On July 31, 1948, two weeks after he became the Dixiecrats’ candidate for president, Strom Thurmond wrote a letter inviting the governor of the Virgin Islands for a stay at the Governor’s Mansion in Columbia.

When Thurmond learned William Hastie was black, he revoked the invitation. According to an article in Newsweek that year, Thurmond said he had extended the same invitation to other fellow governors who had been absent from a national gathering.

“I would not have written him if I knew he was a Negro,” Thurmond was quoted as saying. “Of course, it would have been ridiculous to have invited him.”

What the public didn’t know then was that Essie Mae Washington, Thurmond’s daughter by a black woman, met with her father at the Governor’s Mansion around the same time.

The Hastie incident is one of many in Thurmond’s life that looks different now that the late senator’s family has acknowledged Washington, now Essie Mae Washington-Williams. She declared last week that she is Thurmond’s daughter by a black woman who worked in his childhood home in Edgefield.

Although many South Carolinians, black and white, said they had heard the rumor about Thurmond’s daughter, much of Thurmond’s past now may be re-examined through the prism of new facts.

That process will unfold more among whites than blacks, according to Dan Littlefield, a professor of American history at USC.

“The black community has always been more aware and had more public discussion of these things,” said Littlefield, who is black. “The revelations force the white community to deal with issues that they never dealt with publicly before.”

REVISING HISTORY

Nevertheless, examples abound of episodes, statements, and actions by Thurmond that invite new scrutiny — some more painful for the late senator’s family than others.

After Thurmond died June 26, much was made of his seeing his grandson, Tate Whitmer, only hours before his passing. At the time, the infant was said to be Thurmond’s first grandchild.

“You finally gave me what I really wanted,” Thurmond was said to have exclaimed to daughter Julie Thurmond Whitmer when he saw the baby.

In her extraordinary news conference Wednesday, Washington-Williams said she remembered hearing about that and “I just smiled.”

She said she had introduced Thurmond to her oldest child — and Thurmond’s grandchild — more than a half-century earlier.

Thurmond isn’t alone in having his life re-examined under the glare of new revelations.

Ray Geselbracht, an archivist at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Mo., said the same thing happened to the former president recently when a Truman diary and outtakes from an old documentary film were reviewed by the library staff.

The materials contained racial epithets about blacks and derogatory statements about Jews by Truman, the man Thurmond assailed throughout the 1948 campaign for promoting civil rights.

“The words that he chooses are just frankly not 21st century,” Geselbracht said of Truman. “And you’re reminded that Truman, for all he did for Jews and African-Americans, was a man of the 19th century.”

The documents sparked a debate about whether Truman, the first U.S. president to recognize Israel as a nation, was anti-Semitic, Geselbracht said.

In the cases of both Truman and Thurmond, he said, “These facts remind us of the journey we have taken toward a racially just society. And they remind us that we have to keep going, and we have to keep trying.”

Thurmond, who broke from Truman’s Democratic Party in 1948 to run for president as a segregationist Dixiecrat, later helped lead the South into the Republican Party when he switched to the GOP in 1964.

State Sen. John Courson, a Thurmond political protege and close family friend, said he initially feared the impact that last week’s news would have on Thurmond’s legacy. But he said the way the news unfolded might not alter history much — and not entirely in a negative way.

“The way that she has handled this, with such tremendous poise and dignity, and her obvious affection for Strom Thurmond, and how the family has handled it may even enhance his legacy,” said Courson, R-Richland.

‘COMPELLED TO MINGLE’

During the 1948 campaign and at other times, Thurmond generally refrained from using bluntly racist language.

Thurmond did not, for example, follow in the path of Alabama Gov. Frank Dixon, who delivered the keynote address at the States’ Rights Democratic Convention in Birmingham, Ala., in July 1948.

In his speech, a transcript of which was among Thurmond’s papers donated to the Strom Thurmond Institute at Clemson University, Dixon said Truman’s civil rights program “means to reduce us to the status of a mongrel, inferior race, mixed in blood, our Anglo-Saxon heritage a mockery.”

At the same political convention, Thurmond made his now-famous remark that there were not enough troops in the Army to force Southerners to allow blacks into their movie theaters, swimming pools, homes and churches. And throughout the ’48 campaign, he uttered plenty of words that sound harsh in the context of history — harsher still in light of last week’s events.

