Thurmond’s Daughter, Free at Last
by David S. Broder
The Washington Post
Sunday, December 21, 2003; Page B07
She entered the hotel ballroom slowly, her head high, a small woman in a bright red suit, and let two of her adult children take her hands as she came up the three steps to the rostrum. The opposite wall was lined with TV cameras, and in the three sections of seats, curious South Carolina citizens, both black and white, drawn by the drama of her story, outnumbered the reporters. Without a word being said, the applause rolled out and the spectators and journalists rose to their feet.
Essie Mae Washington-Williams responded with a nod of her head and took her seat. The 78-year-old, gray-haired grandmother, a retired schoolteacher now acknowledged as the oldest child of the late Strom Thurmond, a mixed-race product of his liaison at 22 with a 16-year-old black housemaid in his parents’ Edgefield, S.C., home, appeared to be entirely in control of her emotions. Three days earlier, she had finally confirmed decades of rumors and told The Post’s Marilyn W. Thompson that she was in truth the daughter of the longest-serving senator, who died earlier this year at age 100.