Ben Tillman was a traitor, and it’s time for SC to stop honoring his shameful legacy

By a unanimous vote last week, Clemson University’s Board of Trustees asked the South Carolina Legislature to amend the Heritage Act so that Clemson could change the name of the university’s “Tillman Hall” back to its original name — the “Main Building.”

First, some background.

Ben Tillman served as governor of South Carolina from 1890 to 1894 and represented the state in the U.S. Senate from 1895 to 1918; in 1889 Tillman helped to found Clemson University and served on its trustees board.

Tillman was also a racist and a terrorist.

At the end of the Reconstruction Era Tillman, a protégé of Confederate Gen. Martin Gary, joined Gary’s “Red Shirts,” a paramilitary terrorist group dedicated to restoring white supremacy across the former Confederacy.

As a member of his local branch of the Red Shirts, Tillman helped lead a terror campaign across South Carolina that included intimidating and assaulting black voters, assassinating black political figures and attacking the integrated state militia; he played a central role in the 1876 Hamburg Massacre, during which numerous black militiamen were captured, tortured and killed.

In addition Tillman was an orator who traveled the country to spread his white supremacist views and urge white Americans to kill any black man or woman who tried to assert their equal rights.

Tillman didn’t just help to usher in the age of Jim Crow across America: he helped to create a reign of terror against black Americans — the echoes of which still resonate today.

If all of this sounds personal to me, it’s because it is personal to me.

Why?

Because in addition to this domestic terrorist having his name on Clemson’s main building and his likeness reflected on a statue on our State House grounds, Tillman’s infamous legacy is also honored at Winthrop University, where the main administration building is known as Tillman Hall.

Winthrop University is my alma mater.

And, unfortunately, my old school can’t do anything about changing Tillman Hall’s name because some 20 years ago then-Gov. Jim Hodges was forced to compromise with a Republican-controlled Legislature in exchange for getting the Confederate battle flag removed from the State House dome.

In order to get the flag removed, Hodges had to sign the Heritage Act, which prohibits the removal or renaming of Confederate-related monuments in South Carolina unless two-thirds of the General Assembly says it can happen.

Well, I say that it should happen — and more and more people across South Carolina are saying it should happen, too.

We say that honoring traitors is un-American.

And Ben Tillman was exactly that: a traitor.

That’s not historical revisionism; that’s historical honesty.

Yes, someone can be great and do great things while also participating in abhorrent behaviors.

Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder, and that is disgusting and unforgivable to me. But Jefferson was also the main author of the Declaration of Independence, and that dichotomy defines much of who we were and are as a nation.

Ben Tillman, however, did not write the Declaration of Independence.

He did not lead the Colonial Army to win our freedom at the end of a bayonet.

He did not expand liberty or bring about freeing from bondage.

He was not some pillar of American thought and action who reached for the better angels of our nature while haunted by some personal flaw.

He was a traitor.

It is time we stopped treating traitors like patriots.

And it is past time for South Carolina’s lawmakers to revisit the Heritage Act.

A Democratic Party strategist, Antjuan Seawright is a CBS News political contributor and CEO of Blueprint Strategy LLC. Follow him on Twitter @antjuansea.

This story was originally published June 16, 2020 at 3:22 PM.