In the late 1990s, a new wellness and fitness center was first proposed to either replace or supplement the Blatt Wellness and Fitness Center. On June 23, 1998, university president John Palms announced that he had met with U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond (1902-2003) to “ask permission to seek Board approval to name the facility for the Senator” as a donation from the Senator would “honor South Carolina’s very best.” Thurmond agreed and immediately donated $10,000 toward the Center, promising to provide more names for support. The Board, notably Dr. Palms, Chairman William Hubbard, Mark Buyck, and Chairman Emeritus Dr. Edward Floyd, motioned for the center to be named for Thurmond, and the motion was carried. Thurmond’s list of names proved fruitful: in 1999 the board reported that individuals who previously had little contact with the University were favorable to fundraising, and that these potential donors were Thurmond’s referrals. Thurmond did not provide a significant donation himself after the $10,000, and $32 of $36 million in funding from the fitness center came from student fees.¹ The building opened in 2003.

Thurmond’s connection to the University of South Carolina:

• As U.S. Senator, helped secure appropriations for public education and universities in the state.
• Worked with estate of Martha Williams Brice to fund additions to the football stadium, used legislative influence to name it Williams Brice, and directed funding to the Williams Brice nursing building.

Thurmond summary:

• Is not directly associated with the University of South Carolina; graduated from Clemson.
• Had a strained relationship with UofSC when governor of the state
• Was a leading segregationist, penning the Southern Manifesto opposed to integration, and was influential in Nixon’s Southern Strategy to push the South into the Republican party on the basis of racially coded states’ rights.
• Holds the longest filibuster in history in opposition to the 1957 Civil Rights Act, opposed Voting Rights Act of 1965, opposed integration of Clemson.
• Had a sexual relationship with an African American maid who may have been underage, resulting in the birth of a daughter he never publicly acknowledged.
• Was the subject of several sexual harassment claims.
• Never publicly apologized for his history of segregation or admitted wrongdoing.
  
  

Biography

Strom Thurmond was born in Edgefield, South Carolina on December 5, 1902 to John William Thurmond and Eleanor Gertrude Strom. John William Thurmond was an influential attorney and judge, and Strom came into contact with key South Carolina political figures early in his life. Thurmond earned a B.S. from Clemson College in 1923 and became superintendent of Edgefield County Schools in 1928 at the age of 25. He passed the state bar in 1930 without attending law school and became Edgefield’s town attorney in 1931.

In 1925, when he was 22, Thurmond impregnated Carrie Butler, an African American maid who worked for the Thurmonds in Edgefield. Butler was 15 or 16 at the time. It is unknown whether this action was consensual. Their daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, was born in 1925 and was raised by her aunt and uncle, not knowing her biological parents until she was 16. She met Thurmond shortly after that, and he quietly paid for her tuition at the all-Black South Carolina State College in 1947. He brushed off her complaints about segregation, Washington-Williams said, but she felt their private discussions eventually caused Thurmond to change his policies in relation to African Americans. He never publicly acknowledged that she was his child during his lifetime.²

Thurmond was a state senator representing Edgefield from 1932 to 1938 and pushed for legislation to improve public schools. In 1937, Thurmond ran for an open judicial seat against the established candidate, George B. Timmerman. Thurmond gathered so many votes that Timmerman withdrew, in a move the Anderson Independent called a political upset of major proportions, which stunned even those who usually feel that they know what is going to happen.” As state senator, he encouraged a grand jury in Greenville to impose the death penalty against the Ku Klux Klan, dubbing them “the most abominable type of lawlessness.”³

