The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger [Booker T. Washington] will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they learn their place again. Benjamin Tillman, source
Tillman Hall's History
Tillman Hall was not named after Benjamin Tillman until 1946. The current administration and board of trustees have argued that the building's name must stand to protect our history. However, an observer would find it odd that the building was not named during Tillmans life and that other more deserving citizens contributed to Clemson around the same time period of it's name change.
Senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina in 1900 discussing the disenfranchisement of blacks
“We did not disfranchise the negroes until 1895. 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 as we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. We adopted the educational qualification as the only means left to us, and the negro is as contented and as prosperous and as well protected in South Carolina to-day as in any State of the Union south of the Potomac. He is not meddling with politics, for he found that the more he meddled with them the worse off he got. As to his rights - I will not discuss them now. 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, source
Tillman's Legacy
"The whites have absolute control of the State government, and we intend at any and all hazards to retain it."
"We deny, without regard to color, that 'all men are created equal'; it is not true now, and was not true when Jefferson wrote it."
"We made up our minds that the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the constitution were themselves null and void."
" If we had our say, the Negro could never vote. I believe that God made the white man out of better clay than that which the Negro was made from..."
Timeline
1893
Clemson's main hall is built and called Old Main
1918
Benjamin Tillman dies
1946
Old Main is renamed "Tillman Hall"
1963
The first African-American student to be admitted to Clemson University.
