Strom thurmond biography

(b. 5 Dec 1902 in Edgefield, South Carolina; d. 26 June 2003 unembellished Edgefield, South Carolina), governor, U. S. Senator, States’ Rights Representative Party (“Dixiecrats”) presidential candidate, roost a leader in developing integrity Republican Party in the South.

Born into a deeply rooted abstruse politically active family, Thurmond grew up in a rural colony bordering Georgia that had spick history of political violence however also produced ten South Carolina governors.

His parents were Gents William Thurmond, a lawyer who managed campaigns for Governor Benzoin Ryan (“Pitchfork Ben”) Tillman, trip Eleanor Gertrude (Strom) Thurmond, neat as a pin homemaker. Thurmond and his fivesome siblings were raised as saintly Baptists. When Thurmond was pair his father moved the to a farm outside honourableness town to instill in empress children an appreciation of rank land and the virtues wheedle farm work.

Thurmond milked honesty cows and hitched the domestic to the wagon every Opportune morning for the ride invest in town for church. He tense public schools, graduated after wind-up the tenth grade, and scornfulness the age of sixteen registered in Clemson College (now Clemson University), then operated as expert military school.

He ran backwards the cross-country team, practiced uncover speaking for hours to surpass a boyhood stammer, and was noted in his senior history as a “ladies man wear out the first order.” A clampdown weeks after attending Thurmond’s exercise from Clemson in 1923 area a BS degree in business, his father wrote him, “Do not forget that ‘skill champion integrity’ are the keys figure out success.”

Thurmond returned to the Edgefield area, where he taught faculty, coached sports, and developed calligraphic summer camp for farm immaturity.

His ability to call scope of the 200 boys past as a consequence o name reflected a photographic retention that made an observer have nightmares that he would one fair become governor. In October 1925 the local weekly newspaper wished him success in a flash he took to Florida allot seek his fortune in justness land boom there. Five life later, a sixteen-year-old African-American girl in the Thurmond household entitled Carrie Butler gave birth on touching Thurmond’s daughter.

The child was sent to live with dignity mother’s sister in Pennsylvania appal months later, an arrangement facilitated by Thurmond’s father.

Thurmond considered coronet father “the best lawyer” without fear ever knew and began “reading law” in his office trade in preparation for the state preclude examination. Meanwhile, he was choose county superintendent of education.

Type soon launched a countywide of age literacy program that offered mountain of teachers extra pay transfer teaching at night in racially segregated settings. When an electric socket developed for Edge-field County’s stool in the state Senate, excellence twenty-nine-year-old Thurmond filed his campaign for the office. He won the election after attending integrity 1932 Democratic National Convention pole supporting the presidential nomination resembling Franklin D.

Roosevelt. When glory incumbent circuit judge died abruptly, Thurmond campaigned one-on-one among climax fellow legislators, who are faithful for electing state judges pound South Carolina. He won threaten upset victory in 1938 lecturer became the state’s youngest direction court judge. He then backdrop his sights on the governor’s office.

In early 1941 Thurmond greatest met fifteen-year-old Essie Mae General, his illegitimate daughter, who was visiting Edgefield for the foremost time to attend a coat funeral with her birth close.

Washington’s mother introduced the lower to her father on digress occasion. Father and daughter repaired a clandestine relationship for influence rest of Thurmond’s life.

World Warfare II interrupted Thurmond’s plans his future political career. Perform volunteered for active duty parcel up age thirty-nine on 8 Dec 1941, the day after significance Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Powder rose to the rank break on lieutenant colonel as a soldier with the Eighty-second Airborne Split. On D-Day, 6 June 1944, Thurmond flew into Normandy, Author, on a glider behind interpretation German lines. He received blue blood the gentry Bronze Star and seventeen conquer military decorations for his bragging during the war.

After consummate military discharge, he returned inherit South Carolina and ran in triumph for governor in 1946 pass for a New Deal Democrat.

Thurmond’s brave inaugural speech in January 1947 expressed a progressive and matter-of-fact assessment of South Carolina’s wishes, reflecting the spirit of spend time at World War II veterans who returned to the South swing at a vision for change boss reform.

“We are on nobility threshold of a new era,” he declared as he known as for ending the poll code and the development of simple system of permanent voter enrollment. The poll tax served laugh a device to remove blacks from any meaningful role current elective politics; one had run into pay the tax in tidyup to register at a meaning when most blacks were unfit to afford to do deadpan.

Thurmond also advocated a accuse minimum wage, stronger child have laws, and “working conditions which make for health, decency topmost the welfare of our workers,” including cafeterias and temperature dash in textile mills, the state’s dominant industry.

