What makes this statue worse than all the others
Upon learning that Booker T. Washington had dined with President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House, South Carolina’s former governor and then-U.S. Sen. Ben Tillman railed that “entertaining that n----- will necessitate our killing a thousand n------ in the South before they learn their place again.”
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All of us are products of the times in which we live. Nearly all of the founding fathers were white supremacists, as were Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. But in spite of their own prejudices, there are stories about all of these leaders — and even those such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson — acknowledging the injustice of slavery and later segregation even as they were for the most part trapped by it, even profiting from it.
This was not the case with Tillman. His venomous hatred and disdain for blacks and his joy in punishing and killing them puts him in a totally separate class from other leaders before and after him.
Even his sympathetic and admiring biographer Francis Butler Simkins, who asserts that “It is fitting that his statue stands on the State House grounds,” admits that “Tillman openly justified violence when necessary to enforce the majority sentiments of South Carolina whites and endorsed this tyranny to the end of his days,” with the view that “Whosoever doubts that civilization depends on white supremacy is a fool and a knave.”
It is imperative for us white South Carolinians to review our history as objectively as humanly possible. I staunchly reject the idea that all who fought and died for the Confederate States of America were traitors or dishonorable individuals.
But there were the Tillmans of the South, who deserve no place of honor in our heritage. Tillman’s statue on the State House grounds must go.
Gene Sansbury
Columbia
This story was originally published September 30, 2017 at 8:30 AM with the headline "What makes this statue worse than all the others."