We can't change history
By Warner M.Montgomery warner@thecolumbiastar.com

Statue of Ben Tillman on the statehouse grounds.

There is a movement

afoot, prodded by The Other

Paper, to remove the statue of Pitchfork Ben Tillman from the capitol grounds. The reason? Tillman was a racist.

Benjamin R. Tillman (1847- 1918) led a populist revolt in S.C. and became governor in 1891. He is credited with the establishment of Clemson and Winthrop Colleges, disenfranchising blacks and women, and pushing through the 1895 S.C. Constitution that institutionalized Jim Crow laws.

As a U.S. senator (1895- 1918), Tillman reigned as the prototypical Southern Redneck and was censured for fighting with another senator. He pushed for a larger U.S. Navy, railroad regulation, campaign finance reform, and limited immigration. At the same time, he gave speech after speech denigrating "the negro." His most infamous quote was, "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 the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him."

Yes, Tillman was a racist, but so were most of his fellow South Carolinians. He represented an era, a historical period that should not be purged but remembered so we don't repeat it.

If Tillman's statue (erected in 1940) is razed, then the "revisionist insurgents" will surely move to the other personages on the statehouse grounds: Wade Hampton III, James F. Byrnes, Solomon Blatt, and Edgar A. Brown.

Wade Hampton III, also a governor and senator, was one of the wealthiest men in the U.S. and owned more slaves than any Southern planter prior to the Civil War. And he led a bloody "revolution" to overthrow the Black Republican legislature in 1876. Another racist who should be wiped from the history books?

James F. Byrnes was S.C. governor, U.S. senator, Supreme Court justice, and U.S. secretary of state. As governor, he did all in his authority to continue the state's "separate but equal" system of public schools. When the NAACP sued the State of South Carolina and the Clarendon County Schools over segregation, he used his influence with the U.S. Supreme Court to have the suit shifted to Kansas, which led to the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Byrnes never supported the decision. Another racist who impeded justice who should be erased from history?

Speaker of the House Solomon Blatt and Senator Edgar A. Brown were leaders of the Barnwell Ring that controlled the .S.C Legislature for most of the 20th century. They supported the Jim Crow laws, school segregation, and were political wheeler- dealers and influence peddlers. The two major state office buildings on the statehouse grounds are named for them. Two racist demagogues whose names should be stricken from our memory?

I think not. It is better for us to remind ourselves from whence we came. We can't change history, nor should we, but we should always examine our past very carefully. After all, our future is based on it.