At this very time a year ago, we gaped at the downfall of U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, who indulged in over-exuberant praise for that onetime stalwart of segregation, his Senate colleague J. Strom Thurmond.

Lott was evicted from his majority leader's suite not long after saluting, on the occasion of Thurmond's 100th birthday, the South Carolinian's renegade presidential campaign in 1948, when as governor he bolted from the Democratic Party (by then softening on civil rights) to run as a Dixiecrat.

A Thurmond victory, Lott opined, would have helped the country avoid all those "problems." He didn't have to go into clinical detail; he was understood to be referring to the social upheaval that accompanied the dismantling of this country's Jim Crow regime of racial apartheid.

Not even Lott's fellow Republicans -- never mind the "Southern Strategy" that had catapulted them into power with the votes of disaffected whites -- could stomach a suggestion so loaded with white supremacist baggage.

But knowing what we know now about Thurmond, we can wonder whether -- egads! -- Lott in a strange way might inadvertently have made a point.

Of course, we'll have to fantasize a bit. But with Thurmond set to take the oath of office and move into the White House in January 1949, would he have managed to keep the world from finding out about the young woman who last week finally went public as 78-year-old Essie Mae Washington-Williams?

The country might have been treated to the spectacle of a segregationist president having to acknowledge that he was the father of a daughter born out of wedlock to a black mother. How could he, or anyone, have stuck to the Old South mantra about the perils of race-mixing?

Oh, 'scuse me for overlooking the obvious: race-mixing of the kind evident here, with a well-born white man taking advantage of a powerless black woman (Washington-Williams' mother had been a teenage maid in the household of Thurmond's parents), was a familiar pattern rooted in the slavery era.

It was the Southern white male prerogative, or so it was generally viewed, to carry on in that fashion. Hypocritical? Not if black people were seen as inherently inferior.

But if white men paid no social penalty for dallying with black women, it was manifestly taboo for black men to turn the tables. The young Chicagoan Emmitt Till, lynched in Mississippi after being accused of whistling at a white woman, was just one of the last of an untold number of black Americans persecuted for violating or allegedly violating the rule that black men could not in the remotest terms impinge on the purity of white Southern womanhood.

When a black newspaper editor in Wilmington had suggested, in 1898, that such purity might occasionally fall a tad short, there ensued the notorious riot in which white supremacists not only torched the newspaper's office and drove editor Alexander Manly from town, but overthrew the city government as too friendly to blacks. A number of black residents -- a dozen or so by conservative estimates -- were killed. It has gone down as the only such armed coup in U.S. history.

White Democrats, with N&O patriarch Josephus Daniels during his young and stupid phase helping lead the way, took control that year in Raleigh after galvanizing white voters over the threat ostensibly posed by sexually aggressive black men. (Pardon us while we retch.)

It's fair to say, then, that gender inequality was an incendiary thread woven through the country's race relations. When Strom Thurmond had his liaison with 16-year-old Carrie Butler, resulting in the birth of a baby girl in 1925, it could be said that he was doing his bit to uphold an ignominious tradition.

So why didn't Essie Mae Washington-Williams blow the whistle back when she still had some leverage, back when Thurmond was governor, or presidential candidate, or during his tenure as the nation's longest-serving senator?

What if she had stood before the cameras even while Thurmond was setting the filibuster record in opposition to civil rights? Why did she have to wait until after he was safely in his grave?

The most plausible explanation -- and in fact the one she has offered -- is that she felt a protective bond toward this man who privately treated her with a degree of warmth and didn't shy away from the truth of their relationship. When she made and held to her decision not to "out" him, she was not acting as a surrogate for oppressed black women but as a daughter.

Certainly it would have been noble for Old Strom, as the years wore on, to have publicly embraced this California schoolteacher as his flesh and blood, releasing her from her self-imposed vow of silence. Awkward? You bet. Politically damaging? Hard to tell.

At least Thurmond permitted himself to mellow, distancing himself from his Dixiecrat legacy. Did a day ever go by when he didn't think about Essie Mae? Did he ever seek her forgiveness? He had to realize that, if she ever spoke out, it would be their relationship as much as anything else for which he would be remembered.