaton said. She kept her relationship with Thurmond “from her own children until they were old enough to understand,” Wheaton said.

At the planned news conference, Wheaton said he would briefly “establish the foundation and reasons for which we are coming forth and how important a piece of American history I truly believe this story is.”

Wheaton drew a parallel between Williams and Sally Hemmings, who was a slave of Thomas Jefferson and whose descendants say had a sexual relationship with Jefferson.

“Sally Hemmings represents the first 100 years of this country, this melting pot, and [Williams] represents the most recent 100 years. This is now,” he said.

Times staff writers Daren Briscoe, Gayle Pollard-Terry and Josh Meyer contributed to this report.