In case you haven't heard, Clemson University is considering whether to take the name of violent white supremacist "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman off of its most iconic campus building.

Let's talk history. Tillman Hall was built in 1893, and it was originally known as either Main Building or Old Main. It wasn't renamed in Tillman's honor until 1946, seventeen years before an NAACP lawsuit forced Clemson to admit its first African-American student. As the Greenville News notes, the name change came "after a push from Tillman’s son, William, who was also a trustee, to name a building after his father because his legacy was being forgotten."

It's true, South Carolinians would do well to remember Tillman's legacy. But we shouldn't honor it, which is exactly what we're doing by keeping his name on a building at a public university.

The Greenville News, like a lot of other news outlets reporting on this topic, has said the controversy centers around Tillman's "racist, white supremacist rhetoric." I'm here to tell you that it wasn't just rhetoric.

It would be one thing if the building was named, say, Maurice Bessinger Hall. It's another thing entirely for it to be named after Tillman, a progenitor and perpetuator of American apartheid who led lynch mobs during Reconstruction and boasted about it until his dying day.

Every time I hear Ben Tillman's name — or see his larger-than-life statue on the Statehouse grounds — I am reminded of a haunting passage from The Palmetto State, Jack Bass and Scott Poole's indispensable history of South Carolina. It takes place a few months after the 1876 Hamburg Massacre, when Tillman and other members of white terrorist groups known as the Redshirts murdered black National Guardsmen in an attempt to suppress the black vote. Here is the passage, from page 59:

One of the Redshirt units present at Hamburg, the forty-man Sweetwater Sabre Company, was led by twenty-eight-year-old Benjamin Ryan Tillman. This future governor participated actively in the violence. As violence against blacks in the Edgefield District intensified, Tillman's unit was selected to execute black state legislator Simon Coker of Barnwell. On September 19, informed he had only a few minutes to live, Coker replied, "Here is my cotton house key; I wish you would please send it to my wife and tell her to have our cotton ginned and pay our landlord rent just as she can." Asked if there was anything else, Coker said he would like to pray and dropped to his knees in prayer.

Tillman described what happened next: After a few moments one of his men said, "You are too long … The order 'aim, fire,' was given with the negro still kneeling." In writing about this incident, Tillman continued, "It will appear a ruthless and cruel thing to those unacquainted with the environments … The struggle in which we were engaged meant more than life or death. It involved everything we held dear, Anglo-Saxon civilization included."

Tillman would brag about his role in the slaughter of African Americans for decades, even after he was elected governor in 1890. Using an all-too-familiar political formula, Tillman made populist appeals to lower-class and rural whites while stoking their fear of African Americans. Once in office, he labored against Reconstruction and worked to cement inequality along racial lines.

Gov. Tillman pushed through measures to centralize power in state government, allowing him to remove black officials in majority-black counties. The 1895 Constitution, Tillman's brainchild, outlawed interracial marriage and disenfranchised black voters through the introduction of poll taxes and literacy tests, effectively paving the way for Jim Crow.

Perhaps the only sign that Tillman softened his views was that, as governor, he sometimes used his power to prevent lynchings. On most matters of race, he remained unrepentant. Addressing the U.S. Senate in 1900, he said:

"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. I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores."

Tillman's legacy begins with ruthless bloodshed and ends with institutional racism. In keeping with his agrarian-populist campaign, he pushed the General Assembly to create Clemson University, a military and agricultural school that he worked to keep all-white as a lifetime board trustee. Again, from The Palmetto State (p. 64):

Although Governor John P. Richardson Jr. in 1889 signed the bill establishing Clemson, credit for Clemson went largely to Tillman and his movement, especially after Governor Tillman rejected federal funds from the Morrill Act that encouraged the building of agricultural colleges throughout the nation. Given the racial demographics of South Carolina, accepting the funds would have required that two-thirds of the money go to black students at Claflin College. Tillman expressed concern that black South Carolinians would forget who their friends were if educational funds came to them from outside sources.

hager.angie via Wikimedia Commons

In the end, Tillman Hall is only a name — just like the monument to Saddam Hussein that once stood in Baghdad's Firdos Square was only a statue. No, Twitter warriors, no one is arguing that a name on a building is actually oppressing people. But the symbolism cannot be ignored, especially when African Americans make up 28 percent of the state population but only 6 percent of the Clemson student body.

It's fitting that a bill up for consideration in the Statehouse this year would prohibit the naming of any state road, interchange, or bridge after a person who hasn’t been dead for at least 10 years. The logic, as I understand it, is that you don't want to name something after a person until you have a pretty good idea what his or her legacy will be.

The problem with Tillman Hall is that South Carolinians (and, presumably, Clemson's Board of Trustees) were well aware of Ben Tillman's legacy in 1946 when the building got its new name — probably far more aware than South Carolinians today. And yet the name passed.

A decision to drop Tillman's name would not be without precedent. Duke University used to have a dormitory named after North Carolina's own racist former governor, Charles B. Aycock. The school changed the dorm's name to East Residence Hall last year.

I realize that renaming Tillman Hall will take an act of the General Assembly. I realize it will set off a chain reaction of re-naming campaigns, and I welcome it. Winthrop University has its own Tillman Hall, so named in 1962 in the midst of the Civil Rights era, and two former students asked the school last year to change the building's name. It's also worth considering that the University of South Carolina has a women's dormitory named after J. Marion Sims, a man often called the father of modern gynecology, who made his groundbreaking discoveries by repeatedly conducting experimental procedures on enslaved women before the widespread advent of surgical anesthesia (although, unlike Tillman's reign, there is room for debate about the ethics of Sims' experiments).