She did not visit the segregated South until 1942, when she met relatives in Edgefield. After having grown up in Pennsylvania, Washington was shocked by the racial restrictions of the South. She returned to the North to live with relatives during the war years. After Thurmond returned from World War II, she started college at the all-black South Carolina State College (SCSC) in the fall of 1947. Thurmond quietly paid for her college education. She met and married future lawyer Julius Williams at SCSC in 1948. Her first child, Julius Williams Jr., was born in 1949. As a result, Essie Mae Washington-Williams dropped out of college in the summer of 1949 to begin raising the first of her four children.