Benjamin Tillman, the scion of a rich, slaveholding South Carolina family, was elected governor of the state in 1890. Driven by his fury over Black emancipation and enfranchisement after the Civil War, he dedicated his political career to spreading what he dubbed “the gospel of white supremacy according to Tillman.” At every opportunity, he stoked anti-Black violence, once stating that “nothing but bloodshed and a good deal of it could answer the purpose of redeeming the state from negro and carpetbag rule” and boasting of having “shot negroes and stuffed ballot boxes” as a leader in the Red Shirts, a white terrorist group that executed six African American freedmen in the 1876 Hamburg Massacre. His appeals to white South Carolinians’ racial resentments got him elected to the US Senate in 1894. Before heading to Congress, where he would serve for 23 years, Tillman essentially rewrote South Carolina’s Constitution, ending Reconstruction-era Black political influence and stripping Black folks of the right to vote.
“We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will,” Tillman declared in a 1900 speech. “I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores.”
South Carolina’s all-white legislature honored Tillman in 1940 by casting his likeness in bronze, erecting the eight-foot statue on the Capitol lawn, where it remains, a message of white power and racial terrorism sent straight from the state government. The inscription on the figure’s pedestal lauds him for his “life of service and achievement,” fondly remembering him as a “friend and leader of the common people [who] taught them their political power.”
Absent are any of Tillman’s most famous quotes, including his 1892 claim that he would “lead a mob in lynching a Negro” and his gubernatorial inauguration declaration that “whites have absolute control of the state government, and we intend at any and all hazards to retain it.” South Carolina officials seem to have taken pains to minimize his record of racist violence, suggesting they knew that legacy—and their celebration of it—was shameful. Like the more than 750 Confederate monuments that venerate those who fought to keep Black people enslaved, the Tillman statue proves the vigorous effort undertaken to whitewash American history of the legacy of anti-Black racial oppression and terrorism.