Thurmond has a mixed record regarding court cases where Black men were defendants. Of the 4 men Thurmond condemned to the death penalty, three were Black. In 1940, African American George Thomas was accused of raping a white woman in Georgetown, South Carolina. The victim failed to identify her attacker out of a line of 11 prisoners. The white citizens almost lynched Thomas and the National Guard was mobilized. Thurmond, as the judge, refused to move the trial to a less hostile area, and the all-white male jury ignored family testimonies and seven witnesses and deemed him guilty. Thurmond sentenced him to the death penalty, even though Thomas appealed the sentencing since he was tried in a hostile location and not allowed a fair trial. In his report to the South Carolina Supreme Court, Thurmond made no mention of the mob of over 300, the lynching attempts, and claimed that the National Guard’s presence had no connection “directly or indirectly” to the Thomas trial. Thomas was electrocuted on February 20, 1942.⁴  Thurmond was commended by the New York Times, however, for insisting upon a tough prosecutor to try those who lynched a Black man in Greenville in 1947, when Thurmond was governor. His and the prosecutor’s attempts were unsuccessful: all 28 white defendants were acquitted of the lynching.⁵

Thurmond was working as a judge during World War II. Though he was 39, he asked and received permission to fight on the front lines and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel of the U.S. Army. He joined the 82^nd Airborne Division and fought during D Day. He was captured by German soldiers at pistol point when landing, via glider, behind enemy lines in France. He was awarded the Bronze Star for valor, the French Croix de Guerre, and a Purple Heart.

In 1946, seven months after he returned from the army, Thurmond ran for governor and was inaugurated on January 21, 1947.  Thurmond ran as an outsider, strong admirer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and opposition to the power of the “Barnwell ring” of politicians.⁶ As governor, Thurmond became a leader in the states’ rights movement, arguing that the state had complete freedom to regulate their “custom and tradition,” his euphemism for segregation. In some areas Thurmond was “progressive” by pressing to improve Black schools, pushing for better working conditions at textile mills, and promoting equal pay for women.⁷  Thurmond’s relationship with the University of South Carolina was strained during his term as governor, as he wished to exercise his power as president ex officio of the Board of Trustees to appoint committees. The university president traditionally made appointments, especially since the governor ceased to be the board’s chairman in 1936. Thurmond claimed that the board’s initial refusal to allow the governor to make appointments was rude, and that “there is a cool atmosphere to me as far as I am concerned...I am saying this to your president’s face; I am against him when he is wrong, and I will be with him when he is right...I can help it [the University] or hurt it...I don’t like the attitude [of the university’s admin] down here...There has been too much picayunishness—too much jealousy—too much secrecy.”⁸

In November 1947 Thurmond married his secretary Jean Crouch when she was 22. They met when Thurmond was judging the Miss South Carolina Beauty Contest earlier that year, which Crouch won. He then hired her as his personal secretary. The Thurmonds posed for Life Magazine with the caption “Virile Governor,” with Thurmond in a headstand.⁹ Jean died of a brain tumor in 1960.

As the Southern states slowly left the Democratic party over the issue of segregation, Thurmond ran for president in 1948 as the States’ Rights Democratic Party candidate, with Mississippi governor Fielding Wright as his running mate.¹⁰ This party was dubbed the Dixiecrats. When unsuccessfully running for president, Thurmond boasted: “I want to tell you that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”¹¹ Thurmond claimed he was not racist, but that instead he opposed overexertion of federal authority which he blamed on “Communist agitators.” He stayed silent when federal judge J. Waties Waring ordered South Carolina’s Democratic Party to allow African Americans to vote in primaries, but later loudly opposed judicial decisions concerning integration.¹²

In 1950 Thurmond lost a U.S. Senate bid against Olin D. Johnson but won in 1954 as a write in candidate against Democratic Party-nominated Edgar Brown. He remained a U.S. Senator for the rest of his life but switched to the Republican Party in 1964 in support of conservative candidate Barry Goldwater. Goldwater advocated for states’ rights and opposed the civil rights bills in Congress, and Thurmond worked to whip support for the candidate as his first major act as a Republican. ¹³ Thurmond claimed that the Democratic party had “abandoned the people” and used opposition to the 1965 Voting Rights Act to turn similar dissatisfied white Democrats into Republicans. Goldwater’s defeat in the 1964 election nevertheless showed that the key to Republican success was support from Southern proponents of states’ rights and segregation.

