Strom Thurmond Monument
Current location
Installed December 4, 1999
Designed by William Behrends
Amended 2005
Funded with private donations
The statue of the longest-serving U.S. senator in American history and former South Carolina Governor James “Strom” Thurmond was built and dedicated by the state while he was still alive, making it the second monument to a living person on the State House grounds (the first was for James F. Byrnes). The Strom Thurmond Monument Commission, chaired by S.C. Senator John Courson, privately raised $850,000, largely from corporate donors. The larger-than-life nine-foot bronze figure depicts one of South Carolina’s staunchest segregationists striding confidently from the State House atop an eight-foot base. The monument was amended in 2005 to add the name of Essie Mae Washington-Williams, a child Thurmond fathered with his family’s young black maid in 1925, and to change the number of Thurmond’s children from “four” to “five.”