Milo Yiannopoulos is going to be speaking at Clemson University in South Carolina. I’m so sorry, South Carolina; you get to host a diffident dork who’ll be declaring that feminism is a cancer.
But at least he’ll be speaking in the right place, in Tillman Auditorium, which is named after Ben Tillman. This Ben Tillman.
Ben Tillman’s long and bloody public career began in 1876 at what would ultimately be called the Hamburg Massacre.
The then 29-year-old Tillman led the members of the Sweetwater Sabre Club, a.k.a. the Edgefield Redshits, against a local militia group, all black. Several African-American militia men were killed in a pitched battle with red-shirt-wearing white terrorists. After the militia surrendered, five of them were called out by name and executed. A few weeks later, when vigilantes captured a black state senator named Simon Coker, Tillman was present when two of his men executed the prisoner while he was on his knees praying.
Later, the terrorist leader Tillman explained his intentions on that fateful July 8 day: “It had been the settled purpose of the leading white men of Edgefield to seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the negroes a lesson; as it was generally believed that nothing but bloodshed and a good deal of it could answer the purpose of redeeming the state from Negro and carpetbag rule.” In a 1909 speech at a Red Shirt reunion in Anderson, Tillman reiterated this point, noting that he believed in “terrorizing the Negroes at the first opportunity by letting them provoke trouble and then having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many of them as was justifiable.”
He added, “That we have good government now is due entirely to the fact that Red Shirt men of 1876 did all and dared all that was necessary to rescue South Carolina from the rule of the alien, the traitor, and the semi-barbarous negroes.”
Wait…why does Clemson honor Tillman in the first place? Maybe you deserve Yiannopoulos, after all.
Striking how similar Tillman’s language is to that of modern Sovereign Citizen ‘Patriots’. & doubtless not an accident.
Is that a typo, or is it that on purpose in the original article? I am of course referring to the first sentence in the second paragraph of your quote: “Redshits”. I would probably be inclined to call them that too. We may never know…
Coincidentally, Edgefield is Strom Thurmond’s hometown.
Tillman Hall is probably named for him because he was later the governor of South Carolina, and then a senator. And yes, his involvement in the massacre helped further his political aspirations.
His language reminds me of a certain governor of Maine.
re 2:
yeah, always wondered about the motivation behind wearing red into battle. obviously to keep the wounds from staining the clothes. Always thought this of “RedCoats” of the Revolution, defneding the Imperium from the colonist who wanted to secede from the King. Odd how the Redcoat uniforms included a bold white X centered over their hearts on that red background. Like a perfect aiming spot.
orrrrrr
were these guys only given the aka redshirts after their white white whiteshirts became that color (for some reason).
[going off topic]
Hamburg Massacre sounds like McDonalds
slithey tove @ 5 — Actually the origin of the red coats in the British army was a purely economic one. It’s my understanding that when the modern British army was being outfitted back in the 17th century (perhaps a UK reader knows the specifics better than I) the people in charge wanted the uniforms to be blue or perhaps green, but the cheapest cloth available in the necessary quantities was dyed red. So, red it was and red it remained. There was also the advantage of high visibility on the smokey, chaotic battlefields of the time. A glimpse of red through a drifting pall of gunpowder smoke made it less likely to be shot by friendly fire. Until the American Revolution, when fighting was often conducted in ‘ungentlemanly’ ways — behind trees and fences and walls — high visibility was an asset, not a negative.
Incidentally,
Also,
They’re quite the populists.
Last night on the Moments of Political Madness thread I recommended Carol Anderson’s White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. It’s an extremely timely book.
@Silver Fox #6:
I’d agree with that. Infantry in the New Model Army wore red because the dye was cheap, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they’d already spent most of Parliament’s money on outfitting the cavalry first.
According to Ye Pfffft! of All Knowlege, “Tillman Hall […] was constructed in 1893 […] the same year that the college opened, but it was not until July 1946 when the building was named after Benjamin Tillman.” That article does not say why that name was chosen, but other sources note Tillman was apparently influential in establishing Clemson.
There are some truly abominable quotes attributed to Tillman, e.g.,
The Tillman story sounds like it came from D.W. Griffith or sure could have influenced him into telling his story of birth of a nation.
That the story seems to praise the violent anti-negro racism that was so common place at the time and the difficulty we are still having with racism I see no serious obstacles to thinking of this nation as a racist nation the evidence is all too easily found. This being but another example.
As is Trump. Let the illusions fall and let it be openly said.
uncle frogy
SC @7
Seriously? Bannon thinks that those three clowns are a threat to progressives? Republicans still do horribly when it comes to appealing to woman voters. Palin, Bachman, and Coulter are effectively token women who republicans support to give an illusion of diversity on their side.
A friend of mine ended up at Clemson — I wonder how she feels about this all. In grad school she was pretty apolotical.
Republicans should put up a memorial to Simon Coker, who was most likely a Republican office holder. I won’t hold my breath.
slithey tove & Silver Fox – I think you both misread kestral’s question.
It isn’t about the “Red”, it’s about the RedSHITS spelling in the first paragraph.
As in crimson poops.
Thank you multitool! Yes, that was exactly my point. :-)
Yes, that was what they called themselves. The Red Shirts were paramilitary groups of white conservatives who were common throughout the South (though with varying names) and fought for what was known as “Redemption“, the idea that power needed to be taken away from the freed blacks and their allies and returned to the correct people (i.e. themselves). Next time some libertarian turd tries to blame Jim Crow on the state, please remind him that it basically came about via armed coup against legitimately elected government.
Because he was governor at the time of Clemson’s founding and had persuaded Thomas Green Clemson (John C. Calhoun’s son-in-law) to donate his plantation and money to serve as a land grant agricultural college. This at least is a positive aspect of his legacy.
The question is whether Clemson should now change the name. But why they have a building named Tillman Hall is not itself in any way strange.
Oops, didn’t notice the misspelling in the original. Yeah, that’s a typo…
I must be specially abled to notice “shit” because I deal with it on a daily basis…
**lives on a farm**