Passing for?

This is someone who I am working on getting into our promo tape:

"Passing," Karla Brundage

It happens all the time...I am walking down the street and a complete stranger stops me, maybe even interrupting my conversation, and urgently asks, "What are you?"
Or I am minding my own business, living on my street, when I notice that the Black woman who lives next door to me, who has a child the same age as my child, blatantly ignores my "hellos" and my "we should have tea sometimes." Then one day I find that we have a friend in common. From this friend I learn the reason for her standoffishness. My neighbor does not know I am Black, but I live with a very Black man. She finds such a relationship repulsive. I make her sick.
What about my other neighbor, a Black woman of forth-plus with a grown child, who speaks only to my partner, and won't even wave to me from the car?
Or what about my sister-in-law who warned me, serious and superstitious, "Don't cut that hair, girl. You know your man won't like it; you got good hair."
I can't forget my partner's teacher and spiritual leader, who said offhand to him after meeting me, "Damn man, you already got yourself a white girl."
"White girl! White girl! How dare he?" came my response.
My partner looked at me almost innocently and said, "Karla, he didn't mean what you think he meant. What he meant was..."
"Don't even try to explain. I know what he meant..."
"But..."
"I said, I know what he meant. I certainly don't need you to try and explain it. End of conversation."
He was talking about passing. He was talking about all of those instances I just listed. He was trying to explain my life to me. Do I think I am white? Many people want to know. Do I think I can pass as Black? I cannot give a definitive answer. That is the problem. People are always trying to define me, while at the same time limiting my answer. I have had people ask me what I am, and then refuse to believe me. Others never ask; they just hate me for not fitting into their little box. Meanwhile, I have been teaching myself all my life to define myself in uncertainties, in abstractions, in illusions. I am not who you think I am. Even you, reader, may have a fixed opinion from generalizations that are easy to make. My vital statistics make stereotyping even easier.
I was born in Berkeley, California in 1967. My parents were flower children. According to my father, they thought they could save the world through love. The story is shaky. I think they really got married for two totally different reasons. My mother, who was born and raised in Tuskegee, Alabama, had gone to all-white boarding schools much of her life. I don't think she planned to marry white, but it happened. My father, who was from Pleasantville, New York, came from a dysfunctional alcoholic family. He was being educated at a liberal arts college, and he really felt that there was no better way to live out his newfound beliefs than by marrying this Black woman he met on college exchange and with whom he fell head over heels in love. He believed---and still believes---that by having an interracial child, along with others in their generation, they would be one step closer to ending racism.
So I was born with a cross to carry, so to speak. I say this because I have always known of my father's expectations as well as his bitterness that the sexual revolution did not save the world, and especially at the failure of his marriage, which could not overcome racism. But that's another story.
This is who I am and where I came from: conservative, middle class, educated, on both sides, Black and White. My parents were the rebels. They were married until I was three. During this time, my mother's first cousin was killed for using a white bathroom. It is my opinion that my mother could never really love my father in the same way after that incident. After all, his family is very racist. I have some relatives who still refuse to meet me. After her cousin Sammy's death, my mother became involved with the Black Panthers, and my father became resentful that she could exclude him from her life when, in his mind, he had sacrificed his, having been disowned as a result of the marriage. So they moved to Hawaii to try to escape the racism that they had once been willing to fight. This is the beginning of my memory.
I lived with my mother. I had a happy childhood, most of which was spent outdoors, playing. However, although my mother is a professor in African-American studies at the University of Hawaii, she could not provide for me what did not exist. I knew of racism, I knew I was Black, but I did not grow up knowing what it is to be Black. I had no Black culture or community. In Hawaii, there are many brown people. I was brown, so I fit right in. I basically grew up as a local girl. If people asked, I would tell them I was Black, but people rarely asked. In a weird way, I have been passing for something or another all my life.
