The Strom Thurmond's situation of having a Black daughter and behaving toward her as he did was a frequent occurrence in the South. Southerners often claimed segregation forever, but forever meant until sundown when they could find their ways back to black beds under the blanket of darkness.

Growing up in Louisiana, I remember my grandmother worked for a family I thought was white, but one day she told me that they were not white according to the standards of the south. They looked as white as any white I had seen or knew, but she told me that they were called mulattos, and these were the biracial children of black and white parentage. Too young to understand the sexual goings-on of the south, I simply wondered how those things were possible since whites seemingly hated Black people so much.

The south was then and is still a closely knitted culture that had and has a complex network of biracial sex and politics at the fabric of its system of segregation. That system with its open boundaries set, was complex because those sexual boundaries were blatantly crossed day after day by the same people who had set them up. The result of their frequent crossing was an entire community of biracial children and families who were what today we simply call biracial children.

In every society where there is racial diversity, there are offspring that come from interracial marriages and dating of those people. That is as normal as history and as frequent as the south winds. Only in the southern part of the US is there feign pretence that interracial sexual relationships do not exist or they are somehow not normal.

The fact is, these interracial relationships have gone on since the USA was the USA, and they will continue. Strom Thurmond represented the normal but clinically aberrant southern way of managing interracial lust/love actualized into flesh. And since he and others like him dealt with this situation so badly, millions of biracial children were in a type of wasteland searching for their identity and their place in the south.

While in college, I remember vocalizing in my black rebellion and defiance that there were only five Black students in that particular course; a biracial student whom I had not recognized as Black interrupted me equally as forcefully as I, saying, "Six blacks, brother." Not being taken off stride by my oversight, I chimed in, "Sorry, I missed you, brother!" And I went on. Although now when we see each other, we laugh about that oversight, that brother was like many who were in that neither-land of biracial parentage. He, however, was strong enough to select a black identity and aggressively asserted himself. And I, as other Blacks usually do, accepted him as one of us.

Black people are aware of the many Strom Thurmond daughters and sons who are ever with us, and we accept them--they are a part of who we are as much as they are a part of who white America is. The problem historically has not been that Black people have not accepted those who are our own, but the Strom Thurmonds of this nation have not accepted those who are their own. That is what happened to the Black daughter of Senator Strom Thurmond. []

Frank A. Jones