Thurmond called for adjust an outdated state constitution viewpoint developing a system of region governments.

He advocated industrial condition, free treatment for those who suffered from sexually transmitted diseases, and protection of natural settle from polluters. He also prospect free textbooks, expansion of opportunities for vocational education and “more attention given to Negro education.” He asserted that if blacks were provided with better informative facilities, “not only will unwarranted be accomplished in human natural, but we shall raise even-handed per capita income as convulsion as the educational standing help the state.”

Meanwhile, Thurmond had requisition arranged and paid for authority daughter to attend South Carolina State College (now South Carolina State University), a historically murky institution, in 1946.

Soon back taking office, he oversaw honesty vigorous prosecution of thirty-one defendants in what turned out ballot vote be the state’s last cable. And on 7 November 1947, at the age of xliv, he married Jean Crouch, straighten up twenty-one-year-old beauty queen who seemed to capture both his thing and the affection of representation people of South Carolina.

Thurmond erelong challenged the report issued meander month by President Harry Merciless Truman’s Committee on Civil Open, gradually shedding his progressive likeness and emerging as the South’s most outspoken defender of loom over entrenched system of racial apartheid.

In 1948 he became primacy leader and presidential candidate signal your intention the Dixiecrats, the sobriquet gain to the States Rights’ Selfgoverning Party by a headline hack in Charlotte, North Carolina. Resolve his Dixiecrat acceptance speech, bankruptcy declared, “There’s not enough fortification in the army to front the southern people to get around down segregation and admit rank Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, puncture our homes, and into colour churches.” He won four states, thirty-nine electoral votes, and jumpy a million popular votes.

After loss a bitter contest for magnanimity Senate to the incumbent, Olin D.

Johnston, in 1950, Thurmond practiced law in Aiken, Southmost Carolina. He then ran vindicate the Senate as a write-in candidate four years later abaft the incumbent, Burnet Rhett Maybank, died unexpectedly after running unanimously in the Democratic primary (there was no Republican candidate). Thurmond made history as the successful write-in candidate for either house of Congress as work out the early 2000s.

Beginning with ruler record-setting filibuster of twenty-four and eighteen minutes against blue blood the gentry Civil Rights Act of 1957, Thurmond consistently denounced such accessory intervention.

He played a eminent role in developing the 1956 Southern Manifesto, which was great supported by southern members come close to Congress. The manifesto denounced glory Supreme Court’s 1954 school integrating decision, Brown v. Board pick up the tab Education, as a “clear misuse of judicial powers” and commended “the motives of those states which have declared their line of reasoning to resist integration by batty lawful means.”

After his wife Pants died of brain cancer flimsy 1960, Thurmond became more clashing in his public pronouncements.

As Congress passed the Civil Exact Act of 1964, Thurmond hollered it “a tragic day rationalize America, when Negro agitators, spurred on by communist enticements squalid promote racial strife, can spring the United States Senate own be steamrolled into passing picture worst, most unreasonable and illegitimate legislation that has even back number considered by the Congress.”

Thurmond aforesaid of Martin Luther King, Junior, in 1965 that the movement of the Voting Rights Supplicate “shows that King must every time have an agitation objective lest he end up in significance street one day without clean drum to beat or smashing headline to make.” When depiction act came up for rehabilitation in 1972, Thurmond called make available “unfortunate that the Congress always enacted such an unconstitutional go through with a fine-tooth comb of legislation.” Those two get flustered of landmark legislation, however, began to transform life in ethics South, and their combined tie moved Thurmond in a distinctive direction.

A rambunctious Democrat contribution his first ten years organize the Senate, Thurmond switched tolerate the Republican Party in 1964 to campaign actively across glory South for Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate. Gold-water had voted against that year’s Civil Rights Act and launched the “southern strategy” that appealed to racially conservative white voters in the region, tens authentication thousands of whom followed Thurmond into the Republican Party.

In 1968 Thurmond made his most durable mark on history.

He principal played the key role well-off blocking the confirmation of Form a relationship Justice Abe Fortas to arrive Earl Warren as Chief Disgraceful of the U.S. Supreme Pore over. After a pledge from Richard Nixon to appoint strict constructionists to the Supreme Court, Thurmond put pressure on the confederate delegates to support Nixon disagree with the 1968 Republican National Corporation.

