In January , he resigned his seat. He died in Edgefield the following June. Friday, November 12, Log in. Toggle navigation. Horoscopes Reviews TV Listings. Contact Us. Strom Thurmond switched parties in '64 Posted Sunday, September 9, am. Photo provided by the s. Historical Society A young Strom Thurmond is shown. Get the best of The Sumter Item in your inbox. And he was the oldest, retiring at He climbed out of Edgefield County through a string of small campaigns to become a legislator, a judge and later governor.
Thurmond was the only senator in the nation's history elected as a write-in candidate. Even into his 90s, before he became frail and wheelchair-bound, he remained oddly boyish. He wore inexpensive suits and black military lace-ups and never looked at ease dressed up. He stuffed his pockets with peanuts, ate like a country boy at Washington receptions and relished physical activity and the outdoors.
He was a Tom Sawyer figure who never lost his rural roots. He could describe how to castrate a rooster, run an egg farm and the tricks of breaking a horse. He told stories about the Alamo and the Edgefield men who fought there, as well as his own tales of war. Each flowed from his notions of bravery and honor. Cold case: Who killed Tina Milford? To his enemies, he was mean and cunning.
Admirers praised his unflagging toughness. He built his early political career on no small measure of macho bravura. As a judge, he sentenced four men to die and said later in life that he had no regrets. He fought another U. There was another side. Among the tons of his archived papers are tender love letters to his first wife. His eyes could well with tears when talking about children. He was born Dec. Will Thurmond was a political lieutenant of "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, the dominant figure of post-Civil War South Carolina, who led a farmers' movement and successfully campaigned for governor in Thurmond could spin eyewitness accounts of Tillman.
When you stop to think about that -- and Tillman had heard Revolutionary War characters -- I mean, that takes in three generations. It takes us back years. Thurmond prided himself on being a son of Edgefield, a land that had borne James Bonham and William Travis, who fought at the Alamo, and Pitchfork Ben.
As an old man, he talked about sitting in the Edgefield dust as a little boy at a stump debate during the race for governor. His father had taken his children to hear Ira Jones and Coleman Blease. Other news: As body cameras grow in popularity, Greenville police vehicles move away from dashcams. Thurmond, who learned how to shout and how to demagogue, said the episode served as an example to him throughout his political life. He graduated from Clemson in Beneath his photo in the Clemson yearbook are the words, "One cannot always be a hero, but one can always be a man.
Thurmond taught agriculture and coached at high schools in McCormick, Ridge Spring and Edgefield from until His political career began that year with his election as Edgefield County's superintendent of education. He also began studying, or reading, the law under his father and was admitted to the South Carolina Bar in By , he was working for Franklin Roosevelt's presidential nomination. He was elected to the South Carolina Senate that year, serving until Later, as governor, he would underscore in the Legislative Manual his progressive record.
He wrote of his work as a member of the Social Security Committee that sponsored the first law to help the blind, old and poor. He also wrote of his role in helping to write the first rural electrification act and working to create the Santee Cooper power and navigation project.
Thurmond singled out as accomplishments a longer school term, improved textbooks, mandatory school attendance and the "prevention of chiseling ofteachers' salaries. It was a record of a big and active government, hardly representative of the second half of Thurmond's life. While the issues would change, though, his political performance would not.
Through five decades, Thurmond's style rarely varied -- clenched fists on the stage, shouting and rasping against the evils of "kowtowing" to outside forces. It was a tough image, full of energy and suspicion. Off the stump, there was the other Thurmond. At political rallies, funerals, dawn prayer services before inaugurations, and weddings, Thurmond was often the first there, shaking hands, asking about family, making a connection. Almost the entire Thurmond infrastructure in Washington was about those connections back home.
When a young would-be politician, lawyer or judge went to work for the senator, they spent time clipping obituaries for the senator's notes to families and serving as Thurmond's emissary on all manner of missions for constituents. By , he was a state circuit judge.
While on the bench, he sentenced four men to death, three blacks and one white. David Bruck, one of the nation's foremost opponents of the death penalty, examined Thurmond's death penalty cases. He wrote in The Washington Post in that Thurmond seated all-white juries to judge black defendants even though the U.
Supreme Court had condemned the practice. Bruck referred to a unanimous U. Supreme Court decision written by Justice Hugo Black of Alabama that racial discrimination in jury selection "not only violates our Constitution The Supreme Court ruling, Bruck wrote, came two months before Thurmond seated the jury in the trial of George Thomas, accused of raping a white woman in Georgetown.
Thurmond and his colleagues did what they did because there was not yet anyone to stand up to them," Bruck wrote. Thurmond said five decades later that he had no regrets. I think that if I had been sitting on the jury, I would have reached the same verdict.
Thurmond was 22 when she was born; Butler was only But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! On June 26, , the U. The decision in Lawrence v. June 26, marks a major milestone for civil rights in the United States, as the Supreme Court announces its decision in Obergefell v. By one vote, the court rules that same-sex marriage cannot be banned in the United States and that all same-sex marriages Although the Confederates sustained heavy losses and did not succeed in In a ceremony presided over by U.
President Dwight D. Lawrence Seaway is officially opened, creating a navigational channel from the Atlantic Ocean to all the Great Lakes. The seaway, made up of a system of canals, locks, and dredged In retaliation for an Iraqi plot to assassinate former U. President George H. On April 13, , the day Available on microfilm. The Strom Thurmond Collection, , includes senatorial and family papers arranged in the following series: administrative assistant, certificates, executive assistant, interim, legal, legislative assistant, memorabilia, military, military assistant, personal, photographs, pinks correspondence , president pro tempore, press assistant, scrapbooks, special preparedness investigating subcommittee, state senate, Jean Crouch Thurmond, John William Thurmond, White House correspondence, speeches, subject correspondence, applications and employment, correspondence management, and volume mail.
Finding aid available on-line. Includes discussion of Charleston, SC hospital workers strike Also in Henry Nichols interviews , , 53 pages. Gerald R. Correspondence and briefing papers. Finding aid. Waring papers, ca. Smith papers, ; and correspondence in Clark R.
Mollenhoff papers,
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