Abstract

Was Strom a Rapist?

The author asks why the U.S. media have largely dismissed the possibility that the late South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond committed statutory rape. Months after Strom Thurmond's African-American daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, stepped into history, commentators continue to step around the most explosive aspect of this controversy with the same stealth that ushered Thurmond into interracial fatherhood at 22. Thurmond, icon of the Bible-toting, family-values-promoting right, not only contradicted his segregationist credo by impregnating young Carrie Butler in 1925, he most likely violated the law against statutory rape. A South Carolina statute enacted in 1922 criminalized the carnal knowledge of any woman under 16. No doubt apologists will remind us that the possibility of statutory rape does not alone suggest that Butler did not consent to the act. But in a climate characterized by fear and abject racial intimidation, the question of whether Carrie Butler, an impoverished maid in the Thurmond family household, freely consented is virtually meaningless. In 1942, Judge Thurmond sent George Thomas, a black man, to the electric chair based on an alleged rape victim's cross-race identification, testimony now known to be extremely unreliable. The contemporary media's refusal to acknowledge Carrie Butler as a likely victim of such abuse reflects the sexual racism that black women continue to face today.