Early Life and Education
Washington was the natural daughter of Carrie Butler, who was 16 when her daughter was born, and Strom Thurmond, then 22. Butler worked for his parents as a domestic servant. She sent her daughter from South Carolina to her older sister Mary and her husband John Henry Washington to be raised in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. She was named Essie after another of Carrie's sisters, who fostered her briefly as an infant. Growing up, Essie Mae lived with a cousin seven years older than she, who she believed was her half-brother. Washington was unaware of the identity of her biological parents until 1941, when she was 16, when her mother told her and took her to meet Thurmond in person.
Washington and her mother met infrequently with Thurmond after that, although they had some contact for years. After high school, Washington-Williams worked as a nurse at Harlem Hospital in New York City, and took a course in business education at New York University.
She did not live in the segregated South until 1942, when she started college at South Carolina State University (SCSU), a historically black college. Thurmond paid for her college education. After having grown up in Pennsylvania, Washington was shocked by the racial restrictions of the South. She graduated from SCSU around 1946 with a degree in business.
Read more about this topic: Essie Mae Washington-Williams
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“I do not know that I meet, in any of my Walks, Objects which move both my Spleen and Laughter so effectually, as those Young Fellows ... who rise early for no other Purpose but to publish their Laziness.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)
“We are all conceived in close prison; in our mothers’ wombs, we are close prisoners all; when we are born, we are born but to the liberty of the house; prisoners still, though within larger walls; and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)
“... many of the things which we deplore, the prevalence of tuberculosis, the mounting record of crime in certain sections of the country, are not due just to lack of education and to physical differences, but are due in great part to the basic fact of segregation which we have set up in this country and which warps and twists the lives not only of our Negro population, but sometimes of foreign born or even of religious groups.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)