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With all the national attention brought to the statehouse yesterday for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and it’s celebration of the Civil Rights movement, it was only a matter of time before somebody would summon the ghosts of South Carolina’s less-tolerant past — and seek to eradicate them. The General Assembly began the process last week by introducing legislation targeting a statue on the Statehouse grounds of controversial former governor and senator “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman. The bill, introduced by Rep. Todd Rutherford, (D-Richland) would either add a plaque detailing Tillman’s “racist past” or remove the statue entirely.
And Tuesday, the Hilton Head Island Packet began their campaign against Tillman’s memorial with an editorial calling for action.
It isn’t right that people today and in the future should be led to believe that this man, a notorious racist, stood up for people’s rights when he so vociferously fought to keep down the state’s black residents. Truth should count for something.
It won’t be easy to craft wording on a plaque that can capture the complexities of any man’s life. But state legislators ought to try.
Tillman, coming from a family that owned slaves before the Civil War, made it his life’s work to deny rights to freed blacks. After the Civil War, he led a militia that terrorized and killed former slaves, The (Columbia) State reports. A charismatic speaker and a force in the U.S. Senate, he traveled the nation in the early 1900s, giving speeches to tens of thousands of people, urging whites to prepare to fight if blacks tried to claim equal rights.
The State reports that Tillman also was one of the first South Carolina leaders to use his position to get federal money for the state. The money helped build and maintain the Charleston Naval Base, a major Lowcountry employer for nearly a century. He also helped found what are now Clemson and Winthrop universities, which is acknowledged on his statue, erected in 1940. [Hilton Head Island Packet]
My problem isn’t so much with the fact that Tillman was a racist, because pretty much everyone was a racist at the time. I’m not making excuses for racism — because it’s never acceptable — but we would be mistaken to believe the rest of society during that era was so egalitarian on the issue of race. Although he crudely exploited it, the guy was just a product of his times.
My problem has more to do with the fact that I’m not sure why he has a statue in the first place. Besides being a known racist and a shrewd politician, Tillman’s greatest accomplishment during his two-terms as governor (four total years) was using the state’s alcohol monopoly to create Clemson University. And we all know how well that turned out.
Yeah, he went on to serve as a U.S. Senator for a while, but the only reason I can find that he has a statue at all is because the Democrats went looking for someone to immortalize on the capitol grounds and, at the time (1940), Tillman was still kind of a rock star.
By that logic, we could probably give Mark Sanford or Jim Hodges a statue. Actually, we could probably give everybody a statue. Which is fine, because I always thought I would look good in marble.
Why can’t they just add a few booze bottles to the ground around the statue, put a mustashe on it…and make it the Jeal Toal statue???
Sounds cheap and easy to me.
As a U.S. senator, Tillman denounced President Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation to Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House for its challenge to white supremacy. It “will necessitate our killing a thousand Negroes in the South before they will learn their place again.” http://www.palmettohistory.org/scha/proceedings2007.pdf
‘Nuff said. But if that really isn’t enough for you, since South Carolina Democrats erected this statue, why not let SC Democrats decide what to do with it now.
Anti-racism is more dangerous and a much larger and more pervasive societal problem than racism. The answer to both is anti-anti-racism. In other words, PC-ism just sucks. Any time someone invokes the guilt card, it’s almost always a ploy to fool people into giving them something out of nowhere. Not that pain and suffering aren’t anything, it’s just that they don’t produce anything. Nobody is still living off of the fat of Pitchfork Ben’s hog, unless of course you’re counting all the little piglets sucking on the welfare sow. Ben was also a rabid socialist.
My point? Tillman’s not so great. And, yes, he actually does still share some things in common with today’s Dems, in spite of the musical chairs that the Parties played in the ’60s. But the main point: Getting rid of his statue won’t even begin to satisfy the hate preacher welfare queens. It’s like pouring gas on a burning log. If they get Ben now, they’ll want more and more and more… probably starting here next: http://www.scstatehouse.net/sess117_2007-2008/bills/3588.htm.
What happens when there are no more flags to take down and they’re demanding reparations for slavery? This is cultural Marxism, people. The worst thing you can do is ‘compromise’ with it.
Now that the bill to remove the statue of the racist terrorist and subversive Tillman from the State House grounds has been sabotaged by the subcommittee chairman, I hope somebody will do the decent thing and remove it with a stick of dynamite. I pray for the day when it will be replaced by a monument to pay tribute to a REAL Carolina hero, like Denmark Vesey.
Tillman was more than just a racist! He was the leader of both the Ku Klux Klan and the Redshirts in SC and openly bragged about killing/murdering blacks and urged others to do so also. He is almost single-handedly responsible for Jim Crow laws, stripping blacks of all rights they received after the Civil War. He founded Clemson as a place “where white sons may be taught without the stench of niggers violating their sacred halls”. Even today, Clemson is 94% white! (US News & World Report – 2008 College Edition). The Tillman statue was originally erected under pressure from Clemson alumni in the state government. Tillman was an EVIL man, and every effort should be made to bring his character and his legacy to light. Bring down the statue.
Yes, every white in the late nineteenth century South was a racist who likely would have agreeed with every word he spewed. But a man of his times? He was an evil demagogue who was the most potent white supremacist of the so-called Gilded Age. In addition to his penchant for going down to Orangeburg to hunt ‘n——’ for sport, he organized the founding of Clemson fueled by his outrage at South Carolina College’s post-war admission of Blacks.
What we forget, in our little provincial backwater, is that there is an American ethos that would and should be appalled at the show of honor by a legislature, Clemson, and Winthrop of this diabolically malignant person.