By Zenitha Prince
Special to the NNPA from the Afro-American Newspaper

Essie Mae Washington-Williams died this month without ever publicly being acknowledged by her father, the infamous South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond. Yet, after his death in 2003, she became the embodiment of his legacy—as one of America’s greatest political hypocrites.

That a politician who had built his career on claims of Black inferiority and the condemnation of miscegenation had fathered a daughter with his family’s 16-year-old Black servant was, for some, the ultimate irony.

“If your public face is that you believe in a racially hierarchal environment in which sexual relationships between Black men and White women are forbidden but privately sexual relationships between White men and Black women are accepted it represents a great deal of hypocrisy and psychological contradiction,” said Dianne Pinderhughes, professor of Africana studies at University of Notre Dame.

“For a lot of people outside of the South, that was a surprise and a shock,” said AFRO Publisher John J. Oliver of the revelation.

For people in Edgefield, S.C., however, it was a simple matter of fact, and Washington-Williams was, perhaps, one of the worst-kept secrets of Southern political folklore.

The American South was littered with children like her, which a series of AFRO articles highlighted in 1948 when it revealed Thurmond’s other Black relatives.

At the time, then Gov. Thurmond was running for president under the Dixiecrat (States’ Rights Democratic Party) banner on a segregationist platform—the party was formed by deserters of the Democratic Party, which had, under President Harry Truman, begun to advance civil rights legislation. Thurmond represented the “massa resistance… a powerful planter community that were strong advocates of White supremacy,” Pinderhughes said.

During his campaign, the candidate once declared that there were not enough troops in the Army to force White Southerners to “admit the (expletive) race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”But, apparently, Black women were welcome in their beds.

According to an Aug. 21, 1948 AFRO article, postal worker Robert Thurmond, of Morristown, N.J., revealed that the governor was his first cousin—his father, Thomas, was half-brother to James Thurmond, the governor’s father—and the relationship was well-known.

“I certainly do know Strom and he knows me and he knows about our relationship because we were the only Thurmonds in Edgefield,” he said. More relatives came forward.

In an Aug. 28 article, the Rev. James R. Thurmond recalled seeing the governor’s father visiting his grandfather, the blue-eyed Thomas Thurmond.

“They used to sit and eat, and talk for hours,” he said. “I remember asking my grandfather why that ‘White’ man always visit our home. My grandfather told me they were brothers.”

And there were many more Black Thurmonds littered throughout Edgefield and surrounding counties, he said, a fact well-known.

“It is an old story and ‘everybody in these parts knows it,’” the AFRO quoted Thomas Thurmond, the governor’s half-cousin, as saying.

“We wanted to highlight the hypocrisy of the Southern attitude,” said Oliver, of the newspaper’s coverage. More specifically, he added, “We wanted to highlight the inconsistency of his (Thurmond’s) political vision and his personal life… [that] this guy is a racist but he has Black relatives.”

Oliver said the article likely had some impact, particularly in the elections.

“Thurmond did not get a lot of votes because he reflected a way of life that people no longer wanted to promote,” the newspaper executive said.

Thurmond’s duplicity, as manifested by his Black daughter, was evident in other ways. Those inconsistencies—for example, his authorship of the “Southern Manifesto,” which was created to counter the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case that banned public school segregation and, later, his support of legislation to create a holiday in Dr. Martin Luther King’s honor (Blacks are a powerful voting bloc in South Carolina)—seemed to suggest that his public positions were based on political expediency, said some critics, such as former Sen. Edward Brooke (R-Mass.), who in 1966 became the first Black senator elected since Reconstruction.

In his biography, Brooke said that in January 1967, not long after his election, he went to the Senate pool and found Thurmond and several other Jim Crow defenders already swimming laps. Brooke was expecting objections to his attempt to integrate the pool. Instead, the Southern lawmakers invited him to join them.

“There was no hesitation or ill will that I could see. Yet these were men who consistently voted against legislation that would have provided equal opportunity to others of my race,” Brooke wrote. “I felt that if a senator truly believed in racial separatism I could live with that, but it was increasingly evident that some members of the Senate played on bigotry purely for political gain. They appealed to ignorance and prejudice to entrench themselves in office.”

By Rebecca Nuttall
Special to the NNPA from The New Pittsburgh Courier

As a former leader of the Communist Party USA who was tied to the Black Panther Party during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, 69-year-old political activist, scholar and author Angela Davis has been one of the African-American community’s most militant voices throughout history. Labeled by President Richard Nixon as a “dangerous terrorist,” Davis was once charged with aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder, and spent 18 months in prison before being acquitted in 1972.

Today, Davis serves as a distinguished professor emerita at the University of California at Santa Cruz, but still finds time to be active in the prison abolishment and Occupy movements, in between lecturing at colleges and universities around the country. On Jan. 24, she visited the University of Pittsburgh for the Black Action Society’s Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture.