In a September 1948 radio address delivered in Dallas, for example, Thurmond said Truman’s proposal to guarantee employment equality for all Americans would strip them of other basic rights.

“They will find that at the counters, desks or benches, they will be forced to work, side by side, with all types of people of all races; that in the lunchrooms, restrooms, recreation rooms, they will be compelled by law to mingle with persons and races which all their lives they have, by free choice, avoided in social and business intercourse.”

Washington-Williams was a student at S.C. State during the ’48 campaign, but she said she wasn’t following politics closely. She said she had no memory of the incident involving Hastie.

But during an interview on the CBS news program “60 Minutes II” last week, Washington-Williams said she went to the Governor’s Mansion once to meet with her father, “and we talked for about an hour.”

That recollection casts new light on a statement Thurmond issued after the controversy involving the Virgin Islands governor.

“I regret that Governor Hastie and the cohorts of President Truman have seen fit to take advantage of an understandable mistake on the part of a clerk in my office,” Thurmond said in the statement, issued Oct. 25, 1948.

“Governor Hastie knows that neither he nor any other Negro will ever be a guest at the Governor’s house in Columbia so long as I am Governor or as long as the Democratic Party of South Carolina continues to elect the Governors of my state.”

In the same statement, Thurmond offered his views on race.

“A vast majority of the Negroes of the South do not want social equality and the breaking down of our segregation laws and customs which we all know are best for both races,” he said. “What the enlightened Negro of the South is interested in is economic equality, equal justice under the law, and improved educational opportunities.”

The governor’s explanation did not satisfy James M. Hinton, then president of the state NAACP. In a 1948 letter, also included among Thurmond’s papers, Hinton called the governor’s action “a breach of even common courtesy” due any government official.

“It is so strange,” Hinton wrote, “THAT WHITES IN SOUTH CAROLINA have been responsible for erasing the BLACK FEATURES OF NEGROES, these same Whites cry so loud about racial integrity, and racial social equality.”

Had Hinton, now dead, heard the rumor about Thurmond’s daughter? It has been widely noted since Washington-Williams went public that Thurmond visited his daughter on several occasions while she was at college in Orangeburg, generating gossip.

Thurmond’s statement about Hastie, Hinton continued, “is responsible for much hate, and ill will, when the world needs love, respect, and good will.”

Hinton also tried to peer into the future.

“You, Governor Thurmond will not outlive the hate that you and others have been responsible of (sic) engendering, thru the campaign of your confused ‘STATES RIGHTS MOVEMENT’.

“Negroes,” he concluded, “will be happy when the campaign is over, and you settle down to your position of Governor of South Carolina, and make an attempt to heal the wounds opened in this hectic year of 1948. Negroes now have the right to vote, and will sooner or later WIN THE OTHER CIVIL RIGHTS, so necessary, if this nation is to survive, and nothing you can do or say, will stop GOD’S WHEELS OF JUSTICE from bringing these things to all peoples.”

‘THINGS THAT I COULD HAVE LEFT OFF’

In the CBS interview, Washington-Williams said she discussed Thurmond’s segregationist positions with him only once. She said he told her he “could not change the system.”

Thurmond never apologized publicly for his segregationist past, though he said in 1998 that “I may have said some things that I could have left off.”

“I’ve always held kindly to the black people,” he said. “But it was just the custom and the law that they were separate, and if I held otherwise, I would have been in violation of the law.”

On Wednesday, Washington-Williams said she didn’t think Thurmond was a racist in his heart. But she also said Thurmond never apologized to her privately, either.

Asked if she would have wanted that, she said she “really hadn’t thought about it.”

“I do know that (former Alabama Gov. George) Wallace made an apology, and I’ve heard comments that people think that he should have,” she said of her father. “But I think what he did was more important than words.”

She said she was referring to “the things that he has done for black people over the years.”

Thurmond, long renowned for his constituent service to South Carolinians of both races, also supported money for historically black colleges and was the first Southern senator to hire a black person for his staff.

“That has been overlooked,” said Washington-Williams. “He’s done many things for many people.”

Reach Stroud at (803) 771-8375 or sstroud@thestate.com