Strom Won't Be Missed

Well it finally happened. My home state of South Carolina's most famous (or is that infamous) political figure died at the age of 100.

James Strom Thurmond was born December 5, 1902, when Theodore Roosevelt was president, and over a year before the Wright Brothers historic flight at Kitty Hawk. His political career began when he became superintendent of education in Edgefield County, South Carolina in 1928, and ended after he had served in the Senate for nearly fifty years.

As might be imagined, he is being remembered as a hero in his home state. The local media would have you believe that the earth itself spun only because he willed it to. We have a tendency, as a people, to not speak badly of those who have passed away, but it's important to remember people for who they actually were, not some rose-colored vision of who they were, or pretended to be.

It's with that in mind that I want to paint a picture of what Strom Thurmond really stood for. He was a racist. No amount of sugarcoating or excuse-making can change that. In fact, he was one of the most important figures in the history of the Segregated South.

I've had my fill of people telling me that he was a product of his times and the views he held were almost universally held in the South back then. I'm sorry, but that's just not good enough for me. People can't be excused for a view based solely on the fact that it was a widely held belief.

If segregation is wrong now it was wrong then, and anybody who supported it was wrong. It's really that simple. Besides, we're not talking about just an average Southern citizen; we're talking about a Southern leader.

Thurmond and his political peers were not followers; they were the policymakers. No one forced Thurmond to run a segregationist "Dixiecrat" campaign for president in 1948. No one forced him to give a speech in that same campaign in which he said: "All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement."

Those are not the words of a man caught up in a movement. That's the voice of a man stoking the fires of hate for political gain. After his failed presidential bid, he went on to become the only senator ever elected through a write-in vote in 1954. In 1957 he made history by filibustering a civil-rights bill for 24 hours and 18 minutes. No one forced racist politics on Strom. He championed them of his own free will.

His shift to the Republican Party in 1964 was a watershed moment in Southern politics. He was the first significant Southern Democrat to shift, and he opened the floodgates. His party shift marked the beginning of a complete Southern political shift. Now the South, which was almost exclusively under the control of the Democratic Party fifty years ago, is a Republican stronghold.

Strom's shift wasn't caused by a fundamental change in belief, but was prompted by the Democrats', under Lyndon Johnson, support for civil-rights legislation. The Southern party shift was not prompted by a change in views among the leaders, but was instead a statement of racism.

It's hard to deny that the Strom Thurmond of the 50's and 60's was a leader in the racist politics of the South at that time, and fostered a hatred that still plagues us to this day. Many people choose to forget that Strom Thurmond. I will not.

The Thurmond apologists will then tell me that he reached out to the African-American community after that. He realized the error of his ways and wanted to heal the wounds that he helped cause. After all, they say, he was one of the first Southern Senators to have a black staff member, and he supported a federal holiday for Martin Luther King Jr.

I call bullshit on that. I find it awfully convenient that he had this sudden change of heart around the same time that segregation and civil-rights opposition became unacceptable positions to hold in American politics. Thurmond had been so outspoken in his opposition to civil rights in the past that he could not have survived politically if he hadn't made such a dramatic shift.