Monday letters: One monument we need to target

I wish change moved in waves rather than increments, but I was nonetheless pleased to see the Charleston massacre inspire Gov. Nimrata Nikki Randhawa Haley to reverse her approving stance on the rebel flag. But shame on people such as Rep. Rick Quinn for withholding full support of our governor’s heroism until he received “reassurances” that the flag-haters “will not go after the monuments.”

Quinn is one of many who warn that moving the rebel flag to a museum could be the first step toward a slippery slope that leads to a South Carolina cleansed of heritage. Fear of such a drastic shift is nonsense for any number of reasons, not the least of which that it would require a state Legislature controlled by Jimmy Carter and Al Sharpton.

Better that our worry-wart lawmakers summon some of Nimrata’s courage. Man-up and brave the looming menace of a liberal-kook putsch and go after a State House monument in honor of a U.S. senator who, in numerous speeches, protested that the “Lynch Law is all we have left” and “as long as the negroes continue to ravish white women we will continue to lynch them.”

Presumably, his legal concern was informed by the parenting philosophy he elucidated in the well of the U.S. Senate. Of his three daughters, he said he would “rather find either one of them killed by a tiger or a bear and gather up her bones and bury them, conscious that she had died in the purity of her maidenhood, than robbed of her womanhood by a black fiend.”

Ben Tillman also founded Clemson, but we won’t hold that against him if the Rick Quinns of the world allow that honoring the old creep is a stain on the memory of courageous ancestors who died in the crucible of war.

Columbia