While eulogies often suffer from a profusion of platitudes over honest reflection, Democrat Joe Biden of Delaware weighed in candidly on his friend Strom Thurmond's last 30 years when he "looked into his heart and saw the man, the whole man. I tried to understand him. I learned from him, and I watched him change, oh so subtly."

Biden, an early civil rights activist, told mourners crowded into Columbia's First Baptist Church, "I believe the change came to him easily and I believe he welcomed it because I saw others of his era fight that change, and never ultimately change."

The Strom Thurmond that Joe Biden witnessed voted for the extension of the Voting Rights Act and for the federal Martin Luther King Holiday. These votes, plus the hiring of African-Americans on his staff, the nomination of Matthew Perry to the federal bench and the aggressive pursuit of federal grants for African-American communities, proved to Biden that Strom Thurmond had indeed changed.

This was no longer the segregationist firebrand whose Dixiecrat Party challenged the Democrats and Republicans on the race issue in the 1948 presidential election, who authored the Southern Manifesto to reverse the Brown school desegregation decision of 1954 or who filibustered the 1957 civil rights bill for 24 hours and 18 minutes, still a record. This was, in many important ways, a fundamentally different man.

To his younger, more liberal Senate colleague, Thurmond's shift on racial issues was not keyed to convenience, as African-American voter registration grew. Rather, it was based on conviction.

"For the man who will see, time heals. Time changes," Biden observed. "And time leads him to truth but only a special man like Strom would have the courage to accept it, the grace to acknowledge it, and the humility in the face of lasting enmity and mistrust -- to pursue it."

Biden related a story about his visit with retiring U.S. Sen. John Stennis, D-Miss. Looking at Biden over the table on which the Southern Manifesto had been signed, Stennis conceded, "the civil rights movement did more to free the white man than it did the black man. ... It freed my soul. It freed my soul."

Each of them, Stennis and Thurmond, after decades of resistance to the nation's late-coming commitment to equal opportunity for all Americans, had lived to that age and state of mind which William Faulkner described so well in "Intruder in the Dust." Neither man could no longer "cope with Ö a Face, a composite Face of his native kind his native land, his people his blood his own with whom it had been his joy and pride and hope to be found worthy to present one unbreakable front to the dark abyss."

They could no longer do this, for the Face was not only that of their white Southern constituencies, who by their lights, their narrow interests they owed a duty to serve, but reflectively their own Faces, now uncomfortable to confront. The time had come to change.

Having helped to hold and keep his "native kind" at the edge, and stared with them into this dark abyss of racial injustice inherited and nurtured by him and by "his people his own blood" for far too long, and no longer able to tolerate the innate cruelty and inherent indecency embodied within its darkness, both Stennis and Thurmond, each in his own way, turned away, changed politically and transformed personally. They had both lived and served long enough to earn freedom for their souls. "For the man who will see, time heals," Biden said. "Time changes."

Today, rising generations of South Carolinians have no greater urgency than to heed that extraordinary lesson of life. While much has been accomplished, much remains to be done. The abyss is neither quite as dark nor as wide but the gloomy presence of the racial divide persists.

And persist it will as long as the single most enduring quality of life in the American South remains the burden of its memory, its conflicted symmetry of oppression alongside that of rare courage and honor. Our complex history has molded our region into the most distinct part of the nation because it embraces the extremes of the American dream. It is the battleground, then and now, of our ideals and our blindness. It is the crucible of the nation's unfinished business of racial reconciliation. To be free of the struggle against equality was a moment of unparalleled liberation for Strom Thurmond. So it can be for all those who continue to struggle.

In the last years of his public service, Sen. Thurmond taught us more than how to survive to a ripe old age; he showed us how to change, with grace, dignity and good spirit. He has bequeathed to the descendants of masters and slaves this powerful and rich legacy. With this great gift, we should be able to continue to emerge from the divisions of the past to a more enlightened, healed society where, at long last, we can finally separate and lay to rest the oppression that has been so tragically linked with courage and honor and has comprised the burden of Southern history. For us, too, time can heal; time can change.

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