Strom Thurmond's Jungle Fever! He Says She's Just a Friend

"She cant love me, I cant love her
Cause they say were the wrong color
Staring, gloating, laughing, looking
Like weve done something wrong
Because we show love strong, get real, come on
Calling us names too bad to mention
But we pay them no attention
For color blind are inner feelings"


Stevie Wonder, Jungle Fever


Former "States Rights" Democratic Presidential candidate, whose current gig involves fertilizing magnolias, -- none oter than: Strom Thurmond schools us on racial issues from beyond the grave.

It appears that Strom Thurmond had jungle fever and couldn't keep his hands off his 16 year old maid, resulting in the illegitimate birth of Essie Mae Washington-Williams, in 1925!

Who was it that said, the darker the berry the sweeter the juice: was it La Rouchefoucauld? Carrot Top? Galileo? No matter.

Marcus Warren of The Telegraph reports that:

"In public the senator, who stepped down as a South Carolina senator only a year ago, acknowledged Mrs Washington-Williams as 'a friend'(ed note: italics mine). Privately he admitted that she was his daughter with a black housemaid and helped her financially, (Williams) said."

An originator of the 1956 "Southern Manifesto," which was proffered up when his own mixed-race daughter was 26, Thurmond, as his biography at Clemson states, "holds the record for the longest filibuster in Senate history; he spoke against the 1957 civil rights bill for twenty-four hours, eighteen minutes."

Granted, Strom later reversed himself on his own hypocrisy, hiring conservative Armstrong Wiiliams, among other African American hires, as a staff aide.

Also, granted, is the fact that he repudiated his past before he went completely senile, ironically leaving his staff -- with many African Americans -- to run daily affairs in the Senator's office, like a ramshackle Southern plantation where the eccentric slave owner is, essentially, owned by his "slaves."

But Good Old Strom, may he rest in peace, is in a strong tradition of Southern hypocrite racists, who believe that African Americans -- or did believe -- are backwards people, yet warm blooded enough to heat up the sheets.

Thomas Jefferson serves as the greatest example of this hypocrisy. Our founding Father, in Notes on the State of Virginia, Chapt. 14, writes:

"A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think (ed note: italics mine) one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. It would be unfair to follow them to Africa for this investigation. We will consider them here, on the same stage with the whites, and where the facts are not apocryphal on which a judgment is to be formed."

Of course none of that stopped Tommy from getting busy with Sally Hemmings, who was the half sister of Thomas Jeffersons wife, Martha Jefferson, as a result of some more eighteenth century Southern interracial action.

So, in the end, Strom really was a Traditionalist.

BTW, TJ: The Corsair got an A in his college tutorial on Euclid's Elements, and, years later, can still appreciate the beauty of his Golden Mean Ratio.