Thurmond continued to shift white Democrats to the Republican party by cooperating with presidential candidate Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy.” Nixon promised Thurmond that he would favor an anti-ballistic missile defense system and that he would not press hard on school desegregation, and Thurmond in turn worked on turning Southern Republicans to the Nixon campaign. Nixon and his advisors knew that they needed to appeal to segregationist voters, and thus expressed racialized fears with new political language, such as an emphasis on “states’ rights.”¹⁴

Because he enjoyed such prestige in the Republican party at this point, Thurmond played a pivotal role in the establishment of the “southern strategy” and the political reconsolidation of segregationist politics, as he helped to meld the racialized fears of his southern region to the western “freedom” rhetoric of Goldwater and Reagan. This legacy is clearly seen in the brokering work he did to win over Wallace voters to the GOP in 1968 and in stumping for Nixon in the general election that year. Historians are in agreement that Thurmond’s support for Nixon, in which he assured nervous southerners that Nixon would not employ federal power to enforce civil rights mandates in the region, was crucial to Nixon’s success in that narrowly contested election.¹⁵

In 1972, Thurmond sent a “personal and confidential” letter to Attorney General John N. Mitchell and Nixon aid William Timmons urging them to deport John Lennon of the Beatles due to his political leanings and activism. He believed action against Lennon would avoid “many headaches” since Lennon’s influence on young people might affect Nixon’s re-election chances. The Nixon administration threatened Lennon with deportation from 1972 to 1976.¹⁶ Thurmond was against the investigations against Richard Nixon in July 1973, saying that Nixon was “the only president we have” and compared resignation to “mob rule.” It was likely that he would have supported Nixon in the event of impeachment, but Nixon resigned.

Thurmond married former Miss South Carolina Nancy Moore on December 22, 1968, when she was 22. They had four children: Nancy Moore Thurmond, James Strom Thurmond Jr., Juliana Gertrude Whitmer, and Paul Reynolds Thurmond. Nancy and Strom separated in 1991 and remained estranged, but never divorced. At the time of their separation Nancy stated “At this point in my life I would like to be able to pursue several career options and some measure of independence.” She was 44 and he was 88.¹⁷ In 1993 their oldest daughter, Nancy Moore Thurmond, was killed by a drunk driver a month before her college graduation and weeks before she was set to compete in the Miss South Carolina pageant. Thurmond then became one of the Senate’s strongest crusaders against drunk driving.

Thurmond became the chairman of the Judiciary Committee in 1980, and supported the renewal of the Voting Rights Act and federal holiday for Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.  Thurmond never publicly apologized for stating on the Senate floor that “King demeans his race and retards the advancement of his people” who created resentment which “assists communist purposes.”¹⁸ From 1981 to 1987, Thurmond was chair of the Judiciary Committee, and passed a major rewriting of federal criminal law that ended parole in the federal prison system. He became chairman of the Armed Services Committee and president pro temporare of the Senate in 1994. He was mostly a figurehead, however, due to his advanced age. He relinquished his chairmanship in 1998 and gave up his ceremonial role as Senate president in 2001. In October 2001, Thurmond collapsed on the Senate floor and was moved to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. In his last years in the Senate, he needed to be helped on and off the Senate floor by aides who, according to the New York Times, “told him, in voices audible in the Senate gallery, how to vote.”¹⁹

Thurmond remained in office until his final senate term in 2003, then retired to a special suite in Edgefield County Hospital. He died in Edgefield on June 26, 2003 and is buried in Willowbrook Cemetery. Many attributed his long life to his “legendary” fitness and his refusal to smoke or drink.²⁰ Senator and President Joseph R. Biden Jr. spoke at his funeral.

Though he denied he had a Black child during his lifetime, six months after Thurmond’s death Essie Mae Washington-Williams, then 78 and living in Los Angeles, came forward with the news that she was Thurmond’s daughter. Thurmond’s children did not contest Washington-Williams' claim.

