COLUMBIA - Strom Thurmond met his first grandchild just two hours before he died Thursday.

The senator's oldest son, Strom Thurmond Jr., said Friday that his sister Julie and her husband brought 10-day-old baby Tate to Thurmond's hospital bedside, fulfilling a wish that had appeared unlikely to come true.

To give her time to recover from the Caesarean section delivery in Washington, they were going to introduce Tate to his grandfather July 4.

But they decided to move it up as it became clear this week that Thurmond was growing weaker in Edgefield County Hospital.

On Thurmond's 100th birthday in December, Julie Thurmond Whitmer had announced she and her husband, Martin, were expecting a baby.

"You finally gave me what I really wanted," Thurmond said after hearing the news.

Friday was the first day in more than a century that South Carolina awoke to a world without him. It was hot and somber.

Across the state, flags flew at half-staff in honor of the former U.S. senator, governor, legislator, educator, judge, the legendary Strom Thurmond.

The White House said Friday that Vice President Dick Cheney would represent the president at the funeral.

In Thurmond's hometown of Edgefield, where the one-time segregationist died Thursday, town residents remembered an honorable man who would help all who needed it.

"I think he made decisions according to the times, but he did change with the times," said Edgefield native Glasglow Griffin, 65, owner of the Main Street Auto Service Center. "He took a personal interest in my three sons and encouraged them to get an education and do great things when they got out of the military."

Few S.C. politicians fought harder to deprive black people of their civil rights than Strom Thurmond.

But many of the black residents in his predominantly black hometown of Edgefield didn't dwell Friday on the past of the legendary 100-year-old. They talked mostly about forgiveness.

In the town square, at fruit stands and the banks, flags dropped to half-staff in respect to the former senator, who died Thursday night at the age of 100. Thurmond, the longest-serving senator in U.S. history, chose to live out his final days in the town of his birth, located about 150 miles southwest of Charlotte.

After a funeral Tuesday in Columbia, Thurmond will be buried with military honors in his family plot at Edgefield's Willowbrook Cemetery.

Throughout the day, Edgefield residents and out-of-towners laid flowers at the feet of Thurmond's statue, a focal point in the town square.

But as they mourned Thurmond's death, black Edgefield residents said they felt conflicted about Thurmond, who was known for his staunch support of segregation and his opposition to civil rights legislation.

Several blacks said they deplore the views Thurmond once held, but they also think he truly had a change of heart and did what he could to help blacks and others in recent years. They said their conflicted feelings are common in Edgefield, a town of 4,500 that is 60 percent black.

The attitudes expressed by black Edgefield residents illustrate how hometown ties can cross racial lines and how personal relationships can outweigh politics. That's why Edgefield may give a distorted view of the way blacks feel across the state, said a political scientist and an NAACP leader, both of whom are black.

The Rev. Joseph Darby, first vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said most blacks in South Carolina don't hold Thurmond in high esteem.

He said Edgefield residents may not be candid about their feelings.

"When you have someone who has just passed away, I expect that many folks don't want to say too much out of respect for grieving families," said Darby of Charleston. "Also, they have to live in Edgefield. This may be the New South, but it ain't that new. If I was an African-American living in Edgefield, I expect I'd say nice things about him, too."

Bruce Ransom, a political scientist at Clemson University, said Thurmond's conciliatory gestures toward blacks - voting for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and reaching out through constituency service, for example - did ameliorate some harsh feelings blacks held toward Thurmond.

Ransom said that people familiar with Thurmond only as a political figure tend to think of him only in terms of his conservative philosophy. But he said hometown folks, whether personally or through their families, know Thurmond through that relationship.

"People at a local level get to see the personal side, the helping side," he said.