Granddaughter: Strom Thurmond saved correspondence with his bi-racial daughter
Growing up in California in the 1960s, Monica Williams-Hudgens was at the epicenter of the black nationalist movement. As the civil rights struggle grew more militant, she proudly sported an afro and began spouting rhetoric at the dinner table that alarmed her mother, a South Carolina transplant named Essie Mae Washington-Williams.
So the mother pulled her young daughter aside and told her something she felt a budding admirer of the Black Panthers needed to hear.
“She told me my grandfather was alive, and he was white,” Williams-Hudgens said.
This story was originally published February 6, 2015 at 1:01 PM.