I grew up in the middle-class suburbs of upstate South Carolina as parts of the South were modernizing and transforming into the “new South”; my own city of Greenville, SC a shining example, moving from textiles and agriculture to high tech manufacturing. That new South I grew up in included racially integrated schools.

I am also a proud legacy son of Clemson University. My father and many of my relatives are also graduates of Clemson. My freshman year at Clemson, my randomly selected dorm roommate was a 6’4” stoic Black guy. We made a funny couple walking around campus with me at 5’3” and white. We roomed together for my first two years at Clemson. At the time, under 8% of Clemson’s student population was Black. The Black people on campus tended to congregate together, in the cafeteria, in fraternities and sororities, and in other social circles. Due to my roommate connection, I became familiar with and partly immersed into the Black social circles at Clemson.

Virtually every day at Clemson, my Black friends and I walked by Tillman Hall along with countless other Clemson students and graduates. It is the most recognizable building on campus with its tall clock tower. And in the succeeding years I have walked by that stately building hundreds of times on my way to see my beloved Clemson Tigers football team play. Even from the football stadium, you can look back toward campus and see Tillman Hall basking in the orange glow of the sky at sunset like a watercolor canvas.

Connected as I have been my whole life to South Carolina and Clemson University, I did not really know about Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman, whose namesake building is Tillman Hall. Studying South Carolina history as a youngster, I would have certainly learned about Ben Tillman. Afterall, he was the dominant figure in South Carolina politics for a generation. After building a prosperous agriculture business, Tillman served as state Governor and then US Senator, and as kingmaker of future SC politicians well into the 20th century.

What I did not learn in my South Carolina history courses nor in my time at Clemson was who Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman was to Black people. Only now am I doing my own research and discovering he personally organized and led murdering vigilante groups into Black communities, including the well-documented “Hamburg Massacre” in Edgefield SC in 1876; that he was a powerful voice for restoring total white supremacy in the South by creatively denying Blacks the right to vote; that he instructed an entire new generation of farmers, businessman, and politicians on how to intimidate or outright lynch numerous Blacks in South Carolina and beyond. Tillman, with his political clout, convened a South Carolina constitutional convention and a rewrite of the state constitution in 1895 which effectively re-enslaved Blacks and made it virtually impossible for them to vote. [i]  In Tillman’s own words:

“Then we had a constitutional convention convened which took the matter up calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disfranchising as many of them [Black former slaves] as we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments.”[ii]

So the legacy Tillman left, his life’s work, was to disenfranchise Blacks and return them to enslaved servants of the white race by any means necessary, including taking their property, taking their right to vote, and terrorizing and murdering them.

“We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.” Benjamin Tillman, 1895.[iii]              

I have also learned that Tillman was the key political figure in helping his friend Thomas Green Clemson achieve his dream of launching a land-grant college focused on agricultural education. As SC Governor, Tillman deployed convict labor to build the first buildings of the Clemson College campus. That convict labor consisted of predominately African American men and boys, some as young as 12, who had effectively been re-enslaved through post-reconstruction laws put in place to imprison Black men for “vagrancy”, including not having a job.[iv]

Ben Tillman then served as one of the inaugural trustees of Clemson College. In 1946, Tillman’s son, William, who succeeded his father as a Clemson trustee, lobbied successfully to have the centerpiece building on the campus renamed “Tillman Hall”. Previously it had been called simply “Main Building”.

I didn’t know any of these facts about Ben Tillman when I walked the grounds of Clemson with my Black friends or through the years coming back to campus. Only now, as I reexamine what I thought I knew and do my own research, am I beginning to understand why Black people have been pushing to have the building renamed.

With this new understanding, it is clear to me that the building’s name must be changed. Tillman Hall is named after an indicted (though never convicted) murderer and a person who directly and indirectly devastated hundreds of thousands of Black Americans for generations; these Black Americans who were citizens and supposedly guaranteed equal rights by the US Constitution.  

To those who say changing the building name is stripping away our history as checkered as it may be, I say go to Germany and see if you can find a building named after Nazi leaders. This comparison might seem shocking, but I would guess a Black man from the early 1900s might see them as about the same.

Some might argue that Tillman, while he was an unabashed racist, also championed small farmers in the South and was a key figure in promoting agricultural progress, lifting poor white farmers out of poverty. And in the process, Tillman fostered a form of regional pride among those Southern whites. This is true, but Tillman did it while shoving Black men and women into the red clay under his plowshare. By comparison, in the 1930s Nazi leaders presided over an industrial boom in Germany that lifted the German people out of economic devastation from WWI and made the German industrial machine the envy of the world. Further, the Nazis rebuilt national German pride. Yet, they did these things while shoving Jews, Blacks, and other non-white races down into frozen ground of the Fatherland. 

To those who say “this is a slippery slope…if we start changing the names of every building named after a slave holder or racist, we’d be changing every building and street name in the South;” I say that argument is for people who are not committed to the hard work of reconciliation. Reconciliation requires openness and humility to try to understand and relate to the harmed person’s perspective.

Reasonable people can come up with a few criteria, such as whether the person was a murderer or guilty of some other heinous crime. Other criteria could include weighing the full body of someone’s life work to assess whether the person progressed the world more than he or she damaged it, or put another way did they leave things better or worse than they found them. We could also create commissions to assess these criteria and make decisions about renaming buildings and streets.

To those who say “this is about tradition…Tillman Hall represents the tradition of Clemson University”, I say the old Main Building was not even named Tillman Hall until 1946, a full 57 years after the school’s founding.[v] In fact, one could argue that it would honor tradition more to change the building back to its original name. And speaking as a deeply passionate son of Clemson, who walked its halls, sang concerts in its auditoriums, and even walked onto its hallowed football field to sing the National Anthem, I don’t need a building named after a murderer and a racist to cherish my university.  

To my beloved Clemson University (most of the facts I cite about Tillman above came directly from Clemson’s own website www.clemson.edu in its Tillman biography), thank you for starting to take this issue on, albeit many years too late. I am aware that the current Trustees have formally recommended to the SC State legislature to rename Tillman Hall. Now it is up to South Carolina’s constituents. The legislature will only act if its constituents demand it. Though I don’t reside in SC anymore, as a son of South Carolina and Clemson, I add my voice to say: it’s time to change the name of Tillman Hall to Main Building.    

“We took the government away from them in 1876. We did take it.” Benjamin Tillman, 1900[vi]

---

[i] Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (Liveright Publishing, New York, 2017), pp. 40-41.

[ii] Clemson University (website), accessed 30 July 2020, www.clemson.edu/about/history/bios/ben-tillman.html

[iii] Clemson University (website), accessed 30 July 2020, www.clemson.edu/about/history/bios/ben-tillman.html

[iv] Clemson University (website), accessed 30 July 2020, www.clemson.edu/about/history/bios/ben-tillman.html

[v] Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (Liveright Publishing, New York, 2017), pp. 40-41.

[vi] Clemson University (website), accessed 30 July 2020, www.clemson.edu/about/history/bios/ben-tillman.html