South Carolina statue built on a racist foundation

On Martin Luther King Day, as Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois spoke before hundreds of people from the steps of the state Capitol here, Benjamin Ryan Tillman glowered at him from just yards away.

But Obama’s Secret Service detail had nothing to worry about: Tillman has been dead for 89 years; he is memorialized in a large bronze statue on the State House lawn. More worrisome is that the deeply racist, white supremacist ideas Tillman championed throughout his years as a governor and U.S. senator from South Carolina are very much alive -- as is the 1895 Jim Crow state constitution he engineered.

And there is the dilemma facing state legislators here: Toss Tillman or tailor his monument with the truth.

J. Todd Rutherford can’t do much to rid America of intolerance. But, as a member of South Carolina’s House of Representatives, he is trying to kick Tillman’s prominent statue off the State House grounds.

“Why do we need . . . the statue of a vehement racist who called for the genocide of African Americans who were standing up for their right to vote? He didn’t want to kill all black people, just the ones who wanted to vote,” he said.

Governor from 1890 to 1894, Tillman would heartily agree. In 1900, the son of slave owners spoke proudly of his efforts to disenfranchise and kill prospective black voters: “We have done our level best. . . . We have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.”

Rutherford introduced a bill in January to evict Tillman. “It goes along with my bill to remove the Confederate flag from the State House grounds,” said Rutherford, noting that bill has been languishing in committee for more than a year.

This state, first to secede from the Union, waged a pitched battle over whether the Rebel flag should continue to fly atop the Capitol’s dome below the American and state flags. In 2000, the flag finally came down, only to reappear in what some consider an even more significant position. It now flies beside the towering Confederate Soldier Monument, directly in front of the State House steps, just a few yards from Tillman’s stern-faced statue.

Many South Carolinians cherish the flag as the banner under which their forefathers fought and died for Southern honor. For others, particularly African Americans, it is a hated symbol of the racism that the Confederacy defended.

But tampering with symbols of Southern heritage is a tough sell here, and not only because predominantly white Republicans control both houses of the Legislature, the governor’s office and the majority of statewide offices, Rutherford said. “As an African American legislator, I continue to catch heat from other African Americans who say leave it alone” and focus on more crucial issues such as healthcare and education.”

Tillman -- nicknamed “Pitchfork” for his threat to poke President Grover Cleveland with one -- “was certainly turning over in his grave” on Jan. 21 when Democratic presidential candidate Obama addressed the crowd, Rutherford said. In the U.S. Senate, where Tillman served from 1895 until his death in 1918, the famously hot-headed politician boasted, “We of the South have never recognized the right of the Negro to govern white men and never will.”

In his State of the State address earlier this month, Gov. Mark Sanford, a Republican, recalled those words and condemned Tillman. He urged South Carolinians to vote to reform the segregationist, Tillman-crafted 1895 constitution based on the “plantation model of ‘we know what’s best for y’all.’ ”

If not for federal civil rights laws that trump that constitution, “I would not be in office and black folk would not be allowed to run for statewide office,” said Democratic state Rep. Joe Neal, an African American Baptist minister. He said he had support for legislation he would introduce adding an explanatory plaque to Tillman’s statue.

The current inscription lauds Tillman, a founder of Clemson and Winthrop universities, as a patriot and statesman.

“Simply removing him and scouring his name from history won’t teach us anything. We have to have an explanation of who he was and what he did and call him what he should have been called in his own time, a racist,” Neal said.

Lonnie Randolph, director of the state NAACP, called the State House grounds “a shrine to bigotry” and wants a review of its statuary.

“If they started removing the statues of those persons who were racists and bigots and had white supremacist views, there would be very few statues on the State House grounds,” he said. “All these folks, who lived double and triple lives in terms of how they treated African Americans, are called heroes in this state.”

That would include the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, once a fierce segregationist and one of the most lionized figures in state history.