Biden’s recollection of Strom Thurmond is moving. But it is also a complete lie. It’s important to examine closely, because it has important implications for Biden’s worldview. There is a myth about Thurmond held in Washington, a myth that Biden helped to perpetuate with his eulogy. The myth holds that while Thurmond was a “product” of the old South, as the South changed, so did Thurmond. The Dixiecrat campaign of the ’40s may have been unfortunate, but as “change” came, Thurmond saw the error of his ways and made amends.
This did not, in fact, happen. The decade after the Dixiecrat campaign, as the Civil Rights Movement took off,
Thurmond launched the longest filibuster in Senate history to prevent the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Thurmond was willing to push himself to the point of physical breakdown, speaking on the floor of the Senate for 24 hours, to stop a bill that did nothing more than provide a few basic legal rightsto African Americans. In 1964, Thurmond literally attacked and wrestled a fellow senator to the floor in order to stall the nomination of a pro-civil rights government official. He denounced Bayard Rustin’s “sexual perversion,” and
when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, Thurmond called it a “tragic day for America, when Negro agitators… can cause the United States Senate to be steamrolled into passing the worst, most unreasonable and unconstitutional legislation that has ever been considered by the Congress.” The next year,
he said of the Voting Rights Act that it existed solely because Martin Luther King “must always have an agitation objective lest he end up in the street one day without a drum to beat or a headline to make.” 10 years later, in the 1970s, he affirmed his distaste for the “
unfortunate” Voting Rights Act. But if he didn’t change from the ’40s to the ’70s,
did he mellow after the Civil Rights era? He did not.
He voted against the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988 and the Civil Rights Act of 1990. (The latter failed by one vote.) Then, of course, there was Thurmond’s personal conduct. Not only was he an infamous
predatory womanizer, but
he impregnated his family’s Black maid and refused to publicly acknowledge his Black daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, for his entire remaining life. He had a long time, too: Washington-Williams was in her 70s when Thurmond died. (Thurmond rebuffed her when she asked him to soften his pro-segregation stance, asking her why she would want to go to a Woolworth’s lunch counter. He also devastated her by discouraging her from her dreams of attending a major university, instead arranging for her to get a scholarship to a segregated institution.)
All of this is worth remembering because Joe Biden knows about it, and yet felt comfortable praising Thurmond’s “virtue” and spreading the lie that Thurmond had become a good person. In fact, all that had happened was that after the Voting Rights Act, South Carolinian African Americans could actually vote, threatening Thurmond’s political career, so he “adjusted his behavior to the reality that blacks had become a significant part of his state’s electorate.” He hired a few Black staffers, and voted for Martin Luther King Day,
but (unlike, say, George Wallace) he never expressed anything close to actual regret. Biden chose to overlook this. He said he “chose to believe” Thurmond was not acting out of expediency, and “believed” Thurmond “welcomed” the civil rights era. Because there was no evidence that Thurmond greeted civil rights with anything but the most grudging acceptance, Biden had to fabricate an imaginary Thurmond, praising that Thurmond for his commitment to ensuring that Black children got taught to read so long as they stayed “separate, but equal.”
but the Republican-lite, centrist bullshyt needs to die this election cycle. People arent going to turn out to maintain the status-quo
He's already been vetted and he's still a popular figure.
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