December 23, 2003

It's a new story and an old story. The fact that racist segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond engaged in the kind of "race-mixing" privately that he condemned publicly is not much of a surprise.

The flurry of media coverage around the recent announcement by Essie Mae Washington-Williams that Thurmond was her biological father has danced rather timidly around some of the more sordid implications of this revelation.

Since the rape of slave women by plantation owners in antebellum days, white men have been able to reconcile their sexual encounters with black women with their support of anti-black public policies. That is because racism has never been simply about separation of the races but about the subordination of one group to the will and interests of another.

The sexual exploitation of powerless black women by powerful white men was the corollary to the lynching and castration of black men. It was painful, violent and sometimes deadly.

Whatever the details, Sen. Strom Thurmond's sexual relationship with a black teenage maid in South Carolina in 1925 was a form of sexual exploitation. It was not an "affair," as Thurmond's dignified but beleaguered black daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, attempted to suggest. Even though there is no evidence that Thurmond brutalized or even threatened Carrie Butler, Williams' mother, there is little chance she could have consented freely.

In 1925, most African-Americans in the South were disenfranchised and utterly powerless. There were virtually no black judges, police or politicians, and black citizens were treated as second-class in every respect, with little recourse.

The dictate of the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision that proclaimed "black men have no rights that white men are bound to respect," although overturned by Reconstruction, was still very much in place. This applied to black women, as well. It was against this social and economic landscape that Carrie Butler entered into a sexual relationship with the young Thurmond. He had all the power and privilege, and she was at his mercy.

So, could Carrie Butler have said no to her employer's son? Yes, in an absolute sense, perhaps she could have, but there would have been dire consequences. In small towns like Edgefield, S.C., everyone knew everyone else. Black servants were fired on a whim, and without a recommendation that she was trustworthy and compliant, who would have hired her? With no financial resources and no education, where would she have gone?

Some black maids did find the wherewithal to just say "no," but many more did not. The sexual exploitation of black domestic workers, especially live-in maids was commonplace up until World War II, when the job market began to change. Until then, they were violated against their will routinely as almost a condition of employment. Butler, who lived a difficult life and died young (at age 38), was only one of many such women.

This was not a harmless boyhood antic or a benign "mistake," or something terribly at odds with his avowed racist views. This was a harsh violation of a vulnerable black girl that had more severe consequences for her life than for his. The baby was taken from her mother to prevent awkward embarrassment for the Thurmonds, and the young mother lived out her days in shame and silence.

Race aside, it is important to note that Butler was only 16 when her child was born and probably 15 when the sexual encounters with Thurmond began. She was a minor, under the age of consent in most states. Thurmond, who was 22 at the time, was an adult. While his actions speak to a larger pattern of sexual violation, they also seem to represent a case of statutory rape.

This case reminds me of something very personal. When I was 10, I visited the South for the first time. I met my Mississippi relatives, who ranged in skin color from light cocoa to dark chocolate, and then there was the pale green-eyed cousin who stuck out like a sore thumb.

Who is he? I asked my mother naively. "That's your cousin," she replied, "Aunt Lilly's boy."

"You mean Uncle Fred and Aunt Lilly's boy?"

"Not exactly," my mother replied with hesitation. "Aunt Lilly was taken by a white man when she was 14, and that's what happened," she blurted out.

The white man was a prominent businessman in town. He provided financial support, I learned later, and never visited. I asked no more questions. But I remembered my mother's word: "taken."

Something had happened to Aunt Lilly that she and the family had no power to prevent. Life went on, but there were scars -- scars on black women's bodies and minds.

Strom Thurmond left his scars, too. He was, if nothing else, consistent in his violation of black people, publicly and privately.