Mo' Joe the Schmo

Yeah, yeah, yeah, his Daddy's not a racist says Joe the Schmo's son. Of course, Joe's little boy is running for attorney general in South Carolina, home of some of the most notorious racists ever to creep into a black bedroom. So everybody black needs to run for the hills if Sonny Boy Wilson wins -- imagine the prosecutions and legislation headed in the wind. But to further make the point about Schmo's true views, back in 2003, Wilson called it "unseemly" and a "smear" for Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the illegitimate daughter Strom Thurmond had with the 16 year old family maid to tell the world the old dog was her Daddy. Excuse me?? What was unseemly was old Strom sticking it where Southern gentlemen have been sticking it for the last couple of hundred years--statutory rape and all that be damned. How is it a smear to call your Daddy your Daddy? Of course Strom, who practically wore white Klan robes right on the floor of the Congress didn't want anybody to know about Baby Girl. He did pay for her education and some other stipends. And, oh Lordy, Lordy, his 'other' family recognized her and she is listed on the monument to him, right alongside his white children. She should be grateful, I guess Joe thinks. After a lifetime of keeping it hid (she was born in 1925) I think she was brave to acknowledge him. I wonder if she ever sat and looked at the veins in her hands and wondered about the blood coursing through them? Whose blood, whose genes? Imagine a life of knowing your own father thought anything black was subhuman and had no rights or liberties. Painful. I'm Ruth Adkins Robinson.