I remember at seven and eight wishing to be Hawaiian. I wanted nothing more than to really be what people thought I was. I wanted to go to Kamehameha School, which is a school for people who have traceable Hawaiian blood in them. I can remember using my spare time, when I wasn't swimming in the ocean or running relay races in our huge yard, trying to think up ways to get into that school. In the bathtub was one of my favorite places to dream. I would stand in front of the mirror wet and with a towel on, pretending it was native Hawaiian garb, and that I was really Hawaiian. I don't remember when I accepted the fact that it would not happen.
In seventh grade, my mother told me that we were going to move to the mainland for a couple of years. My fantasy changed, although not so abruptly. I remember now, at age twelve lying in bed and praying to God: "God, please let California be fun. Let me have a boyfriend, and God, if there is any way, can you please take the time to look at my eyes? See God, they are brown. And God, my dad has blue eyes. I know that people in California have blue eyes and light skin. I mean, they are white. I don't have to be white, but maybe while I am there, I will be a little lighter, and then I'll be tan, and if my eyes were blue...It would be perfect, not to mention my hair, which if it were just a little lighter. My dad has blond hair; if only I could just look more life my dad. I am not asking for much, just to look more like my dad than my mom. Please God, just let me be more beautiful."
This is not a lie or even an exaggeration. I prayed this prayer all the way up until the night we left. Many years later when I read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, I broke down crying from relief. My secret was out, and it wasn't just me. The Bluest Eye connected me to other Black women in a way I had never been able to connect, in that I am always told that, because of my near-white attributes, I somehow think I am better than others. That story is one of the truest tales I know.
So I moved, but not to California. I moved with my father to upstate New York; Hope, to be exact. I lived in Hope for one year. I hoped that no one would find out that I was black. I often wonder what it was that made me think I needed to pass in order to survive up there in the land where my father was raised and the KKK thrives. Was it my mother, who cried every day before I left, telling me that people are racist, especially when they see a brown girl with a white man? Or was it my father, who did not give me the strength to stand up for who I was. I remember telling him that I told my new friends I was Hawaiian, but I don't remember him giving me any helpful advice. I didn't even have to lie; it was easier than that. When they asked where I was from, I said, "Hawaii." And they said, "Oh, so you're Hawaiian, then." And I just smiled, my killer Hawaiian smile. All the people in Hope were thrilled, because they had a real Hawaiian living in their town. My wish had come true.
The only problem was my mother. She ruined my plan. She called almost every other night from California, and cried, "Karla, don't deny me," she would say, "please, don't deny me. Don't lie about who you are." But I was thirteen, I had never been Black before, and I wanted to have friends. I was in a new place completely foreign to me. It was too hard. I chose to tell only one person who I really was. She was my best friend, her name was Squeaker. And Squeak she did. It wound up that eventually everybody found out that I was really Black. Some people resented that. Some were bummed that I was not a "real" Hawaiian. But I really think that misleading them to think I was Hawaiian first softened the blow. I mean, I was already a cheerleader by time the word got out. This was what I think was the beginning of a long series of events in which I learned how to objectify myself in order to survive. I was making myself more and more invisible, in order to escape the lasso of definition.
In ninth grade, I finally did move to Oakland, California. In Oakland, I was for the first time immersed in Black culture. And for the first time, I had a boyfriend who told me I was beautiful for who I was, a Black girl with a white father. Of course, this was my first love, and he was also mixed. What I did not know about was the deadly lines drawn between dark and light within the Black community itself. Since I did not know, I existed happily. Loving myself for perhaps the first time,I had Black and white friends. I declared myself a rebel from the traditional cliques of high school, the "stoners," who were white; the Chicanos; and the soul or disco lovers, who were Black. I declared myself a peacemaker between the three sides, neutral by virtue of my skin. After all, I looked more Chicano than anything. For a time it was my father's dream of racelessness come true.
When I finally went to college, passing became an issue again. Once again I found myself on a plane bound for upstate New York---Poughkeepsie, to be exact. Vassar College was like no place I had been before. Looking back on it, I see that I spent most of my college career in culture shock. I was not only adapting to race but to class differences. I entered Vassar with the same attitude that I had when I left Oakland. I was Black and White, and therefore part of both groups.
