For next generation, a new Thurmond
Son of segregationist leader calls for removal of Stars and Bars at capitol
What finally opened Paul Thurmond’s eyes and changed his heart was in the Gospel of Mark — the very New Testament passage that his state Senate colleague Clementa Pinckney and eight other members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church here were studying the night they were gunned down in an apparent racist hate crime.
It was the parable of the sower, in which Jesus explains that if a seed falls on fertile ground, it can yield 30- or 60- or a hundredfold.
“I thought it spoke to my public service,” Thurmond said Monday. “I kept thinking about the circumstances. I kept praying about what had happened, and there was this really true belief that good could come out of this horrible tragedy.”
The next morning, with that verse fresh in his mind, the 39-year-old Republican legislator wrote the speech he would deliver the following day on the Senate floor, calling for the Confederate battle flag to be taken down from the state capitol grounds.
The youngest son of former South Carolina governor and U.S. senator Strom Thurmond noted that his great-grandfather had been with Robert E. Lee when the Confederate commander surrendered at Appomattox.
“I am aware of my heritage, but my appreciation for the things my forebears accomplished to make my life better does not mean that I must believe that they always made the right decisions,” Thurmond said. “And for the life of me, I will never understand how anyone could fight a civil war based in part on the desire to continue the practice of slavery.”
Though Paul Thurmond did not mention his father in that speech, it was lost on no one that he was signalling a generational shift.
“Strom Thurmond’s legacy lingers even in this century,” said Matt Moore, chairman of the state Republican Party. “But ironically enough, the page has been turned by his son.”
Over the past three-quarters of a century, no name in South Carolina — and, it could be argued, the United States — has been more closely associated with the politics of race and segregation than that of Strom Thurmond.
In 1948, after the Democrats added a civil rights plank to their platform, then-governor Thurmond broke away and ran for president as a “Dixiecrat,” vowing, “There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theatres, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.”
As a U.S. senator, he stood and filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957 for 24 hours, 18 minutes, setting a record that still stands. And when he finally left his party to become a Republican in 1964 — a move that foreshadowed the realignment of politics in the South — Thurmond said it was in part because the Democrats had “forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups.”
“I have tried to do what I think is right. I’m not ashamed of what he has done in the past. There are some amazing things that he has done,” Paul Thurmond said. “There are certainly some things that I would not agree with, and his position in 1948, and his position in 1957, would certainly fall into that category.”
It comes down to a paradox, he acknowledged. “I’m my own person, and yet I’m also his legacy.”
Strom Thurmond reflected and drove the poisoned politics of his state in his time. The raising of the Confederate battle flag over the capitol in Columbia in 1961, ostensibly to commemorate the Civil War centennial, was widely seen as a middle finger to federal desegregation efforts.
In the decades since, the banner has remained a raw wound in this increasingly diverse state, one that did not heal after a compromise was struck in 2000 to move the flag from atop the capitol dome to a pole near the street.
The younger Thurmond does not recall ever being asked, either as a candidate or a public official, what he thought of the flag — and as a result, he said, he had not given it much consideration.
Shaken as he was by the killing of his Charleston-area colleague, Pinckney, Thurmond acknowledged that he initially was angered by new calls to remove the flag. “My first reaction was just the same as I think a lot of people are still reacting, which was: How can you take this tragedy and create a political issue from it — creating a political opportunity, so to speak?”
But when he went to a vigil for the victims, Thurmond said, he was struck by a passage cited from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 letter from a Birmingham jail: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
Then the parable of the sower convinced him that, indeed, a moment had arrived when something good could happen.
In the legislature, he has styled himself a fiscal conservative and advocated legislation to make public school teachers more accountable for their performance. After Walter Scott of Charleston, an African-American, was shot and killed as he ran from a white police officer in April, Thurmond was an early co-sponsor of a new law to require law enforcement officers to wear body cameras.
His family has supported his stand on the flag, and the reaction has been almost universally positive, Thurmond said. Hundreds of emails have come in from around the country, and he has tried to answer every one. The legislature is expected to vote soon after July 4, and it appears there will be the necessary votes to take down the flag.
“My forefathers gave me life. They really built this country and this state. I’m appreciative of their sacrifices. I don’t necessarily have to agree with them,” Thurmond said.
My forefathers ... built this country and this state. I’m appreciative. I don’t necessarily have to agree with them.