“This has been a very unique Martin Luther King Jr. Day period because it coincided with the second inauguration of the first African-American president,” Davis said referring to President Barack Obama. “While we celebrate the historic occasion of Obama’s second term, it’s important to reflect on the conditions that led to it.”

Davis was tasked with providing the students and community attendees in the Alumni Hall auditorium with little known facts about King and the Civil Rights Movement. She responded by probing King’s legacy, how his beliefs are often misrepresented and other misconceptions throughout African-American history.

“As we observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we are actually paying tribute to the millions of people who joined the struggle for freedom,” Davis said. “Martin Luther King Jr. could not have emerged as the powerful figure had it not been for ordinary people.”

In light of the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Davis revealed the truth behind the document signed by President Abraham Lincoln, not delved into in high school history classes. While the document is touted as the end of slavery, Davis said it was used to bolster troop numbers in the Civil War by encouraging Blacks in Confederate states to join Union Army forces.

“I think we should be celebrating it, but critically celebrating it, understanding that it was a military strategy,” Davis said. “We often act as if the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves, but it was only slaves in states that had seceded from the union.”

Following her remarks, many in the audience questioned Davis on how to advocate for change in the areas of racial equality, capitalism, poverty, the prison industrial complex, gun control, torture, and more. While both the audience and Davis criticized President Obama’s inaction on these issues, she said the public should take the lead in demonstrating for the changes they want to see.

“What was most important about the election of Obama was the people. I’m totally opposed to many of the policies and Obama’s failure to act, but I still want to support him,” Davis said. “We need to organize the kinds of demonstrations that let him know that we do not agree with his failure to address issues of race.”

For her part, Davis continues to take part in demonstrations on the issues most important to her, particularly prison abolishment. Two days after her lecture at Pitt, on Jan. 26, her birthday, Davis was involved in protests at two of the largest women’s prisons in the country.

Special to the NNPA from The Louisiana Weekly

Bernette Johnson was sworn in Friday as the first black chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court, less than four months after her colleagues resolved a dispute over whether she was entitled to the position.

Johnson took the oath of office during a brief ceremony a day after her predecessor, Catherine “Kitty” Kimball, formally retired. A public ceremony marking her investiture is scheduled for February 28 on the courthouse steps in the French Quarter.

“After serving for 10 years as a district trial judge, and then as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, I feel well-prepared for the tasks ahead as the chief administrative officer of the judicial system of the state,” Johnson said in a statement. “I am ready to serve, and excited about the challenges of this new position.”

Johnson filed a federal lawsuit in July 2012 after her colleagues said they would debate whether she or Justice Jeffrey Victory, who is white, had the seniority that entitled them to succeed Kimball.

U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan ruled in September that Johnson had more seniority, but stopped short of ordering the state’s highest court to name Johnson as Kimball’s successor.

The Louisiana Supreme Court ended the racially tinged power struggle in October, ruling that Johnson’s years of appointed service count when deciding which justice is “oldest in point of service” under the state constitution.

Voters elected Johnson in 1994 to the state appeals court, and she was assigned to the Supreme Court as part of settlement of an earlier lawsuit that claimed the system for electing justices diluted black voting strength and violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. She served an eighth Supreme Court district centered in New Orleans until the court reverted back to seven districts in 2000, when she was elected to the high court.

Victory joined the court in 1995, a year after Johnson, but said her years of appointed service shouldn’t count.

Johnson, Victory and a third judge who stood to be second-in-line if Victory’s argument prevailed were recused from debating the matter.

This article was originally published in the February 4, 2013 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper

Special to the NNPA from The Miami Times

Representative Cynthia Stafford (D-Miami) has filed House Bill 123, which aims to require an overt act for someone claiming the stand your ground defense. Representative Mark Pafford (D-West Palm Beach) and Representative Barbara Watson (Miami Gardens) have joined Stafford as co-sponsors of the bill. The representatives offered the following statements:

Stafford said: “The way the law currently reads, a person claiming stand your ground need only have a reasonable belief that they are in imminent danger of great bodily harm or death. There is no provision that requires something other than a person’s belief. This bill will require an overt act, in essence, an initial aggressive act that places the claimant in fear for their life.

“House Bill 123 will help to eliminate assumptions that have proven deadly in the past. It’s no longer, `I thought’ he or she looked dangerous so `I thought’ I would be harmed or killed. With this bill, there must be something more than `I thought’ there must be an overt act that placed a person in reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm.

Pafford said: “Representative Stafford’s proposal provides a smart change to a complex law that obviously needs urgent attention.”

Watson said: “I believe there are loopholes in the current law that too often lead to opportunities for individuals to make a judgment of fear or threat to their safety that result in deadly consequences. House Bill 123 tightens the guidelines as to whether they can claim stand your ground.”