American gothic
Salon
By Rebecca Traister
In 1948, while running for president of the United States on the Dixiecrat ticket, Strom Thurmond proclaimed, “All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement.”
But in 1925 it apparently had taken neither legislation nor bayonet to force a 16-year-old black maid named Carrie Butler into the bed of Thurmond himself, then a 22-year-old graduate of Clemson University living with his parents in Edgefield, S.C.