Washington Post reporter Marilyn Thompson, who has reported brilliantly on the anthrax investigation the past year, was a cub reporter in Columbia, South Carolina in 1981 when she got a tip that segregationist South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond had fathered a daughter with an African American woman. When a call came last week -- twenty five years later -- from the lawyer for Thurmond's daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, Thompson, who is undergoing chemotherapy, was almost too weak to take it. "A lawyer in Los Angeles is trying to reach you," my editor told me. "He represents someone named Essie Mae Washington-Williams. He says she's holding a press conference next week to tell the world her story."

"I knew Essie's secret," Thompson writes in today's Post. "Her father was James Strom Thurmond, once one of the nation's most spiteful segregationist...With a Faulknerian irony that only a handful of people suspected, Thurmond at the same time was secretly giving money to Essie, his biracial daughter, the product of a relationship with one of his family's maids.

"Essie had never told me her secret. In fact, in keeping with the pact she had made decades ago with her father, she had adamantly denied it when I tracked her down in Los Angeles in 1984 using a patchwork of clues to piece together first her name, then the details of her life.

"I had been struggling for nearly 25 years to tell her story, absent the birth certificate, DNA evidence or confession that would prove it. Now, Williams's attorney told me in my hurriedly placed phone call, she was ready to talk to me. She had been impressed, he said, with the way I treated her in 1984 when I showed up unannounced at her workplace, carrying two yellowed documents that I believed offered strong proof of her parentage."

An incredible story that Thompson has been investigating for a quarter of a century, described here. Hopefully, it won't take the country quite as long to learn what happened in the anthrax case, and Thompson will recover soon to report her findings.

Posted by Laura at December 21, 2003 12:57 AM