What I found at Vassar was that I could never be a part of the elite white world, and worse, the Blacks there resented me for even trying. I remember walking into the cafeteria on the first day of school with my new roommate, who happened to be white. I walked past a table where all ten of the Black freshmen were eating dinner and I said hello. They barely looked at me, and when I walked away, I heard someone comment that I must think I am white. From the first day, I was never accepted by the African-Americans at Vassar; it was a very small, very tight group. Those who were mixed were forced to choose sides, and most of us chose white. The animosity between lighter and darker-skinned blacks, especially women, was a part of black culture that I did not yet understand. I did not get why they would hate me or why they would think I thought I was white.
I was so hurt. I figured if they did not like me, then I would just hang out with the whites. This was a big mistake. During my entire college career, I was never invited to anyone's house of Thanksgiving, I was never asked to a dance. What I could not see was that with the whites, I was accepted as an object, an exotic. I existed on the periphery.
To lessen the pain, I drank excessively and found myself sinking deeper and deeper into a hole of self-hatred. Yet I refused to see my rejection as racially motivated, until one night when I was at the school bar, drunk as usual. A man I had slept with grabbed me and locked me in a phone booth with him. While in the phone booth, we began to argue about what had happened between us. I accused him and many of his friends of using me. To this he replied, "Don't you see Karla, it's your fault! You are beautiful, so beautiful and exotic, and don't you know what that does to men?"
That night I cut off all my hair. That night I also began to see that I had been trying to be white most of the time I was at college, and that in reality, I did not know who I was. By the time I graduated, I was an alcoholic, and I knew that I had to go back to Oakland to be around Black people.
I don't know if I thought it would be better to be in the black community, but I knew that I was missing something . I have lived in Oakland for five years now, and one thinkg I have learned is that as a people, we as blacks have been truly indoctrinated into racist ways. When I first arrived, I obtained a position as a teacher's aide at a home for emotionally disturbed teens, many of whom were black. These youths had nothing to hide in their evaluations of me. I began to notice by their reactions to me the confusion we as a people feel about our skin. Most did not believe I was black. I found myself in a position again where I felt forced to disguise my real identity. Instead of answering that I was part black, mixed, hapa, half, or mulatto---all terms that I had used my entire life---I found myself saying I was black. I wanted so desperately to be accepted as black, but still no one would believe me. Whenever I said "black," in response to the question, "What are you?", the person attacking me would say, "Black and what...?"
So, I began to denounce my whiteness. I was angry at my father for cursing me. I was angry at all white people for being racists and for promoting racism everywhere.Once again I looked for acceptance of my new identity in men. I chose black men who were "revolutionary" in their beliefs, men who had forsaken the system completely. Over and over I found myself in the same predicament. I was not black enough for them. Yet to this day almost all the men in that group are living with (off) white women. Naturally, I began to hate white women. All the anger I had felt at Vassar surfaced and I was able to bond with black women for the first time, as well as justify my hypocrisy, until I began to realize that many black women hated me, too, for the same reasons. They thought I was white.
This was my latest disillusion. It was really all too much for me. I opened my eyes and began to look at my life. Many of my friends are mixed. Not deliberately, but maybe out of some common pool of experience. I realized that it was not only hypocritical but impossible to hate my father, a part of myself. At the age of twenty-five, I finally realized that I am mixed. Not definable, not in any box, and probably not all that new a phenomenon. But certainly an enigma.
Still, people are constantly trying to define me---all people, white and black. For a while, I wanted to wear a sign around my neck that said, "I am Black." But slowly I began to realize, I am not just black. I certainly am not white. I am mixed. What does it mean to be a mixed race black/white woman in America in the nineties? Recently, my mother told me that we are actually one-eighth Cherokee. This is another part of me that I never even explored, let alone identified with. I am still trying to figure it all out, but I think right now it's about defining myself, taking that step to say, hey, I am mixed. I am not going to pretend anymore. I am not going to argue with teenagers about my race. I am not going to drive myself to the point of suicide trying to be white, either. I am just going to be me.

