"If you can't publicly acknowledge a father, then in one sense you don't have one," said Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "Keeping this secret was probably a major stress on [Washington-Williams] as a little girl. She didn't have Strom Thurmond as a father in any tangible sense. He was the classic absent father -- the thing they like to put on black men -- and she must have felt in her heart somewhere that he didn't love her."

And, Poussaint continued, the feelings of rejection would not have stopped at the particulars of their personal relationship. "Here was this rabid segregationist spewing hatred toward black people, a man who in every public way was saying 'You are inferior' and that on some level he despises you, in the same way that Jefferson kept his children slaves. This is beyond hypocrisy; there is something sick about this stuff."

Washington-Williams grew up during segregation -- seated on the back of the bus, drinking from separate water fountains, disenfranchised in every way. And she would have been 32 years old in 1957 when her father staged a 24-hour and 18-minute filibuster on the Senate floor in a futile attempt to prevent the passage of a civil rights bill.

Poussaint raised another question about the union, more than three-quarters of a century ago, of Thurmond and his family's maid. It's a question that, now that both of Washington-Williams parents are dead, will never be answered. "One thing to consider is, Did he rape her?" said Poussaint. "We know at that time in history that a white man could have had a black woman for the pickings ... The definition of rape down there, back then, this didn't have a definition for black women. They were close to property, totally disenfranchised and without power; there was no one to protect them."

In an interview on "60 Minutes II" Wednesday night, Washington-Williams characterized the relationship between her mother and Sen. Thurmond as an "affair" and said her mother remembered Thurmond as a "very nice person."

When Thurmond and Butler conceived Washington-Williams, the age of consent for women in South Carolina was 14, so legally what transpired was not statutory rape. The union also did not break miscegenation laws of the time. According to the 1895 South Carolina Constitution, while "the marriage of a white person with a negro or mulatto or person who shall have one-eighth or more negro blood shall be unlawful or void," and "no unmarried woman shall legally consent to sexual intercourse who shall not have attained the age of fourteen years," there was no law prohibiting intercourse between a white man with a black woman.

And yet, the sexual politics of interracial relationships have always been legally charged. Case in point: 1942's State vs. Thomas, in which a white South Carolina woman accused a black man of raping her. Then-Judge Strom Thurmond sentenced the man to the electric chair.

"There were dalliances between whites and blacks back to the early days of slavery," said Wainscott. "In today's terminology this is sexual harassment, Exhibit A. But it has been a historical and cultural ethic for slaves to perform sexual services for their white masters and to receive in return less harsh treatments and favors. Obviously in 1925 we're not talking about a slavery situation but about a social caste system."

Bruce Ransom, Wainscott's colleague in Clemson's political science department, agreed: "These liaisons weren't something that was just among the run-of-the-mill white population, but among those who were the leaders. Those who helped define the policies and enforce the policies -- those who separated the races -- were on a personal level somehow involved in relationships or sexual liaisons that crossed the line."

Noting that Thurmond seems to have confided the truth about his offspring to his friends and some of his staff, Wainscott said: "People like George Wallace and Gene Talmadge may have had similar dalliances. But something tells me they would have absolutely pulled out all the stops to keep that information from ever being known. Most of his ilk -- the unreconstructed segregationists, probably would not have confided in their friends. They would probably have had this kind of secret buried with their bodies."

Thurmond, however, was reconstructed, at least to some extent. He was one of the first Southern senators to hire an African-American aide, and in 1983 supported the creation of a national holiday to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "He was ahead of his time in raising his finger to the wind and realizing that times were changing," said Wainscott -- though the times did not change enough for him to publicly acknowledge his mixed race offspring before his death.

The 54-year-old Ransom remembered hearing first about Thurmond's black daughter from one of his father's friends when he was around 10 years old. "Over the years the official word was denial that such a daughter existed," said Ransom. "But in the community and on the street, even without hard evidence, there was a belief that this did happen."

It happened so much, in fact, that stories like Jefferson's and Thurmond's litter American culture. Julia Stern, a professor of American literature and culture at Northwestern University, and an expert in the novels of William Faulkner, said: "This is the nation's founding story."

Well, it's Essie Mae Washington-Williams' story now too. And whatever else she's seeking -- closure, identity, legitimacy -- it seems her admission has also provided her with the most fundamental of American ideals: "I am Essie Mae Washington-Williams," she said at the end of yesterday's press conference, her voice breaking. "And at last, I feel completely free."

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