Former S.C. Sen. Strom Thurmond, 100, dies

WASHINGTON - Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a one-time Democratic segregationist who helped fuel the rise of the modern conservative Republican Party in the South, died Thursday, his son Strom Thurmond Jr. said. He was 100 and the longest-serving senator in history.

Mr. Thurmond, whose physical and political endurance were legendary - he holds the record for solo Senate filibustering - retired on Jan. 5, 2003, at the age of 100 after more than 48 years in office.

Mr. Thurmond died at 9:45 p.m., his son said. He had been living in a newly renovated wing of a hospital in his hometown of Edgefield since he returned to the state from Washington earlier this year.

Age took its inevitable toll on Mr. Thurmond as he neared retirement, and he was guided through the Capitol in a wheelchair. Yet he wielded political power virtually to the end, prevailing upon President Bush to appoint his 29-year-old son, Strom Jr., as U.S. Attorney in South Carolina in 2001.

Mr. Thurmond is "beyond criticism" in South Carolina, Furman University political scientist Don Aiesi said as the senator's health declined and he underwent a series of hospitalizations late in his congressional tenure. "Strom is the most venerable of institutions here."

In a political career that spanned seven decades, Mr. Thurmond won his first election in 1928, to local office, and his last in 1996, to his eighth Senate term.

"We cannot and I shall not give up on our mission to right the 40-year wrongs of liberalism," he said during his last campaign. "The people of South Carolina know that Strom Thurmond doesn't like unfinished business."

His voting record was prodefense, anticommunist and staunchly conservative. His devotion to constituent services was legendary. He was a lifelong physical fitness buff, who shunned tobacco and alcohol and was known for his vigorous handshake. He had a storied, lifelong reputation as a ladies' man.

Mr. Thurmond ran for president as a Dixiecrat in 1948 and won 39 Southern electoral votes as part of a states-rights uprising against President Harry Truman's support for civil rights. Nearly a decade later, he set the Senate record for filibustering when he spoke for a straight 24 hours and 18 minutes against a bill to end discrimination in housing.

Ironically, his presidential campaign sparked controversy more than a half-century later, when then-Majority Leader Trent Lott declared at Mr. Thurmond's 100th birthday party that voters of Mississippi were proud to have supported the South Carolinian when he ran for the White House.

"If the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years either," added Lott, who was forced to step down as the Senate's Republican leader in the ensuing uproar.

Mr. Thurmond's racial politics changed over the years as blacks began voting in large numbers. He became the first Southern senator to hire a black aide, supported the appointment of a black Southern federal judge and voted to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday.

His outlook seemed far different a half century ago, when he ran for president.

"I want to tell you," he declared in one speech in 1948, "that there's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches."

Mr. Thurmond grew up a Democrat - his father once ran for office - but switched to the GOP in 1964 to support Barry Goldwater's conservative campaign for the White House.

The first time he ran as a Republican, in 1966, he won easily.

Born Dec. 5, 1902, in Edgefield, S.C., James Strom Thurmond - Strom was his mother's maiden name - was elected county school superintendent, state senator and circuit judge before enlisting in the Army in World War II. He landed in Normandy as part of the 82nd Airborne Division assault on D-Day, and won five battle stars and numerous other awards.

Like many one-time segregationists, Mr. Thurmond insisted the issue wasn't race but "federal power vs. state power" - though the state power he wanted to preserve was the power to segregate.

"The question of integration was only one facet of that matter," he said in a November 1992 interview.

Showing how much his world had changed, in 1977, Mr. Thurmond's young daughter, Nancy, 6, enrolled in a public school in Columbia, S.C., that was 50 percent black. The girl's teacher also was black.

Mr. Thurmond's first wife, Jean Crouch, was 23 years his junior. The couple married in 1947, and she died of a brain tumor in 1960.

His second wife, former beauty queen Nancy Moore, was 44 years younger than Mr. Thurmond when they were married in 1968. Mr. Thurmond was 68 when their first child, Nancy, was born. The couple had three other children before separating in 1991: Strom Jr., Juliana and Paul. Nancy died in 1993 after being struck by a car.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright