For his daughter Essie Mae Washington-Williams, it means her church, South Carolina State University and Los Angeles public schools.

Washington-Williams, who divulged last week she is the daughter of Thurmond and his family's black maid, also revealed herself to be a very private person. Willingly, she kept the secret of her parentage for most of her 78 years.

Quiet, reserved and understated are the words friends of the retired Los Angeles teacher use to describe her.

But Washington-Williams, like her father, also has led a public life, not in the sense that she has sought publicity or public office, but in that she has dedicated herself to institutions with strong civic agendas.

That dedication often translated into leadership roles for the widowed mother of four, as the chief lay leader in her church, as a schoolteacher and as an officer in her university alumni chapter.

"She was a very effective leader," said Villa Frierson, the lay director of the Congregational Church of Christian Fellowship, where Washington-Williams once held the same title. "She was fair. She was articulate. She was low-key and made sure others were heard."

Washington-Williams might have been soft-voiced, but she was not silent. Consistently, in her home and in her classroom, she preached the value of an education, much as her father did.

Though Thurmond, the former Edgefield County, S.C., school superintendent, once demanded separate schools for blacks and whites, he also pushed young people toward school all his life, in the classroom and on the stump.

"Her attitude toward education was that it was the most important thing you can pass on to your children," said her son Ronald James Williams of Onalaska, Wash. "A love for learning, that's what she believed."

Born in Aiken, near Thurmond's hometown of Edgefield, Washington-Williams moved to Los Angeles with her children in 1964. With its reputation for tolerance and fast-growing economy, the city at the time held promise for many blacks from the South and Midwest.

There she joined the Congregational Church of Christian Fellowship, known in Los Angeles for its activism on poverty and racial issues.

Though most of its 300 members today are black, it was founded in the mid-1940s as a place where blacks and whites would pray side by side.

Parishioners in the 1970s lobbied for the system that bused children to integrate the Los Angeles public schools. They also provided a gathering point for children before the buses picked them up. The congregation founded, on its property, a mental health counseling service.

In the mid-1990s, Washington-Williams held the moderator's job at the church, which belongs to the democratically run United Church of Christ. Along with the minister, the moderator, elected by the congregation, oversees the church's work. She won the nearly full-time volunteer job at a rough time in the church's history.

Factions feuded within the congregation. Some were allied with the minister; some wanted to oust him. Washington-Williams kept her head above the politics, said Thelma Mitchell, the church's historian at the time.

"She tried to go by the book," Mitchell said. "She listened to everybody, and she tried to be available. This is where her character came through."

Washington-Williams, despite nagging health problems, still serves as a greeter at the Congregational Church of Christian Fellowship. She has shown similar commitment to her alma mater and to education in general.

In 1946, at the suggestion of her then-soon-to-be-governor father, she matriculated at South Carolina State University, then called South Carolina State College, in Orangeburg.

She studied business at the all-black school and met the man she would marry, a law student from Savannah named Julius T. Williams. Thurmond once visited her privately in the college president's office.

South Carolina State graduates do not abound in Los Angeles, but the alumni there are fiercely proud and deeply connected to their school.

"It's far away," said Avernell Roache Helton, a 1952 graduate who lives in Los Angeles. "It's been a labor of love to stay active on the West Coast."

About 15 people, including Washington-Williams, who once served as an officer in the group, make up the L.A. chapter of the alumni association.

During the past 10 years, they have raised about $15,000 for South Carolina State's scholarship fund.

Until recently, they brought the school's choir out for a fund-raising concert every other year. They also sell tickets for short trips to Las Vegas and other nearby destinations, with the profits going to scholarships.

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