Brent Staples: Why Does Strom Thurmond's Black Daughter Want to Join the Daughters of the Confederacy?

Brent Staples, writing about Strom Thurmond's black daughter; in the NYT (July 17, 2004):

... amusement turned to perplexity recently when Ms. Washington-Williams announced that she would embrace her white heritage by applying for membership in the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a historically white group founded in the 19th century to memorialize Southern valor in the war to preserve slavery.

Ms. Washington-Williams said through her lawyer that she was not condoning slavery but was exploring her heritage in a way that she hoped would produce a richer dialogue about race. As a former teacher, she clearly recognizes the instructional value of her family's story. By showing that families who appear to be white at one time can appear to be black at another, she is underscoring the fact that race is a more elastic concept than most contemporary Americans understand.

She also wants to show that black Americans played roles in all aspects of the nation's history, including the Civil War. That war featured African-American participants on both sides, as did the slave trade, where blacks served not just as slaves but also as owners.

The fact that African-Americans, some of them former slaves, actually owned human beings has only recently begun to penetrate the public consciousness. Many people learned about it for the first time by reading a Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel by Edward Jones,"The Known World," which explores the life of a black slaveholder in Virginia.

Charleston, S.C., had more slaves in the 19th century than any other city. And it was an epicenter of free people of color who were slave owners.

The city was also a center for mixed-race people, thanks to generations of encounters between Charleston's white elite and the legions of slaves who were needed to sustain the opulent Charlestonian lifestyle. (The historian Joel Williamson wrote that the city was"half white and half Negro, and its Negro half was more white than black.") Charleston's wealthy free people of color were often eager slave owners, and many of them shared with whites a derisive attitude toward the darker black masses.

Eager to protect their money and privilege, and the slaves upon which both rested, many free people of color in the Deep South rallied to the Confederate cause at the start of the war. They fought as rebels right up to the time when it became apparent that the South would lose.

The hatred they felt for former slaves was palpable to Union officers who pressed into the South during the war. As one officer wrote to the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison:"With all their admirable qualities, [they] have not yet forgotten that they were, themselves, slaveholders."

This reality of a socially complex, mixed-race South — with whites and blacks closely related by blood and mutually complicit in slavery — disappeared from public view as the country adopted simplistic formulations of the racial past.

The drama unfolding between the daughter of a black woman born in the shadow of slavery and a white family with deep Confederate roots seems the perfect window through which to revisit the subject. If that is what Ms. Washington-Williams intended, she has served a useful purpose for us all.