Her father was a staunch segregationist, her mother was his family's teenage black maid: Famed daughter of a notorious liaison dies aged 87

The mixed-race daughter, who her segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond never publicly acknowledged, has died at the age of 87.

Thurmond made a name for himself as a staunch Republican that was against the integration of black and white Americans, and he died at the age of 100 without ever announcing that he had fathered the half-black woman named Essie Mae Washington-Williams. 

She was born in 1925 after Thurmond, then 22, had an affair with a 16-year-old black maid who worked in his family's Edgefield, South Carolina home.

It was only after he died in 2003 that Ms Washington-Williams came forward and disclosed her lineage.