Neo-Nazi's death an end of era?

Racist failed in quest for Aryan homeland
Sarah Kershaw, New York Times
Sunday, September 12, 2004

Toward the end of his life, the man who was once the nation's most visible face of white supremacy, a Nazi-uniform-wearing, jackbooted ideologue whom his critics called "the grandfather of hate," was a frail old widower gasping for breath in a tiny donated house in northern Idaho.
And when he died in his sleep Wednesday at 86, Richard G. Butler, who founded the Aryan Nations in the 1970s, had already long ago lost his power and influence over the radical right, a collection of extremist subcultures, militias and neo-Nazi offshoots that his movement spawned.
Still, the death of one of the founders of the 20th century white separatist movement signals the end of a chapter in the nation's social history. And it certainly marks the failure of Butler's ambition to create what he had envisioned as "an autonomous Aryan homeland" in the Pacific Northwest.
"Butler's death, in a way, marks the end of an era," said Daniel Levitas, author of "The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right" (St. Martin's Press, 2002).
Butler's brand of white supremacy was based on a theology known as "Christian Identity," combining a heretical interpretation of the Bible and a belief that Jews were satanic and blacks "mud people." Before the seams of that movement began to come apart, Butler's 20-acre compound in the pine- forested hills of northern Idaho was a gathering spot for white supremacists.
Most experts agree that though white supremacy may be ebbing, it has certainly not died along with Butler. Indeed, there are signs on the Internet and in rallies that it may still be thriving, from Washington state to West Virginia, although in new forms.
"Is the radical right in trouble, faltering and fading away?" said Mark Potok, who tracks extremist groups for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. "I don't think so. I think it's yet again starting to morph." In the Pacific Northwest, a bastion of white separatism, anti-government militias and survivalists, a new dogma has begun to spread, drawing on Odinism, a pre-Christian theology that worships Norse deities and derives its name from the chief god, Odin.
Skinheads and other separatist groups who have rejected Christian Identity are drawn to Odinism because it rids them of the messy problem of having to contend with Christian values like compassion and forgiveness and frees them to justify violence, said Randy Blazak, a professor of sociology at Portland State University and director of the university's Hate Crimes Research Network.
Blazak and other experts trace the rise of radical subcultures like Odinism to the turmoil in the white supremacy movement. For several years it has been riven by infighting, philosophical friction and fall-offs in recruitment.
Today there are about 17 Aryan Nations chapters across the country with a total of 200 or so members, figures that are a third to a half of what they were in the mid-'80s, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Things got worse for the radical right after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the conviction in that attack of one of its members, Timothy McVeigh. The known paramilitary groups and militias with roots in places like Montana and Washington state numbered 171 in 2003, down from 858 in 1996, according to the law center.
"The militia movement suffered from an aggressive federal crackdown in the wake of Oklahoma City," Levitas said. "Americans in this day and age are not at all keen on the idea of being recruited into violent revolutionary organizations whose mission is to assassinate public officials. It is not a very sellable idea in a post-9/11 world."

IR Portrayal in Comedic Film

Film The Cookout has "an interracial couple composed of a uptight black judge (Danny Glover) who treats Todd with class condescension and his white wife (Farrah Fawcett), who runs screaming at the sight of other black people. "


Film Review: the Cookout
Tue Sep 7, 7:41 PM ET
By Frank Scheck
NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - It's hoped that over this past holiday weekend, more people were enjoying real cookouts than enduring "The Cookout," a painfully unfunny, would-be comedy unleashed by Lions Gate on Friday without press screenings.

Barely managing to produce a single moment of genuine humor, this comedy of no manners manages to squander the talents of some fine performers, including Danny Glover and Queen Latifah (who also co-produced). It sold just $6.2 million worth of tickets during the weekend.
The film revolves around a weekend cookout hosted by Todd Andersen (Storm P), a young black basketball player just out of high school who has signed a $30 million contract with the New Jersey Nets. To the consternation of his old-fashioned parents (Frankie Faison, Jenifer Lewis), Todd immediately begins spending his money, which he hasn't even received yet, on, among other things: a fancy new car, diamond earrings for his gold-digging girlfriend (Meagan Good) and a lavish mansion equipped with 10 bathrooms ("You've only got one ass," his father comments) in a fancy gated community.
Todd's arrival is greeted with less than friendliness by the community's fascist security guard (Queen Latifah), who dons a SWAT suit in anticipation of trouble. Also alarmed are an interracial couple composed of a uptight black judge (Danny Glover) who treats Todd with class condescension and his white wife (Farrah Fawcett ), who runs screaming at the sight of other black people.
The film's humor, such as it is, basically revolves around the personal and class conflicts among the cookout attendees, who also include Todd's high-strung agent (Jonathan Silverman); a pair of morbidly obese stoner relatives; and a gate crasher (Ja Rule) trying to get Todd to sign some sneakers.
The screenplay, credited to three writers, is utterly lacking in the wit and warmth that distinguished such obvious inspirations as "Barbershop" and mainly relies on broad physical comedy, stereotypical characterizations and dialogue on the order of "That don't smell like feet, that smells like ass." Needless to say, the performers are unable to elevate the material to a higher level, and it's truly sad to see some true talents wasted -- Queen Latifah, in particular, should be required to return her Oscar nomination.
Cast: Security guard: Queen Latifah; Bling Bling: Ja Rule; Leroy: Tim Meadows; Lady M: Jenifer Lewis; Todd Anderson: Storm P; Wes: Jonathan Silverman; Brittany: Meagan Good; Mrs. Crowley: Farrah Fawcett; jog Anderson: Frankie Faison; Becky: Eve; Judge Crowley: Danny Glover.


Director: Lance Rivera; Screenplay by: Laurie B. Turner, Ramsey Gbelawoe, Jeffrey Brian Holmes; Producers: Queen Latifah, Shakim Compere; Director of photography: Tom Houghton; Editors: Jeff McEvoy, Patricia Bowers; Production designer: Anne Stuhler.
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

How students identify-- race vs. nationality...

Click here:
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/singapore/story/0,4386,272027,00.html

More Thurmond Letters

Posted on Sun, Sep. 12, 2004

More Thurmond letters foundSenator's notes with biracial daughter in files
By John Monk and Eileen WaddellKnight Ridder

But, for all their careful, businesslike tone, the letters also show Strom Thurmond took an interest in Essie Mae Washington Williams' life and the lives of her children, his grandchildren.

COLUMBIA - Handwritten on pink stationery, the April 29, 1946, letter is brief: a note from a young person to a politician she knows.
"Judge Thurmond:
I wish to let you know that I received the telegram. Thank you very much.
I'm getting along as well as ever. School is fine, finals will be this month. I haven't heard anymore from A&M about my acceptance as yet. I hope to as soon as possible. I will let you know when I do. Until then, I am
Sincerely yours, Essie Mae"
That 58-year-old letter is the first known written link between the late U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond and his long-secret biracial daughter, Essie Mae Washington Williams.
The newly discovered letter, along with some two dozen other new letters and records that connect Thurmond, who died June 26, 2003, and Williams, now 78, was found in Thurmond's archives at Clemson University.
Reporters from The (Columbia) State uncovered the records, most from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, in those archives, which contain about 8 million pages of the late senator's letters and other documents.
The new documents, along with half a dozen or so previously known letters, provide the most detailed portrait to date of how Thurmond, South Carolina's most powerful politician of the 20th century, led two lives.
Publicly, Thurmond was a segregationist, opposing any mixing of races. Privately, he had a child with a black woman and kept in touch with their child for decades.
The letters between Williams and Thurmond were worded carefully.
These were more or less business letters, Williams said in an interview. "There was never anything personal in it. Of course, my reasoning behind that was, in case anybody opened the letter, there wouldn't have been anything there for them to get from it."
Early in his 48-year Senate career, Thurmond instructed Williams to write "very personal" on the outside of envelopes of her letters to him. Staffers put letters with that notation on his desk unopened, he wrote Williams.
But, for all their careful, businesslike tone, the letters also show Thurmond took an interest in Williams' life and the lives of her children, his grandchildren.
The records show:
The earliest known letter between Thurmond and Williams was in April 1946.
Thurmond started making Williams loans the next year.
Initially, Thurmond had her sign promissory notes. But later he stopped that practice, making it clear the cash was a gift.
Thurmond apologized that he and his wife, Nancy Moore Thurmond, were not able to attend the Los Angeles high-school graduations of two of his granddaughters, Monica and Wanda, in the early 1970s.
Thurmond tried to help Williams get a mid-level federal job in 1973.
Without acknowledging their relationship, Thurmond tried to help his grandson, Ronald Williams, get into the University of South Carolina medical school and Charleston's Medical University of South Carolina in 1975.
Thurmond tried to help Essie Mae Washington Williams save the Army job of one of her friends in 1975.
Thurmond and Williams or her children met at least half a dozen times in his U.S. Senate office in Washington, according to his office calendars. The last known visit, between Thurmond and granddaughter Wanda Terry, was in June 2002.
Dan Carter, a nationally known University of South Carolina historian, said, "The State's discoveries are valuable because they help document Thurmond's bizarre double life of maintaining contact with someone who is your flesh and blood, important to a Southerner, yet at the same time managing to separate that completely from your politics."
By having a child with a black woman, Thurmond violated taboos on interracial sex, Carter said. At the same time, he was a leading segregationist.
Williams had not expected more records of her communications with Thurmond to be found, she said. Previously, only a handful had been turned up by The Washington Post and writers of a 1998 Thurmond biography, "Ol' Strom."
"That really surprises me, because as secretive as he was, we never said anything about being secret, it was just kind of understood. I'm surprised he would keep all that," said Williams, who lives in Los Angeles and is working on a book about her relationship with her father.
The new records include Father's Day, Christmas and birthday cards from Williams to Thurmond. They also reveal Thurmond's efforts to help Williams and her family.
During much of that time, Thurmond worked to deny blacks the right to vote and equal access to jobs, schools, housing and public facilities.
After 1970, faced with an increasing number of black voters, Thurmond became a racial moderate. But he kept his daughter's existence secret.
For all the thousands of people he knew, Williams says there may have been no one with whom her father could share his secret. She said he never apologized for his segregationist stands.
"He didn't believe in apologies," Williams said. "That is one of the things he was criticized for. Even the guy in Alabama, [former Gov. George] Wallace, remember him? He came out and really apologized and admitted he was wrong.
"But I guess no one's perfect, and whatever way a person thinks, it's hard for anybody to change that."

