Handwritten on pink stationery, the April 29, 1946, letter is brief: a note from a young person to a politician she knows.

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 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 a half-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 directly on his desk, 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, 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 Essie Mae 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 Williams save the Army job of one of her friends in 1975.

• Thurmond and Williams or her children met at least a half-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.

The new records will help “historians trying to figure out who Thurmond was,” Carter said.

Williams had not expected more records of her communications with Thurmond to be found, she said in an interview. 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 was a hero to segregationists. He 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. “I don’t know that there was ever a person he really felt he could confide in.”

She noted Thurmond 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.”

When Williams wrote 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 S.C. 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 later, “E.M. Williams.”

Asked if using “Mr.” was a code to confuse people who might come across the letters, Williams said, “I don’t know. There was never any code about it. Maybe it was a typographical error,” she said with a chuckle.

“That was not a code though. That was something — that was his choice.”

Williams 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.

The Butler infant was given the last name of Washington by an aunt who raised her. In 1948, Essie Mae Washington married S.C. State law student Julius Williams, taking his last name.

Last December, 55 years after her mother died and six months after Thurmond died, Essie Mae Williams publicly announced Thurmond was her father. Thurmond’s relatives accept her claim as true.

Williams told The State 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 (my cards).”

Williams’ statement that she wrote Thurmond three times a year for years raises this question: What happened to the dozens and dozens of other cards she sent Thurmond and his replies?

There is no easy answer.

About half of the estimated 8 million documents in the Thurmond archives are unprocessed. It is possible more Thurmond-Williams letters are in those documents, said Mike Kohl, head of Clemson’s Special Collections unit, which houses the archives.

It is also possible Thurmond staffers destroyed some letters. Duke Short, Thurmond’s top aide from 1989 until the senator’s retirement, declined to discuss Thurmond papers with The State.

Clemson archivists — trying to winnow down the huge collection — also could have thrown away some of the correspondence, not realizing its value. Thurmond’s papers began arriving at Clemson in 1982, 21 years before Williams revealed Thurmond was her father.

Kohl said his staff had discarded some papers, such as Christmas cards, that didn’t look important. He said he didn’t know if any Williams letters had been thrown out. However, all Williams correspondence now will be kept, he said.

Williams treasures several color photographs of Thurmond that he sent her. She also has mementos he would give her when she visited him once a year in his Washington office.

“When I would go there, I would get little pins he had gotten from places he had visited.”

Asked if Thurmond had given her a letter opener — he distributed thousands to constituents over the years — Williams laughed and said, “Everybody has one of those.”

Thurmond also sent Williams calendars.

“He always sent me calendars every year, as he sent to all his constituents,” she said. “After he had his family, it was always with the family on it.”

In those calendars, Williams saw pictures of her half brothers, Strom Jr. and Paul, and half sisters, Julie and Nancy Moore. She didn’t meet Thurmond’s surviving children until late last year. (Nancy Moore, Thurmond’s eldest child with second wife, Nancy, died in 1993.)

Thurmond’s white children were born in the 1970s into privilege, in contrast to Williams’ own birth — into low-income obscurity to an unwed mother.

But Williams said she is not bitter.

She said she is grateful to Thurmond for providing regular assistance to her and her family, especially when they faced tough times. She declined to say how much Thurmond gave her, but her attorney, Frank Wheaton, has said it was less than $1 million.

Thurmond had to keep secret his relationship to Williams, said historian Carter. If it had become public, it could have doomed his public career. “It very likely would have destroyed him.”

Segregationists were core Thurmond supporters.

Thurmond courted their vote. For example, in January 1956, he spoke at a meeting of 4,000 White Citizens’ Council members at Columbia’s Township auditorium. The Citizens Councils, with more than 50,000 S.C. members in the ’50s, promoted white supremacy and racial purity.

Clemson’s records suggest the written relationship between Thurmond and Williams began on April 29, 1946, when she wrote him from New York.

At the bottom of the letter, signed “Essie Mae,” someone —perhaps a secretary — scrawled “Washington.” Her letter can be seen today in the “W” file of Thurmond’s personal correspondence for the year 1946.

That spring, Thurmond was a state judge. Home from World War II for only six months, he was preparing to run for S.C. governor, quietly contacting thousands of supporters by mail and phone.

By August, Thurmond was campaigning in a runoff for the Democratic nomination. At the same time, Williams started school at A&M in Orangeburg.

“I was able to get in on my own, but he did help me financially,” Williams said.

Thurmond paid her tuition and other expenses, Williams said, adding she also had a job on campus.

“I’m a working girl,” she said. “I’ve always had a job, even from the age of 16. The second year I was there, I worked as secretary to the head of the business department. About two hours a day, 10 hours a week. It was good spending change.”

