Surprise, surprise, as Charles Johnson relates in his Wall St. Journal op-ed today, "Essie Mae Williams (nee Thurmond)", it appears that at least one preacher of white supremacy and racial purity didn’t consistently practice the hate that he preached.

Now that the late Strom Thurmond has been outed as the father of an out-of-wedlock daughter to his black maid way back in the day (1925), it remains for the nation to come to terms with an insecure past masked by the security of numbers, at least for those with white skin. Read Johnson’s essay as a springboard to Ralph Ellison’s posthumously published novel, Juneteenth, perhaps the most profound literary presentation of the possibilities and pitfalls of an American solution to its own racial conundrum.