Crosses Burned on Interracial Couple's Lawn in Philly

I'm contacting them, and following up on this case:

Hate Crime Victim Calls The Crime, 'An Act Of Stupidity'
(09/10/04) by KYW's John McDevitt


Two South Phildelphia men have been arrested and charged in connection with Tuesday morning's cross burnings behind the home of an interracial couple.
The couple's nextdoor neigbor, 44-year-old John Dixon of the 2800 block of Ernst Street and another neighborhood man, 34-year-old Albert Martin of the 2500 block of South 29th Street face a list of charges including ethnic intimidation and reckless endangerment of another person (both suspects are caucasian.)
The men are accused of setting two crosses on fire behind the home of 27-year-old Michael Dillon and his fiance Ebony Willams on Tuesday.
She is African American.
Dillion is causian. He says the whole thing makes no sense:
"To tell you the truth, there is no message. It's just a crime of stupidity."
The couple and their six month old son have only lived in the home for one week.

Letters link Thurmond, long-secret daughter

from LowCountry Carolina News

The late Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., is framed in a Citadel honor guard during a Dec. 4, 1999, ceremony on the South Carolina Statehouse grounds in Columbia, where a statue of him was dedicated. The Associated Press The late Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., is framed in a Citadel honor guard during a Dec. 4, 1999, ceremony on the South Carolina Statehouse grounds in Columbia, where a statue of him was dedicated.The carefully worded letters lack anything personal, but show a lifelong link between the late U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond and his long-secret biracial daughter, Essie Mae Washington Williams.For all their businesslike tone, the letters show Thurmond took an interest in Williams' life and the lives of her children - his grandchildren.Among 8 million pages of Thurmond documents archivists are preserving, the earliest known letter between Thurmond and Williams was in April 1946, The State of Columbia reported Sunday.Publicly, Thurmond was at the time a segregationist, opposing any mixing of races. Privately, he had a child with a black woman and kept in touch with his daughter for decades.Their correspondences - most from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s - are among the late senator's letters and documents archived at Clemson University, his alma mater.The records include Father's Day, Christmas and birthday cards from Williams to Thurmond. They also reveal Thurmond's ongoing efforts to help Williams and her family.Dan Carter, a University of South Carolina historian, said the letters are valuable because they help document Thurmond's "bizarre double life of maintaining contact with someone who is your flesh and blood - important to a Southerner - yet at the same time managing to separate that completely from your politics."By having a child with a black woman, Thurmond violated taboos on interracial sex, Carter said.At the same time, he was a leading segregationist. The new records will help "historians trying to figure out who Thurmond was," Carter said.Last December, 55 years after her mother died and six months after Thurmond died, Williams publicly announced Thurmond was her father. Thurmond's relatives accept her claim as true. Ultimately, her name was added to a monument honoring Thurmond that lists his other children.Williams said she was born Essie Mae Butler on Oct. 1, 1925, the result of a liaison between the then-22-year-old Thurmond and a black maid in his parents' Edgefield house, Carrie Butler. Butler was 16 at the time, Williams has said.Early in his 48-year Senate career, Thurmond instructed Williams to write "very personal" on the outside of envelopes of her letters to him. Staffers put letters with that notation on his desk unopened."These were more or less business letters," Williams told The State. "There was never anything personal in it. Of course, my reasoning behind that was, in case anybody opened the letter, there wouldn't have been anything there for them to get from it."When Williams wrote to her father in the spring of 1946, he was a 43-year-old circuit judge readying to run for governor.Williams, 20, was living in New York City, taking classes at New York University and considering a move back to her native South Carolina to attend the state's public college for blacks.Located in Orangeburg, it was called the Colored Normal, Industrial, Agricultural and Mechanical College, or A&M for short. Today, it is South Carolina State University.The 1946 letter is the only known letter Williams wrote to Thurmond signed, "Essie Mae."Often, over the years, Thurmond would write his daughter using her initials and the title, "Mr." In turn, Williams often signed her letters "E.M. Washington" or after she married, "E.M. Williams."Williams said she didn't know if using "Mr." was a code to confuse people who might come across the letters."Maybe it was a typographical error," she said with a chuckle. "That was not a code though. That was something that was his choice."From the late 1950s, only scattered pieces of correspondence can be found between Williams and Thurmond.Williams said she was writing Thurmond two or three times a year by the '60s, sending cards to mark Christmas, Father's Day or his birthday. Thurmond never sent Williams similar greetings, she said.But, in response to her cards, he usually replied with a brief official letter thanking her, she said."He always acknowledged them."Williams credits Thurmond with keeping her financially solvent after her husband, Julius Williams, 45, died of heart failure in 1964. She was left with four children and no income.She declined to say how much Thurmond gave her throughout the years, but her attorney, Frank Wheaton, has said it was less than $1 million.Thurmond probably would not have given her as much money as he did had she not been widowed with four children to care for and educate, she said.Also, in 1964, Thurmond quit the Democratic Party and became a Republican after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. Despite his political stands, the relationship between Thurmond and his daughter continued.Thurmond softened his segregationist positions starting in 1970.About the same time, Williams, who had gone to work as a teacher and, later, a school administrator, went to graduate school.On June 9, 1972, Thurmond wrote Williams, congratulating her on earning a master's degree. For the first documented time, he wrote using her first name.The same day, Thurmond wrote his granddaughter, Williams' daughter Wanda, congratulating her on her high school graduation.Thurmond's papers began arriving at Clemson in 1982, 21 years before Williams revealed Thurmond was her father.Clemson archivists trying to winnow down the huge collection admit they could have thrown away some of the correspondence, not realizing its value.All Williams correspondence now will be kept, they say.

