News Outlets Using Sanitized ’48 Thurmond Quote
Retired schoolteacher Essie Mae Washington-Williams‘ public acknowledgment last week that she was the unacknowledged daughter of the late Sen. Strom Thumond produced a wealth of follow-up stories and commentary over the weekend. But most news outlets are using a sanitized version of one of Thurmond’s most famous quotes.
In 1948, according to the Web site stromwatch.com, which provides audio of the statement, Thurmond said:
“I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theatres into our swimming pools into our homes and into our churches.”
However, in most news reports, the “n” word is replaced with “Negro.”
Reporting the quote using the “n” word have been CBS News, the Los Angeles Times editorial page, the Economist, and columnists DeWayne Wickham of Gannett News Service (who alerted Journal-isms), Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Robert Fulford of Canada’s National Post, and Dave Shulman of L.A. Weekly.
United Press International opted for using ” ‘n—-‘ race” and ABC News went with “admit the (censored by network) into our theaters . . .”
But nearly everyone else, Southern newspapers no exception, used the sanitized version, including the New York Times, the Associated Press, USA Today and NBC News. Of course, it is possible that Thurmond made more than one speech and the two camps are quoting different ones. But the same sanitizing process took place a year ago during the controversy over praise of Thurmond by Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., as the National Newspaper Publishers Association wrote at the time.
Meanwhile, the weekend pieces were highlighted by a 3,148-word description by Marilyn W. Thompson in the Washington Post of her 25 years tracking the story as she worked for three different newspapers. When she finally got a call from Washington-Williams’ lawyer saying his client was ready to go public, Thompson was too weak from six weeks of chemotherapy to fly to Los Angeles. But she got the exclusive by telephone.
In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, L.A. Johnson wrote that the revelation had set off a “weeklong national dialogue about race, politics and responsibility.” In the Greenville (S.C.) News, Tim Smith was among those reporting that “Several producers and publishers have contacted Essie Mae Washington-Williams’ attorney, Frank Wheaton, including Craig Anderson, who produced a television mini-series on the romance between Thomas Jefferson and one of his slaves.”
In The State in Columbia, S.C., Joseph S. Stroud wrote that, “examples abound of episodes, statements, and actions by Thurmond that invite new scrutiny ? some more painful for the late senator?s family than others.”
And the Charlotte Observer editorialized Thursday that, “We hope Ms. Williams’ coming forward with her story inspires others among this country’s so-called “black” and “white” families to begin honestly admitting and exploring their interrelationships, even though doing so may cause pain in some quarters for a time. The cliché about America being a melting pot is founded in fact. Many families are, if truth be admitted, blends of black and white. Recognizing that, embracing and moving forward can only be a positive step for all.”
National Public Radio audio of Thurmond speech
Black Columnists Weigh In on Thurmond Daughter
- Merline Davis, Herald-Leader, Lexington, Ky.:
In Essie Mae Washington-Williams‘ day, “with her mother being 16 and with Williams obviously a product of a mixed-race relationship with someone in the ‘Big House,’ the proper thing for her family to do was to whisk the child far from gossiping tongues and the ostracism sure to follow from schoolmates.
“So, Williams continued to protect herself from the shame of her birth by covering her life in pseudo-secrecy, making it at times, I’m sure, as uncomfortable as . . . plastic furniture covers.
“I just don’t think I could have done the same.”
- Eugene Kane, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
“Since Thurmond lived to be as old as some countries, his relationship with his 78-year-old daughter could serve as a metaphor for America’s often turbulent history with black people.
“Blacks have been here longer than other groups, yet many still don’t feel like true members of the American family because of lingering wounds from a harsh racial past too many Americans refuse to acknowledge.
“If we’re brave enough, just like Thurmond’s daughter, maybe telling that truth will set us free, too.”
- Colbert I. King, Washington Post:
“The legacy of the Thurmonds of America is more odious than the mere fact of having fathered but not publicly owned up to children they brought into this world. Those men left in their wake a cruel caste and color preference system that hangs like a funeral shroud over African Americans even to this day.”
Gunnar Myrdal’s “An American Dilemma” “documented it: The dark days of slavery, with its preference for fair-skinned house girls and yard hands; Reconstruction, when the better-educated and property-owning blacks of interracial heritage got a head start in just about every endeavor; the early 20th century, with black communities led by light-colored aristocracies.”