Thurmond and Segregation

Thurmond was deeply invested in education in South Carolina, though he ardently stressed his desire for it to remain segregated. However, as Superintendent of Education for Edgefield, he initiated a literacy program that resulted in Black illiteracy dropping more than 25% in one year. He also secured federal funding for HBCUs in 1971.²¹His foundation and family have contributed over a million dollars to the University of South Carolina as of 2019.²² His foundation funded and continues to fund scholarships.

Like many conservative Democrats in the 30s and 40s, Thurmond welcomed New Deal federal largesse into his state. But he grew alarmed at the potential reach of federal power into the region when the civil rights movement started to win victories in the courts and in the court of public opinion. He was one of the first to leave a liberalizing Democratic party as the Democrats increasingly embraced the cause of civil rights in the 1950s and 60s. ²³ On the Civil Rights fight, he claimed: ''No fight was ever won by staying out of it. Our cause is right and just. We shall honor ourselves by pressing it to the end.'' Famously, Thurmond invited the governor of the Virgin Islands, William Hastie, to visit the governor’s mansion in Columbia, and when he found out Hastie was Black stated, “I would not have written him if I

Thurmond was the major force behind the “Southern Manifesto” broadside in 1956, which advised readers on how to resist the Brown v. Board of Education Decision desegregating public schools. He critiqued the Supreme Court decision, arguing that “with no legal basis for their action,” the court “undertook to exercise their naked judicial power and substituted their personal and political ideas for the established law of the land.” Nineteen of the twenty-two Southern senators signed.²⁵

 In 1957, Thurmond set the record for the longest filibuster at 24 hours and 18 minutes on the Senate floor. It was in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which eventually passed. Thurmond vocally opposed every new civil rights bill proposed during the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He called the Freedom Riders of 1961 “red pawns and publicity seekers,” tying the Civil Rights movement to Communism’s “menace.”²⁶

In 1963, Thurmond claimed that the court order allowing Harvey Gantt to enroll in Clemson was an act of “glaring stupidity” which proved the Fourth Circuit court had “slight regard for objectivity, justice and law.” The State newspaper assumed that Thurmond referenced recent remarks by Ernest Hollings and Donald Russell, outgoing and incoming governors, which he claimed were “events and statements implying that the Southern people are accepting forced integration as distasteful but inevitable.” This, said Thurmond, led to “publicized misinterpretations outside the South.” Thurmond argued that the original judge who heard the case, Judge C.C. Wyche, had proven “that there was no showing that the refusal to admit Gantt was on the basis of his race” and thus the overturning of Wyche’s ruling was substituting “fiction for fact and expedience for the law.” Thurmond maintained that the college, having a maximum capacity, was enforcing its minimum entrance requirements, and that this was an individual suit and not a class action suit.²⁷

In 1970, Thurmond’s choice for governor of South Carolina, state Representative Albert Watson, lost to Democratic candidate John West. Watson was linked to various racial conflicts in the state and stood up for “hard-core [read: white] rednecks.” Watson’s campaign—strongly supported by Thurmond-- made common cause with Darlington county school segregationist dead-enders, and the political operative Lee Atwater, a leading practitioner of the “southern strategy” which redefined political rhetoric in America by repackaging old-line segregationism within new discourses of “law and order,” “states’ rights,” and “fiscal responsibility.” After this defeat, Thurmond hired Thomas Moss, a Black state director of the Voter Education Project, which sought to encourage African Americans to vote. Moss worked for Thurmond for 25 years and pushed for grants for Black neighborhoods, schools, and small businesses.

After the battle against segregation was lost in South Carolina, Thurmond used political pragmatism to stay in office, voting in favor of extending the Voting Rights Act in 1982 and voting for the Fair Housing Act in 1988. He courted Black politicians in South Carolina and paid attention to Black communities seeking federal help, helping launch the career of Armstrong Williams and appointing Judge Matthew Perry to the position of federal judge. He opposed Congressman Jim Clyburn’s motion to name a federal courthouse after Perry in 1993 because Thurmond and others wanted the courthouse to be named for Strom Thurmond instead.²⁸ Civil rights activist Victoria DeLee supported Thurmond as early as 1972. Thurmond pushed for Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court nomination and congratulated the new justice at his home.²⁹ Thurmond never publicly apologized for his segregationist actions, except to deny that his actions were about race.

