Dear Senator: A Daughter's Memoir

The illegitimate daughter of the late Senator Strom Thurmond breaks her lifelong silence. Her father, the longtime senator from South Carolina, was once the nation's leading voice for racial segregation; he mounted a filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 -- in the name of saving the South from "mongrelization." Her mother was Carrie Butler, a black teenager who worked as a maid on the Thurmond family's South Carolina plantation. The memoir reveals a brave young woman who struggled with the discrepancy between the father she knew -- financially generous, supportive of her education, even affectionate -- and the old Southern politician who refused to acknowledge their relationship in public.