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Softening his stance on race aided success Two weeks ago, Strom Thurmond left the Senate, frail but alive, able to gavel the chamber to a close. He turns 100 today. Those with long memories will say good riddance. Others attuned to recent history might be more charitable.
Either way, how did a man who never authored a major legislation, who was never a power broker of much consequence, garner such name recognition?
Most would say it is simply longevity. And in important repects they are right. What makes Thurmond so interesting is his 74-year political career embraced two distinct eras --segregation and the post-civil rights political world.
He was the last of the old-time "segs." He was also the politician who made the most successful transition into an electorate remade by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a law passed over the unyielding opposition of Thurmond and every other deep-South senator.
His critics, uncharmed by the courtly old man of the past 20 years, will duly remind us of the litany of harsh resistance: Thurmond's 1948 bid for president as a Dixiecrat seeking to preserve segregation in the name of "custon and tradition;" his authorship of the 1956 "Southern Manifesto" to overturn Brown v Board of Education; his record-setting filibuster in 1957 to block a voting rights bill; his 1967 attempt to block Thurgood Marshall's ascent to the U.S. Supreme Court.
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He stoked a hostile atmosphere that made it even more difficult for moderate voices to emerge and prod the South into acceptance of the inevitable.
At bottom, Thurmond and his coresistors stood against the equality principle enshrined in our Constitution. In time -- far too much time-- that princple trumped the ways of the past. The new civil rights laws and court decision that upheld them changed the electorate and the culture itself. Thurmond, however grudgingly, came to realize that politics grounded in across-the-board equality were of paramount importance.
Though he accepted the new politics of equality, Thurmond never formally rejected the old politics of inequality. There was no grand concession, no tearful apology, but rather the continuous day-to-day ministrations of a consummate politician.
Thurmond was a retail practitioner; he moved around the state handshake by handshake. He prided himself on "standing with the people," and when the "people," those who voted, became white and black, Thurmond shook their hands with equal gusto.
He made gestures both concrete and symbolic: becoming the first white politician in the state to hire a black staff member, and to a prominent position: funneling millions of dollars to black communities for one civic project or another; voting for a critical 1982 extension of the Voting Rights Act; and giving vocal support to a national holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
South Carolinians re-elected him time after time with healthy margins. He drew white moderates as well as double-digit support from the black community, which, importantly, never rose up for the sole purpose of defeating him.
In ways just and unjust, race can and does shape politics. Sometimes, as in the case of Strom Thurmond, it requires the law, invoked with courage and enforced without compromise, to redirect the path that race plays in public life. Thurmond's success owed less to embracing the equality principle than to abandoning his open opposition to it.
His long tenure was possible because he bent to the winds of change. There's something to be said for that.
Nadine Cohadas is a Washington writer and author of "Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change."