Jim Clyburn, the highest-ranking Black member of Congress and representative from South Carolina, said that he “always had pause” with Thurmond's years as a segregationist leader, and that “I don’t square that at all. It’s part of what I work every day to overcome” but that he and Thurmond were “political friends.”  “You don’t have to agree with people to work with them,” he later added after working “with Strom Thurmond all my life.” Clyburn believed that Thurmond’s “willingness to change over time set an example for many South Carolinians.”³⁰ In his eulogy for the senator, President Joe Biden claimed that Thurmond was no longer the same man he was as a segregationist: “For the man who will see, time heals, time changes, and time leads him to truth. But only a special man like Strom would have the courage to accept it, the grace to acknowledge it, and the humility in the face of lasting enmity and mistrust to pursue it until the end.” Thurmond also told Biden that the civil rights movement “freed my soul.” Biden listed Thurmond’s signing of the Voting Rights Act and Martin Luther King Day as well as Black members of his staff as signs of Thurmond’s growth.³¹

Timothy Noah of Slate, however, disagrees, and argues that Thurmond never publicly renounced his “repugnant” views of the past. In 1988, Thurmond insisted that in the 1948 presidential bid he was “just trying to protect the rights of the states and the rights of the people...some in the news media tried to make it a race fight, but it was not that.” Yet when asked about the speech he gave that same year, he had to be “convinced” that he said it and said “if I had to run that race again, some of the wording I used would not be used. I would word it differently.” He did not say which words. In 1991, he said “When I grew up, the black people were just all servants. Now they’ve developed and developed and come up and we’ve got to acknowledge people when they deserve to be acknowledged, and the black people deserve to be acknowledged.”³²

Sexual Assault Claims

Some argue that as Carrie Butler was perhaps 15 at the time that she was impregnated by Thurmond, that Thurmond most likely violated the law against statutory rape, which even in 1922 was 16. There is no evidence that the two had any relations before or after. The only way this event would not have qualified as statutory rape was if Butler was born no later than early January 1909 (we only know she was born in 1909 or 1910) and just after her 16^th birthday. Many argue that as an impoverished maid in the Thurmond household, there was virtually no way Butler could have said no without at least fear of consequences.³³

Former Senator John Tower said of Thurmond: “when he dies, they’ll have to beat his pecker down with a baseball bat in order to close the coffin lid.”³⁴ In 1994, Senator Patty Murray told fellow senator Barbara Boxer that Thurmond tried to grope her in an elevator.  Thurmond put his arm around Murray, tried to fondle her breast and said, “are you married little lady?” When Boxer found out, she was “distraught” and wanted to call a press conference, but Murray said she wanted “to deal with this in a quiet way” and told Thurmond’s staff “he can’t just wander around by himself—he needs to have staff people with him because he can’t be going around attacking women in the elevator.”³⁵ Asked about the incident later, Murray's spokesperson said it was “handled it in a way she felt was appropriate and since then she has not talked about it and doesn't intend to.” A spokesperson said that Thurmond remembered only grabbing Murray by the arm, and that it was customary for him to do so, and “vintage Strom Thurmond” to ask women if they were married as a “getting-to-know-you exercise.” They also stated that Murray declined to meet with Thurmond after the event, saying it was not necessary. In 1996, Murray said “I think he was merely hanging on tighter than he should have been.” ³⁶

