Because Strom Thurmond lived so long and managed to occasionally turn on the charm, a lot of people have been able to minimize or rationalize his past as a rabid racist and advocate of segregation. Lest we forget, The Smoking Gun offers us this peek at the platform on which he ran for the presidency.
I wished the senator no ill but if he didn't want people to hold this against him, he should at some point have declared that it was wrong. Even George Wallace (our last major presidential candidate who couldn't pronounce "negro" without making it sound like that other "n" word) managed to repudiate his segregationist positions.