In September, Thurmond won the Democratic runoff. With no Republican opposition, he was, in effect, governor-elect with a four-year term to begin in 1947.

In early October, Essie wrote Thurmond again. Her letter is lost, but Sara Holmes — a secretary in Thurmond’s office — sent a letter to “Mr. E.M. Washington” at Manning Hall at State College at Orangeburg:

On Oct. 31, 1947, Williams wrote Thurmond, who has now been governor for 10 months, to thank him for a “loan.”

Williams said she and Thurmond initially referred to money that he gave her as “loans.” At first, Thurmond had Williams sign promissory notes. But, she added, “They weren’t really loans.”

Later, Williams said she had a frank talk with Thurmond, saying the loans were really gifts. She said she told him: “‘Suppose something would happen? You know, they could hold me to this! I don’t want to sign those any more.’ He said, ‘You won’t have to.’ ”

From that time on, Williams did not sign any promissory notes. Thurmond also destroyed the old loan agreements, she said.

The October 1947 letter from Williams expressing thanks for a “loan” came seven days before Thurmond’s first marriage, to Jean Crouch. Crouch was a beauty queen and a member of a politically connected Barnwell County family. Thurmond was 44; Crouch was 21 — a year younger than Williams.

Marriage was also in the works for Washington.

In June 1948, she married Julius Williams of Savannah. He was one of five students in the first graduating class of A&M’s fledgling law school, created by the state because whites did not want blacks attending the state’s only law school, at USC.

Williams said her new husband knew who her father was. “I couldn’t keep anything like that away from him,” she said.

And 1948 was also a year of change for Thurmond.

White Southerners were furious at President Harry Truman, who publicly had pledged to work for civil rights, including integrating the military. Riding an anti-Truman backlash, Thurmond was nominated as the presidential candidate of the States Rights Democratic Party, or “Dixiecrats.”

Accepting that nomination, Thurmond said: “I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches!”

In the November election, Thurmond won only four states — South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

In February 1949, Essie and Julius Williams had their first son — Julius Jr. On June 15, 1950, a second son, Ronald, was born.

Fourteen days after Ronald was born, Essie Mae Williams wrote Thurmond from Coatesville, Pa. The letter is addressed to “Gov. J.S. Thurmond, State Capitol, Columbia, South Carolina.”

The purchasing power of $75 then would be about $600 today.

Thurmond, meanwhile, was running for the U.S. Senate, trying to unseat incumbent Olin Johnston.

Thurmond — who had a biracial daughter, two black grandchildren and a black son-in-law at the time — ran his campaign largely on race. He and Johnston each tried to convince white voters they would outdo the other in denying rights to blacks and upholding segregation. It was the only campaign Thurmond ever lost.

In 1953, after living several years in Julius Williams’ hometown of Savannah, Essie and Julius moved to Compton, Calif., a community near Los Angeles. They had two more children, Wanda, born in 1954, and Monica, born in 1956.

Julius had gone to California to help a sister move and loved it, Williams said.

In 1954, Thurmond won his first election to the U.S. Senate, filling a vacancy created by the death of U.S. Sen. Burnet Maybank.

That same year, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled segregated public schools were unconstitutional.

As a new senator, Thurmond became one of the nation’s foremost defenders of segregation. For 16 years, he helped form the Southern policy of “massive resistance” to civil rights for blacks.

From the late 1950s, only scattered pieces of correspondence can be found between Williams and Thurmond. In one, dated July 1958, Thurmond suggested Williams put “very personal” on future letters — to alert his staff to place them on his desk unopened.

About 1960, the Williams family moved back to Coatesville, then to Savannah.

In January 1960, Thurmond’s first wife, Jean, died of a brain tumor. Later that year, he won re-election to the Senate.

A July 20, 1964, letter in the Thurmond archives shows Williams trying to reach Thurmond to get money.

A Thurmond secretary wrote Williams that the senator was not in Washington but would return shortly. The secretary wrote, “Since you have written about a finance matter, I would suggest that you call him over the phone at his residence some night about 9 or 10 p.m.” The secretary included Thurmond’s home phone.

A few months later, in October 1964, Julius Williams, 45, died of heart failure. Essie Mae Williams had four children and no income.

Williams credits Thurmond with keeping her financially solvent during that period. 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.

In December 1965, Williams sent Thurmond a Christmas card with a Bible verse. Attached was a small handwritten note, asking for a meeting.

On Jan. 4, 1966, Thurmond replied, telling her, “I expect to be in Washington for some time now, except for weekend trips to South Carolina, and should be pleased for you to stop by my Senate office whenever you are in Washington.”