“. . . What pathology! Straightened hair; bleached skin; shame over Negroid features. Screwed-up goals, too: Work hard, join the black middle class, marry up, get a fair-skinned woman if she and her family will have you. Segregated world? So what? In the black community, a light skin, in matters of work, play and social mobility, had advantages.
“Much of that, thank goodness, is dying out.”
- Alberta Phillips, Austin American-Statesman:
“For 78 years, Essie Mae Washington-Williams has been black. She was born to a single black woman, graduated from a historically black college and was a member of an African American sorority. The media instantly promoted her to ‘biracial’ this week following her disclosure that her father was Strom Thurmond, the late senator and segregationist from South Carolina.
“That South Carolina and much of the country for decades dismissed the allegations regarding her paternity is insult enough. But to strip her of her cultural identity, to suddenly recast her as more than black but less than white because her father was a rich, powerful white man, is an insult to African Americans.
“Now, it seems the media — and no doubt some modern historians — are attempting to hijack Essie Mae’s black identity to protect the rich and the powerful.”
- Bob Ray Sanders, Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
“It is said that Thurmond later in life redeemed himself and won the respect of many blacks whom he had discriminated against in the past.
“Maybe so.
“But no matter how formidable a politician he was or how polite he may have been to the child he publicly denied, the truth is he died a cowardly old reprobate whose life and career will forever be tarnished by a deed he tried to cover up.”
- Barry Saunders, News and Observer, Raleigh, N.C.:
“Thurmond never publicly acknowledged his black daughter — and in fact vehemently denied he had one — but we should’ve gotten a clue when the Rolling Stones’ ‘Brown Sugar’ replaced the funeral dirge as his body lay in state in the South Carolina capitol.
“(That’s a joke.)
“Hypocrisy is an obvious reason for his obstinacy, but I also think Strom knew that as long as there was no civil rights act, no laws providing the vote or equal education opportunities, his family would have a steady supply of undereducated black girls working as maids.
“Bastard.”
- Elmer Smith, Philadelphia Daily News:
“This is not just some boudoir quirk.”
Both Thomas Jefferson and Strom Thurmond “owe their political careers to keeping blacks in their place. For Thurmond, that meant keeping black people away from the polls.
“Jefferson won the presidency in 1800 ‘with electoral college votes derived from the three-fifths representation of slaves who could not vote but who were partially counted as citizens,’ historian Garry Wills points out in his new book, ‘Negro President.’
“I’m glad it’s all coming to light. Because even after these men become historical footnotes, their times should be remembered forever.”
- Brent Staples, New York Times:
“Like most stories of its kind, this one would have died out long ago had it not been carried for nearly a century on the tongues of black South Carolinians, who recognized the story of Strom Thurmond and Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s mother as a universal story of black families across the state.
“It was not, however, the official story. The biographer Nadine Cohodas dismissed it as a ‘legend in the black community’ a decade ago in her book ‘Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change.’ Another writer of the South described it as apparently without foundation ? a phrase that is used all the time to dismiss the black oral tradition as apocryphal.”
- Cynthia Tucker, Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
“If there is any real news here, it lies in the uncommon dignity with which Washington-Williams has conducted herself. A retired Los Angeles school teacher, she guarded Thurmond’s secret all these years, saying she was ‘sensitive about his well-being, his career and his family.’
“‘I never wanted to do anything to harm him,’ she said.
“Imagine that. All the time that Thurmond worked assiduously to guarantee that law and custom would continue to harm her and her children, she protected him. It just goes to show you a child can rise above vile parentage.”
- Adrian Walker, Boston Globe:
“When cities like Boston went through the throes of racial strife in the 1970s, Southerners like Thurmond were often bemused. The self-righteous North, they believed, was getting its own test in the complexity of race relations and not exactly acing it. But the claim, common at the time, that the South had been forced to successfully confront its racial demons was, as this exemplifies, a very partial truth.
“. . . It really isn’t about Strom Thurmond. It’s about truth triumphing, belatedly, over myth. It’s about claiming, however painfully, all of one’s ancestors, all of the relatives, the entire family tree. By denying her heritage into old age, Essie Mae Washington-Williams lived a lie, not her lie, America’s lie.”
- Tonyaa Weathersbee, Black America Web:
“While I wish that Williams had spilled her secret during a time when it would have exposed the hypocrisy of people like Thurmond who rode to political prominence on a separatist platform, I have to admire the fact that she was able to separate the personal from the political; that she was able to accept him through seeing him as just her father, not as a race-baiting opportunist. That took a lot.
“It is true that Thurmond later eased up a bit on his anti-black stance. He was among the first Southern senators to hire a black aide. Thurmond also gained the support of many blacks in South Carolina through pork barrel politics; among other things, he helped secure a number of grants for black colleges and small businesses.
“But those seemingly magnanimous gestures only show that Thurmond, who never formally apologized for his segregationist past, was still about power for white people rather than justice for black people.”
- DeWayne Wickham, Gannett News Service:
Thurmond “was a hypocrite all those years that he spent as a segregationist politician, ranting and raving racist views while secretly meeting with his black daughter and encouraging her to keep his secret. He was a hypocrite in the years that followed when he is said to have undergone a conversion — a change of heart about race relations that still left him unwilling to publicly claim his black daughter.
“As much as people like to say that Thurmond changed, that he had shed his racist cloak, it’s apparent that he feared letting his constituents know that he’d had a sexual relationship with a black woman. In the end, it seems that maintaining their support was far more important to him than acknowledging the child that union produced.”
- Armstrong Williams, Sun-News, Myrtle Beach, S.C.:
“There was a conversation at a 1996 Washington Urban League ceremony honoring Thurmond and myself for the growing bonds between black and white Americans. Backstage, Thurmond leaned over and said, ‘You know, I have deep roots in the black community . . . deep roots.’ His voice softened into a raspy whisper, ‘You’ve heard the rumors.’
“‘Are they just rumors, senator?’ I asked.
“‘I’ve had a fulfilling life,’ cackled Thurmond, winking.
“The senator’s story is our history. Now that Thurmond has passed, history deserves a full accounting.”
Will Jose Padilla Get Same Rights as Saddam?
In a column headlined, “If rat Saddam gets a fair trial, why not Padilla?” Orlando Sentinel columnist Myriam Marquez compares the prospect of a trial for deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with the treatment of Jose Padilla, subject of an appellate court ruling last week.
“Why has Bush denied those rights to Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomb suspect who has been confined to a military prison since the summer of 2002 after he was detained in Chicago upon his return from Pakistan?” asks Marquez.
“How can the Bush administration argue that the war on terror demands locking up U.S. citizens like Padilla as ‘enemy combatants’ when they weren’t caught fighting U.S. troops overseas?
“For that matter, how can the administration hold foreigners indefinitely at the Guantanamo base in Cuba in the name of a war on terror that the president has stated has no clear ending? That’s an issue the U.S. Supreme Court will decide. Already, two appellate courts have submitted conflicting rulings.
“Last week, a New York appellate court put the president on notice about his unilateral tactics in the Padilla case. The Puerto Rican former gang member who converted to Islam may be a danger to us all. He may indeed have been part of a plot to spread radioactive poison to our citizens. He may be as evil as Saddam himself, but the United States can’t just hold Padilla indefinitely without any charges, without access to a lawyer and without a trial. Let’s try him and, if found guilty, send him to prison for a long time — for life even.
“Padilla wasn’t fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq or anywhere else. He may be scum, but he deserves the same justice that an Iraqi rat caught in a hole is about to get.”
Indiana Boasts Rare Black Editorial Cartoonist
The number of African American editorial cartoonists on daily newspapers is minuscule — in fact, Journal-isms is hard-pressed to think of any. So it is nice to be able to note that Ron Rogers, who free-lances for Indiana’s South Bend Tribune, has won a couple of awards for his work.
In June, he won a third-place award from the Indiana Society of Professional Journalists, and this month he won second-place honors from the Hoosier State Press Association
His wife, Donna Whitaker Rogers, reports that, “He just started free-lancing cartoons to the South Bend Tribune in the spring/summer of 2002. He also had a showing of his political cartoons at Virginia State University in Petersburg, Va.”
Few Sports-Radio Hosts of Color in Nashville
“They talk about them, interview them, invite them on the air as guests . . . but when it comes to hiring minorities, Nashville’s electronic sports media has dropped the ball,” writes sportswriter Mike Organ in the Nashville Tennessean.
“The market was recently flooded with sports talk and sports-related shows, especially on radio, but it did not result in a more diverse group of on-air personalities.
“By a recent count, there are 37 radio hosts of 16 local call-in or theme-oriented shows on four stations ? WGFX-FM, WTN-FM, WNSR-AM and WLAC-AM ? and only two minorities among them ? David Coleman, co-host of The Morning Sports Page, and Howard Gentry Jr., host of The Howard Gentry Show. Both shows are on WNSR-AM (560).
