Strom Thurmond and Cory Booker couldn’t have been more different. If it were up to Thurmond, Booker, or anyone that looked like him, wouldn’t have a seat in the US Senate. Thurmond made it a point to hassle Illinois Senator Carol Moseley Braun and fought her intensely to preserve the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s (UDC) design patent on the organization’s insignia: the Confederate flag. Congress had renewed the patent every fourteen years since 1898, but after some debate, the Senate voted not to renew the UDC patent. After Thurmond’s death, Braun delivered a speech in celebration of the 15th anniversary of Title IX at the Self Auditorium at the Strom Thurmond Institute in South Carolina.
Thurmond began his political career as a Democrat, the natural home at the time for someone with his racist views. Had Booker been born when Thurmond was a Democrat, Booker would likely have been a Republican, but times change. Thurmond became dissatisfied with the Democrats after Truman desegregated the military and the federal government. He became a Dixiecrat, running for president against Truman in 1948, getting over 1 million votes and winning four states.
It was 1957 when he made his epic speech opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1957. If a Civil Rights Act was passed in 1957, why did we need the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968? It’s because the first Act was watered down by the Anderson–Aiken amendment and the O’Mahoney jury trial amendment. Every Civil Rights Act ever passed in America was ultimately watered down by either Congress or, most likely, the Supreme Court, as they did to the Voting Rights Act on multiple occasions.
Cory Booker was born in Washington, DC, and raised in Harrington Park, New Jersey. He was an acclaimed football player in high school and attended Stanford University where he played tight end, making the All Pac-10 Scholastic team. He received his bachelor's and Master’s degrees from Stanford and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at The Queen’s College, Oxford, earning a degree in United States history in 1994. He got his law degree from Yale University in 1997 and operated free legal clinics for low-income residents of New Haven, CT.
As a young man, Strom Thurmond had his own exploits. He impregnated the 16-year-old Black daughter of his parents' maid. He had almost nothing to do with Essie Mae Washington-Williams, though he did pay for her college education, perhaps for keeping his secret. Her true parentage was not publicly known until Thurmond died in 2003. While having a Black daughter of his own, Thurmond served as a beacon for white supremacist politics in the United States.
“I wanna 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 nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches," said Thurmond.
"An American should be able choose to work in a place where he is with his kind of people and not find that at the counters, desk or benches they will be forced to work, side by side, with all types of people of all races; that in the lunchrooms, rest rooms, recreation rooms, they will be compelled by law to mingle with persons and races which all their lives they have by free choice, avoided in social and business intercourse.”
The day after Booker’s record-setting speech, it was as if nothing happened at all. Democrats cheered their moment in the sun while Republicans ignored that anything had happened, especially the content of Booker’s speech about the harm being done to the American people. The news cycle moved on. All that’s left is to celebrate the removal of Strom Thurmond from the record book.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Jeremy Heligar's work on Medium.