A Literary Friendship in Black and White By JOSEPH BERGER

NY Times

They were two boys from striver families, showing up at DeWitt Clinton High School's literary magazine in 1939 to start clambering toward some faintly imagined heights of artistic achievement.
But in those days the chances of a friendship seemed slim. As Sol Stein tells it now, he was white, Jewish and attracted to women, while James Baldwin was black, the stepson of a Pentecostal minister and attracted to men.
But somehow their toil as editors of The Magpie, the school magazine, kindled a bond that endured until Baldwin's death of stomach cancer in 1987 and invigorated both their careers, Mr. Stein's in publishing and Baldwin's as a sage voice of American race relations.
The aesthetic climax was Mr. Stein's role in coaxing into being Baldwin's masterpiece, "Notes of a Native Son" (1955), a collection of essays that became a classic of the black experience in America. At a recent ceremony at Clinton, Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of African and African-American studies at Harvard, described the friendship as "one of the great moments in interracial harmony and intimacy in the history of American literature."
Now Mr. Stein, 77, a novelist and playwright who founded the publishing house Stein & Day, now defunct, has reflected on that relationship in "Native Sons," published last month by the One World imprint of Ballantine Books.
The book is a concise memoir augmented by their correspondence and a story and play they wrote together. But it manages to recreate a time in New York when, however deep-seated the prevailing racial hostilities, a relationship between kindred spirits could still flourish.
"So much happened in our work together that his color disappeared, my color disappeared and it stayed that way for the rest of our lives," Mr. Stein said in an interview at his Westchester County home.
It began at DeWitt Clinton, a sprawling powerhouse in the north Bronx that turned out Richard Rodgers, Burt Lancaster, Countee Cullen, Neil Simon and Paddy Chayefsky. Baldwin, wanting a finer school than Harlem supplied, trekked up by subway.
The Magpie crew, Mr. Stein remembered, gathered on Fridays in the school's tower. The faculty adviser, Wilmer Stone, would read the writers' stories "in the most boring monotone imaginable," scaring one faint-hearted colleague, Richard Avedon, into a celebrated career as a photographer.
"We learned then what all writers must eventually learn, that the reader has to be moved by the words alone, without help from the histrionic talents of their author," Mr. Stein writes.
Mr. Stein, a courtly man with a twinkling smile, suggested that part of his kinship with Baldwin came from their outsider perspectives; Baldwin "assumed his ancestors came to America in chains" while Mr. Stein's parents made their way illegally from Russia. But he was also drawn to Baldwin, he said, because he was exceptionally smart.
"I have all my life been attracted to really smart people," he said. "It was not his writing, but how smart he was about life, about books, about people."
Academically, Baldwin shrugged off subjects that did not interest him, which may explain why, as well read as he was, he never went to college.
"If he wasn't interested in it, he didn't do it," Mr. Stein said. "You couldn't force Jimmy to do anything - to come on time for a meeting, to take a day job just to support his family - anything."
As their friendship blossomed, Baldwin often invited him over to spend time with his mother, Berdis, a cleaning woman from the Maryland shore, and his eight younger brothers and sisters. And Mr. Stein invited Baldwin to meet his family on Sedgwick Avenue in the north Bronx.
"My mother took a liking to him," Mr. Stein said. "He had these dancing hands, and Jimmy was great with kids. And I was crazy about Jimmy's mother. She was my second mother. She struck me as colorblind. I never had the feeling I was the white kid visiting. I was Jimmy's friend."
In the cafeteria or at each other's homes, they shared a Depression-era outlook toward food, expressed in starkly different ways.