“There are 12 sportscasters on Nashville’s four television stations and only one is black, WTVF’s Bob Rainey, and only one is Hispanic, WZTV’s newest anchor, Jesse Blanco. That only four of Nashville’s 49 sports radio and television personalities are minorities is alarming.
” . . . Full disclosure: As for The Tennessean sports staff, there are three minorities. They are Assistant Managing Editor/Sports Bill Bradley, staff writer Bryan Mullen, who covers Vanderbilt athletics and golf ? both of whom are Hispanic. Maurice Patton, who is black, covers Tennessee State, the Nashville Sounds and Vanderbilt women’s basketball for the newspaper.”
Firm to Help Sell or Revive Vanguarde Magazines
Vanguarde Media, the publisher of Honey, Heart & Soul and Savoy magazines, has hired Triax Capital Advisors to help it restructure its business. Triax is to help sell its titles or find a strategic partner to help revive them, as Valerie Block reports in Crain’s New York Business.
In Friday’s New York Daily News, Paul D. Colford quoted Triax managing partner Joseph Sarachek as saying that founder Keith Clinkscales wouldn’t be involved as an officer of Vanguarde. But, Sarachek added, “He may be an interested buyer.”
Clinkscales resigned as chairman and CEO of Vanguarde when it filed for protection from bankruptcy last month.
Philly Black Business Leaders Blast Dailies
“Bruce Crawley, friend of Mayor [John] Street and head of the city’s African-American Chamber of Commerce, yesterday blasted the city’s two daily newspapers for their coverage of the federal probe into municipal corruption,” Mark McDonald wrote Friday in the Philadelphia Daily News.
“At a press conference in the ornate Mayor’s Reception Room at City Hall, Crawley said the city’s African-American businesses are victims of ‘profiling’ by the two dailies, which are engaged in a ‘dangerous, racially biased game.’
“Stories portray these businesses as being ‘involved inappropriately’ with the Street administration, Crawley said. Media reports also suggest that these minority firms only got city work after making campaign contributions to Street, he contended.
“Zachary Stalberg, editor of the Daily News, said: ‘Bruce raised a number of legitimate issues in his long statement, but he chose to ignore two things of which he is well aware.
“‘First, the Daily News is not attacking minority-owned businesses. It is covering a federal investigation. Second, the two newspapers might be jointly owned, but they do not act in concert.’
“Amanda Bennett, the Inquirer’s editor, said that given the revelation of a large federal investigation into city government and its contracts, ‘what newspaper would not provide aggressive coverage of that situation?'”
BET Signs Deals with Cox, Comcast
Black Entertainment Television and Atlanta-based cable television operator Cox Communications have renewed their distribution relationship for BET and BET Jazz Network programming. The new agreement takes effect Jan. 1 and runs through Dec. 31, 2009, according to a Friday news release.
“This agreement covers Cox’s 6.3 million subscribers in such major markets as Las Vegas, Phoenix, New Orleans/Baton Rouge, San Diego, Oklahoma City and the Hampton Roads, Virginia area.
“Earlier today, BET parent company Viacom announced a sweeping distribution contract with Comcast that covered all of Viacom’s cable network properties including BET and BET Jazz,” the release said.
Dwight Ellis to Retire from NAB After 20 Years
Dwight Ellis, who has headed the National Association of Broadcasters’ Career Center and Human Resource Development for more than two decades, plans to retire from the trade association effective Feb. 1, the organization announces.
“As vice president of human resource development, Ellis oversees NAB?s diversity outreach program that links television and radio broadcast companies to colleges and universities across the country, serves as a liaison to minority and women’s groups, and has been an advocate for minority entrepreneurship in the industry,” a news release says.
“Ellis has helped launch broadcasting careers of scores of college graduates and provided networking opportunities for students and other professionals through career fairs, seminars and Web sites. He?s also left a mark on young professionals by directing them to scholarship and grant programs that made it possible for them to complete their educations. Ellis also helped create NAB?s Career Center, a free referral service linking broadcasters to culturally diverse, qualified job applicants.”
Ellis joined NAB in 1978 and was promoted to vice president in 1980. He plans to launch Dwight Ellis & Associates Ltd., “a global media and workforce development consultancy that uses ‘Strategic Diversity,’ a holistic approach for meeting challenges of doing business in the global marketplace.”
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