He has a daughter by a black woman........so who knows......maybe he did take the man across the Potomac to the Pentagon..........

Governor of South Carolina[edit]

Thurmond's political career began under Jim Crow laws that effectively disenfranchised almost all blacks from voting, at a time when they constituted the majority of the state's population. Running as a Democrat in the one-party state, Thurmond was elected Governor of South Carolina in 1946, largely on the promise of making state government more transparent and accountable by weakening the power of a group of politicians from Barnwell, which Thurmond dubbed the Barnwell Ring, led by House Speaker Solomon Blatt.

Many voters considered Thurmond a progressive for much of his term, in large part due to his influence in gaining the arrest of the perpetrators of the lynch mob murder of Willie Earle. Though none of the men were found guilty by the all-white jury (as blacks had been disenfranchised under the South Carolina constitution, they could not serve on juries), Thurmond was congratulated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union(ACLU) for his efforts to bring the murderers to justice.^[13]