At my mother's table Jimmy would eat like a bird, one small piece at a time, taking two hours over a simple meal, while I devoured all of it in the first few minutes," Mr. Stein writes. "One might suppose that Jimmy was stretching out the pleasure of food while I was gulping it down before it vanished."
Their friendship had to cope with the prevalent racial attitudes, as Mr. Stein discovered visiting Baldwin. "I remember a cop at 131st Street said to me, 'What's your white face doing in this neighborhood?' " he said.
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Mr. Stein went to City College and enlisted in the Army Air Forces and later commanded an Army infantry unit in American-occupied Germany. Baldwin worked at defense plants in New Jersey, where the indignities he suffered among bigoted Southern co-workers and whites-only restaurants reshaped his racial outlook, and then as a waiter in Greenwich Village. They never wrote to each other. But when Mr. Stein returned in 1946, they picked up their friendship.
One subject the two avoided was Baldwin's homosexuality. "He knew I knew," Mr. Stein said. Baldwin, though, did introduce Mr. Stein to the love of his life, Lucien Happersberger, a handsome Swiss sidewalk artist who was the model for a character in Baldwin's explicitly gay novel, "Giovanni's Room" (1956), and whom Baldwin discreetly called "L" in his letters.
By the early 1950's, Mr. Stein was executive director of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, comprising 300 intellectuals opposed to totalitarianism, and he proposed a series of high-quality nonfiction paperbacks, a relatively new concept. The writers would include Bertram Wolfe, Leslie Fiedler and, with sly calculation, his friend Baldwin.
Mr. Stein helped shape essays Baldwin had been writing for intellectual magazines like Partisan Review into a book with a sustained flow. The letters portray a smooth working relationship, ruffled by tensions over Baldwin's dramatic lateness in delivering copy.
Flashes of Baldwin's sagacity but also self-doubts pepper the letters. While living in France, as he did much of his life, Baldwin recognized his rootlessness as endemic. "I'll tell you this, though," Baldwin wrote. "If you don't feel at home at home, you never really feel at home. Nowhere."
Baldwin hints at a crisis soon after "Notes" appeared to laudatory reviews: "I thought I was sick, and indeed I was, but it turned out to be only a nervous breakdown. About breakdowns, baby, there is nothing to say, nothing one can say while it's happening, nothing to be said when it's over."
Baldwin's body of work was to include the novels "Go Tell It on the Mountain" (1953) and "Another Country" (1962) and the essay collection "The Fire Next Time" (1963).
Reflecting on his friend's legacy, Mr. Stein suggests that Baldwin, despite his rage at the treatment of blacks, in his early works provided a counterpoint to the black nationalism of the 1960's and the identity politics that followed, someone who argued that black-white relationships were more complicated than one of victim and victimizer. Mr. Stein recalls that when Swiss villagers were astonished at Baldwin's color, Baldwin's literary response was to imagine how African villagers might have reacted to the first white man they saw.
Mr. Stein quotes a passage from an early draft of "Notes": "It is time for white people to stop feeling guilty about Negroes, and for Negroes to stop trying to make then feel guilty, unless they want to feel guilty about being persons on this earth."
Baldwin showed "that thought about the issues rather than anger was essential to establishing the sense that we are all human beings and not of color," Mr. Stein said. "Divisiveness works against that. Multiculturalism works against that."
His own "conspiratorial" friendship with Baldwin, Mr. Stein said, demonstrates the need for blacks and whites to encounter one another, whatever their attitudes going in. He recalled that when he was commanding an infantry unit in Germany, a white soldier from the South had complained, "They put a negra in the bed next to mine."
"I told him: 'It's in alphabetical order. Goodbye.' "
But the two soldiers quickly grew so close that they were hauled up on charges of cheating together on an exam.
"I think about what is there that's applicable to other people," Mr. Stein said of his friendship with Baldwin, "and the key word is proximity."