Thurmond softened his segregationist positions starting in 1970. He hired his first black assistant, Tom Moss, and began to reach out to influential blacks, offering to use his influence to get federal grants, for example.

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. “Nancy and I ... regret that we will be unable to be with you on this happy occasion,” he wrote.

(Efforts by The State to reach Nancy Thurmond for comment were unsuccessful.)

On May 23, 1973, Thurmond wrote Williams, saying he had inquired about the progress on her application for a mid-level position with the federal government. He says he hopes to get a “status report.”

In an interview, Williams could not recall what that letter referred to. But, she said, Thurmond did help her by getting a California friend to write her a recommendation for a job in the Los Angeles schools in the 1980s.

On July 5, 1974, Thurmond wrote E.M. Williams of Los Angeles, acknowledging “receipt of the plaque with the verse on it, ‘Children Learn What They Live.’ This is a very interesting poem, and you are very kind to send it.”

The poem tells how children imitate their elders and begins, “If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn.”

At first, Williams did not remember sending the poem. Later in the same interview, she said she might have sent it because, by 1973, Thurmond and wife Nancy had two small children, Nancy Moore and Strom Jr.

In the spring of 1975, Essie Williams requested help from Thurmond’s office to keep chaplain Herbert Turner — an old family friend who had officiated at her husband’s funeral — in the U.S. Army. In response, Thurmond said his aides had investigated the matter. However, the chaplain was discharged anyway.

Also in 1975, Thurmond received a letter from Ronald Williams, his grandson, asking for help in getting into medical school.

Thurmond wrote at least three medical schools, including two in South Carolina. Williams said he was accepted at the University of Washington without Thurmond’s help. But, he added, Thurmond did help him get a Navy scholarship to pay for medical school in return for his serving five years in the Navy.

In writing the S.C. medical schools, Thurmond described Williams as “a young black man originally from South Carolina,” not mentioning that Williams was his grandson.

Ronald Williams said he was born in Coatesville and lived in Pennsylvania, Savannah and California while growing up.

Once, during medical school, Ronald Williams said he dropped by Thurmond’s Senate office in Washington. On summer Navy duty, Williams wore his uniform.

“That is the only time I ever recall meeting him, one on one,” said Williams, who had met his grandfather as a child but didn’t recall him.

Much of their talk that day was about Williams’ mother, Ronald Williams said. “How she was doing well and how she appreciated all his efforts over the years. It was a chance to have him see me in a Navy uniform ... which I thought he would enjoy seeing since he was a military person himself.”

There was not much emotion, Ronald Williams said.

“This was the kind of thing where I was the son of a constituent,” he said, adding Thurmond “had a good strong handshake, which I thought was appropriate and I felt very comfortable with. ...

“It was hard to think of him as a grandfather since we had had so little personal exchange or interchange.”

Still, meeting his famous grandfather meant a lot to him, Williams said. “I kind of treasured it. It was unfortunate that was the only meeting we ever had. “

Afterward, Thurmond sent Ronald Williams a commemorative plate, he said. It said something to the effect of, “From your friends, Strom and Nancy.”

Among the notations in the Clemson archives are calendar entries in Thurmond’s daybooks.

They say Essie Mae Williams visited Thurmond in Washington on Thursday, May 18, 1995; Wednesday, June 5, 1996; Monday, Aug. 4, 1997; and Friday, Aug. 6, 1999.

Williams’ final visit to Thurmond’s office is listed as Thursday, June 20, 2002, with Wanda Perry, Thurmond’s granddaughter. (“Perry” was a misspelling of Wanda’s last name, Terry.)

But Williams said she didn’t make that visit. A knee operation kept her home. Instead, Terry made the trip alone.

Williams said she had no second thoughts about keeping her relationship secret for years. “I did exactly what I wanted to do.”

Over the years, she had thought of writing a book. She only got serious about it once her father died — and, then, only because her two daughters urged her to come forward.

“They encouraged me,” Williams said. “That’s how it happened because I may never have said anything.”

Her book is due out in January or February. Williams is working with a writer and going over the book’s manuscript. A movie is also in the works, she said.

And she’s spending time with her 13 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren — all direct descendants of J. Strom Thurmond, the late senator.

Historian Carter said many questions remain unanswered, such as why Thurmond kept up his potentially explosive relationship with Williams over the years.

“Was it out of a sense of responsibility?” he asked. “Out of fear?”

Some of those questions may be answered in Williams’ book.

Williams said she wants the book to show that Thurmond — who helped thousands of S.C. young people with scholarships and jobs, and funneled millions in federal aid to the state — was more than a segregationist. “They need to know more about him as a man and a person who did so much for so many.”

She also said she wants her story to help Americans live in racial harmony. “I hope it will bring the races closer together.”