Commentator Cokie Roberts said that Thurmond was in “the category of his own” when it came to harassment on Capitol Hill. “He once kissed me on the mouth live on air at a political convention,” she said in 2017.³⁷ When Senator Susan Collins joined the Senate in 1997, she was warned not to get in an elevator alone with Thurmond. She wrote that when she avoided an elevator, a Republican male colleague laughed because “he knew exactly why I was turning around and not getting on the elevator.”³⁸  In 2018, GQ Editor in Chief Jim Nelson wrote about how his sister, a DC lobbyist in the 90s, received the ”Strom Thurmond Squeeze,” a ”signature sideways hug.” She said that “when he’d meet a woman he liked...he’d mewl, ’Aw, you’re such a purrrdy girl! And smart, too!’...he’d grab boob, every time.”³⁹ Sally Quinn wrote in her book that in the 1950s, Strom Thurmond came up behind Quinn and her mother with a hand on both of their rear ends. Quinn laughed it off and said, “As I recall, we were both quite flattered, and thought it terrible funny and wicked of Ol’ Strom,” though at first they “jumped and let out a shriek.”⁴⁰ In her memoir Living History, Hillary Clinton dubbed Thurmond the “frisky nonagenarian Senator from South Carolina.”

 

 

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¹ Board of Trustees Minutes, 25 Sep. 1996, 30 Jan. 1997, 21 May 1998, 23 Jun 1998, 25 Feb. 1999, South Caroliniana Library.

² Their daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, said that she knew Thurmond loved her mother, and that “I believe he loved me, after his fashion.” She does not state if Thurmond told her this. Essie Mae Washington-Williams, Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond (New York: Harper, 2005) For an opinion on how the power dynamic of the two made consent impossible, see Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Was Strom A Rapist?” The Nation 15 Mar 2005, 

³ Adam Clymer, “Strom Thurmond, Foe of Integration, Dies at 100,” New York Times 27 Jun. 2003, 

⁴ David Bruck, “The Four Men Strom Thurmond Sent to the Chair,” The Washington Post, 26 Apr. 1981.

⁵ Clymer, “Strom Thurmond, Foe of Integration, Dies at 100”

⁶ Thurmond blamed the Barnwell Ring for the lack of transparency in the state government. These politicians from Barnwell were led by House Speaker Solomon Blatt.

⁷ Clymer, “Strom Thurmond, Foe of Integration, Dies at 100”

⁸ During this period, the university was experiencing political difficulties and a college president—Smith—who “failed to provide vigorous leadership in public relations with the state.” Henry H. Lesene, A History of the University of South Carolina, 1940-2000 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 56.

⁹ Nadine Cohodas, “Thurmond, James Strom” South Carolina Online Encyclopedia 16 Aug 2016.

¹⁰ The Democratic party began its shift under the Truman Administration, when he began to explore a firmer civil rights policy in the wake of postwar racial violence. Southern conservative Democrats remained deeply disconcerted about the evolution of their party on the issue of race in the 1950s and 60s, a concern made vivid in the launching by southern conservatives of the “massive resistance” campaign in 1956 shortly after the Brown decision. This was a campaign in which Thurmond remained a leading spokesperson, as evidenced by his role in drafting the Southern Manifesto and rendered with heroic aplomb in his historic anti-civil rights filibuster in 1957.

¹¹ Cohodas, “Thurmond, James Strom.”

¹² Clymer

¹³ According to historian Kevin Kruse, “The Goldwater/Thurmond moment was transformative in how Americans understood the two parties on civil rights. Until 1964, it seemed clear that Democrats were the party of economic liberalism and the GOP economic conservatism, but civil rights had been left out of the picture. . . .[After 1964] [t]here was a stark change in popular perception about the two parties on civil rights.” @KevinMKruse Twitter thread, April 30, 2018 

¹⁴ For more on Nixon’s southern strategy, see Nixon advisor Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (1969).

“States’ rights” would be supported by other rhetorical formulations, notably appeals to “law and order,” as a supposed counter to the tumult in the streets witnessed in the era; bussing and local control of schools (and, indeed, the private school movement of the period) as a proxy for desegregation opposition; the continued red-baiting of the civil rights movement with ongoing accusations about communist infiltration of the movement; and stoking fears about a runaway welfare state making handouts to the undeserving poor.

