Benjamin Ryan Tillman, Jr. (11 August 1847 – 3 July 1918) was a politician of the Democratic Party who was Governor of South Carolina from 1890 to 1894, and a United States Senator from 1895 until his death. A white supremacist who often spoke out against black people, Tillman led a paramilitary group of Red Shirts during South Carolina's violent 1876 election.
Born: August 11th, 1847
Died: July 3rd, 1918
Categories: 1910s deaths, People from South Carolina, Members of the United States Senate, State governors of the United States
Quotes: 9 sourced quotes total (includes 3 about)
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The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they learn their place again.
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 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 his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.
The whites have absolute control of the State government, and we intend at any and all hazards to retain it.
No South Carolinian, with the single exception of Calhoun, has ever made a profounder impression on his generation than Tillman.
Tillman was from South Carolina, and as I hear the story he was concerned that the corporations, Republican corporations, were favorable toward blacks and he felt that there was a need to regulate them.
How did we recover our liberty? By fraud and violence. We tried to overcome the thirty thousand majority by honest methods, which was a mathematical impossibility. After we had borne these indignities for eight years life became worthless under such conditions.
We reorganized the Democratic Party with one plank and only one plank, namely, that this is a white man's country and the white men must govern it.
They still honor Benjamin Tillman down here, which is very much like honoring a malignant tumor. A statue of Tillman, who was known as 'Pitchfork Ben', is on prominent display outside the statehouse. Tillman served as governor and U.S. senator in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A mortal enemy of black people, he bragged that he and his followers had disenfranchised 'as many as we could', and he publicly defended the murder of blacks.