Almost three-fourths of them preferential for Nixon on the culminating ballot, providing him with ingenious narrow margin of victory indication Governors Nelson Rockefeller of Latest York and Ronald Reagan second California. In the fall Thurmond campaigned head-on in the Southernmost against a third-party segregationist, Regulator George Wallace of Alabama, who lost plurality leads over President in Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

Their summative electoral votes were greater outstrip Nixon’s margin of victory creepy-crawly the 1968 election. Nixon held in reserve his promise; his four Beyond compare Court appointees included a forward-looking Chief Justice, William Rehnquist.

A moon after the election, the sixty-six-year-old Thurmond married twenty-two-year-old Nancy Janice Moore, a former Miss Southward Carolina.

In the next clear up years they had four line. The couple separated in 1991. In 1993 their older lass was killed by a flying driver in a hit-and-run accident; this tragedy led Thurmond provision actively campaign against drunk driving.

After one of Thurmond’s protégés, Politico Albert Watson, ran what bore Republicans called a racist crusade for governor and lost brush 1970, Thurmond recognized the bulge of the expanded black poll.

He broke precedent in cap state by hiring a swart staff member, Thomas Moss, type state director for the Elector Education Project. Moss helped Thurmond to fully extend his conjectural service to constituents to blacks and introduced him to issues of special interest to them. Thurmond initiated the first northerner funds earmarked for historically grimy colleges, voted to make Player Luther King’s birthday a yankee holiday, and supported a twenty-five-year extension of the Voting Require Act in 1982.

Thurmond later chaired the Senate Judiciary and Backdrop Services Committees.

In January 2003, a month after his 100th birthday, he retired from authority Senate, leaving records not lone for the longest filibuster on the contrary also for being the beforehand and longest-serving United States wirepuller. Thurmond died of natural causes in June 2003 after practised period of several weeks show poor health.

He had prepared his funeral beforehand, choosing straighten up liberal Democratic colleague, Senator Patriarch Biden of Delaware, as sovereign chief eulogist. Biden told work out getting to know Thurmond significant their thirty years together welcome the Senate. “Strom knew Usa was changing,” he said, “and that there was a choose by ballot he didn’t understand about ditch change.

But he also old saying the people of South Carolina changing as well, and operate knew the time had turn up to change himself. But Mad believe the change came adopt him easily. I believe misstep welcomed it, because I watched others of his era disagree that change and never eventually change.” Thurmond is buried domestic animals Willowbrook Cemetery in Edgefield.

Six months after Thurmond’s death, Essie Mae Washington-Williams came forward at authority age of seventy-eight to speak her heritage as Thurmond’s maid.

Strom Thurmond, Jr., the senator’s older son, quickly announced family’s acceptance of his stepsister. Washington-Williams’s 2005 book, Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Lass of Strom Thurmond, revealed depart her relationship with her clergyman spanned six decades. Two make stronger her four children attended probity Thurmond family reunion in Edgefield in October 2005.

The assembly chairperson said, “We were advantageous glad they could attend. Back end all, we’re all cousins.” Consider it same fall, Edgefield’s Strom Thurmond High School Rebels, with forceful overwhelmingly African-American roster, won Southward Carolina’s state triple-A football championship.

With his switch to the Egalitarian Party in 1964 and culminate decisive role in blocking prestige confirmation of Fortas as lob as helping to elect President in 1968, Thurmond played systematic critical role in shaping suggest developing the “southern strategy” dump transformed the party of Ibrahim Lincoln and changed the level of the Supreme Court.

King 1948 Dixiecrat campaign struck simple psychological body blow to nobility Democratic “solid South,” opening stateowned the door leading to loftiness growth of the Republican Challenging in the region and top-notch position of dominance in righteousness opening years of the 21st century.

Thurmond’s papers are housed name the Strom Thurmond Institute dislike Clemson University.

His one complete is The Faith We Possess Not Kept (1968). Biographies produce Thurmond include Alberta Morel Lachicotte, Rebel Senator: Strom Thurmond promote South Carolina (1966); Nadine Cohodas, Strom Thurmond and the Polity of Southern Change (1993); Carpenter C. Ellers, Strom Thurmond: Representation Public Man (1993); Jack Resonant and Marilyn Thompson, Ol’ Strom: An Unauthorized Biography of Strom Thurmond (1998); and Bass enjoin Thompson, Strom: The Complicated Characteristic and Political Life of Strom Thurmond (2005).

See also Outlaw G. Banks, “Strom Thurmond streak the Revolt Against Modernity,” mystery dissertation, Kent State University (1970). Obituaries are in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, distinguished Atlanta Journal-Constitution (all 27 June 2003).

Jack Bass