¹⁵ This “southern strategy” was widely discussed in Republican circles at the time, and well-understood to be a rhetorical strategy to appeal to the south’s racial fears. Many point to Ronald Regan’s launching of his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in close proximity the site where the Ku Klux Klan murdered three young civil rights workers in 1964. Further evidence comes from Lee Atwater, who in a recorded interview laid bare the political logic at work:  Exclusive: Lee Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy - YouTube. Many histories have been written about the “southern strategy.” See Earl Black & Merle Black, The Rise of Southern Republicans (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2002); Dan Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000); Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

¹⁶ Arnold H. Lubasch, “Deportation of Lennon Barred by Court of Appeals,” New York Times 08 Oct. 1975. l

¹⁷ “Strom Thurmond, Wife Announce Separation” The Orlando Sentinel 29 Mar. 1991.

¹⁸ Nadine Cohodas, Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993),

387.

¹⁹ Clymer.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Jack Bass and Marilyn W. Thompson, Strom: the Complicated Personal and Political Life of Strom Thurmond (Public Affairs: New York, 2005), 38-9, 240-1.

²² University of South Carolina Foundations, Thurmond Funds Project Summary Report as of 13 Feb 2019. 

²³ Clymer.

²⁴ Cohodas, Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change, 138, 188.

²⁵ “The Southern Manifesto.” Congressional Record. 84th Congress Second Session. Vol. 102 Part 4 (March 12, 1956). Washington, D.C.: Governmental Printing Office, 1956. P. 4459-4460

²⁶ Clymer.

²⁷ ” Thurmond Raps Gantt Reversal,” The State, 17 Jan 1963, Newsbank.

²⁸ The courthouse was named for Perry in 2004. ”Congressman Clyburn Realizes Dream of Honoring Matthew Perry,” Office of U.S. Congressman James E. Clyburn 2004 

²⁹ Bass and Thompson, Strom: The Complicated Personal and Political Life of Strom Thurmond, 301; Cohodas, Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change 482-4, 497.

³⁰ Julie Hirschfeld Davis, ”Strom Thurmond marks his 100^th birthday,” The Balitmore Sun Dec. 6, 2002; Laura Barron-Lopez and Heather Caygle, ”Black lawmakers get Biden’s back amid ’segregationist’ uproar,” Poltico, Jun. 19, 2019; Amy Geier Edgar, ”Former constituents thankful for legacy” Spartanburg Herald-Journal, Jun. 28 2003

³¹ Joseph R. Biden, “Eulogy for James Strom Thurmond.” July 1, 2003. American Rhetoric.

³² Cohodas, Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change, 497.

³³ Crenshaw, “Was Strom A Rapist?”

³⁴ Jack Bass and Marilyn W. Thompson, Ol’ Strom: An Unauthorized Biography of Strom Thurmond (Atlanta: Longstreet, 1998)

³⁵ Jill Filipovic, “How Female Senators Dealt With Sexism as They Built Their Careers” Cosmopolitan 21 Apr. 2015.

³⁶ Scott Sconner, “Book recounts sexual harassment allegation against Sen. Thurmond by Sen. Patty Murray,” Associated Press 8 Nov. 1996,; Paul Kane, “Patty Murray leads women’s push for lasting change in handling sexual harassment on Capitol Hill,” The Washington Post 7 Dec. 2017.  

³⁷ “Cokie Roberts on Politicians and Sexual Harassment,” NPR’s Morning Edition 15 Nov 2017.

³⁸ Liza Mundy, “The Secret History of Women in the Senate,” Politico Magazine January/February 2015,

³⁹ Jim Nelson, “#MeToo and My Sister, Too,” GQ  6 Jun. 2018,

⁴⁰ Jonathan Chait, “Sally Quinn Forced to Dine With Non-Fake Friends,” New York Intelligencer, 14 Jun 2012,

⁴¹ Board of Trustees Minutes, 25 Sep. 1996, 30 Jan. 1997, 21 May 1998, 23 Jun 1998, 25 Feb. 1999, South Caroliniana Library.