Was Strom Thurmond a racist? Two of his biographers to discuss his legacy

Watch the Facebook Live discussion here.

Was Strom Thurmond a racist?

The late U.S. senator’s legacy is under scrutiny as current and former students at the University of South Carolina call for renaming the Strom Thurmond Wellness and Fitness Center on campus.

Thurmond’s pro-segregationist views are well-known. He ran for president in 1948 as a third party candidate committed to keeping segregation alive in South Carolina and the South. He set the Senate’s filibuster record in 1957 in an effort to defeat a civil rights proposal. He voted against the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and he urged the FBI to investigate whether Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist.

But some say he changed later in life. He was honored by an organization of South Carolina’s black mayors for his service to their communities. Some civil rights leaders praised him for his efforts to help Black South Carolinians. He voted to renew the Voting Rights Act in 1982 and for a federal holiday to honor King in 1983. In his last campaign for U.S. Senate in 1996, Thurmond received 20 percent of the Black vote, a high for Republicans in the state during that time.

Jack Bass and Marilyn Thompson will discuss Thurmond during a live online forum hosted by The State on Wednesday, Sept. 2, at 12 p.m. They have co-authored two books about Thurmond. The first, “Ol’ Strom, An unauthorized biography of Strom Thurmond,” was published in 1998. The second, “Strom: The complicated personal and political life of Strom Thurmond,” was published in 2005.

Bass, a University of South Carolina graduate, is a former staff member of The State and The Charlotte Observer. He was twice named S.C. Journalist of the Year. A former journallism professor at the University of Mississippi, he is professor emeritus of humanities and social sciences at the College of Charleston. He has authored or co-authored six other books, including “The Orangeburg Massacre,” about the shooting deaths of three young men by state highway patrolman at S.C. State University in 1968, and “Unlikely Heroes,” about the Southern judges who turned the Brown court decision on schools into “a broad mandate for racial justice,” according to his website, jackbass.com.

Thompson grew up in Greenville and is a former reporter at The Columbia Record, Columbia’s defunct afternoon newspaper, where she wrote a five-part series on Thurmond. She later worked for The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and Reuters, as Washington bureau chief. She also is former editor and vice president of the Lexington Herald Leader in Kentucky. At The Post, she helped manage investigative teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 1999 and 2000. She also broke the story of Strom Thurmond’s biracial child, Essie Mae Washington, in 2003. She is a senior editor at ProPublica.

This story was originally published September 1, 2020 at 5:00 AM.