As many of you have no doubt heard, the offspring of Ben Tillman are attempting to change the name of our beloved, iconic Old Main building so they can name it after him. Old Main has been Old Main since Clemson was founded and, frankly, the entire Clemson family should find this initiative deeply insulting.

We’re not saying that we don’t recognize or appreciate Tillman’s efforts in helping found Clemson—there’s a decent chance it wouldn’t be here without him.  It’s just that every other notable thing he did in his lifetime was truly despicable and inconsistent with the values and high moral character of Clemson College. Some of his major accomplishments include:

1.            The Hamburg massacre. We’re all familiar with this 1876 act of unsolicited violence. Tillman helped organize and lead a band of marauders to attack an unsuspecting garrison of African-American union militiamen. (Note: this was 11 years after actual hostilities in the Civil War had ended. Tillman missed out on the actual war because he “fell ill.”) After they were captured and disarmed, and in an act of supreme cowardice, Tillman’s crew executed five of them just for kicks. On the way back home, Tillman and his band of rabble stopped at one of their houses to have a nice big meal and pat each other on the back.

2.            In case you were wondering if he ever felt bad about any of the above, Tillman was still bragging about his involvement in these shameful acts many years later, referring to them as “the stirring events of 1876.” See also Speech to State Constitutional Convention, 1895 (“How did we recover our liberty? With fraud and violence.”).

3.            Shot at black people to keep them from voting; stuffed ballot boxes to ensure their votes didn’t matter. We struggle to think of something more un-democratic and un-American. Again, true to form, boasted about all of this for the rest of his miserable life.

4.            Helped write and implement South Carolina’s Jim Crow laws, thereby ensuring decades of subjugation and lost human potential for a large portion of our population. Hopefully one day this will come to an end and the first African-American graduate of Clemson can go on to do something awesome like, say, become the mayor of a major American city.

5.            Unfortunately got elected Governor, where he championed the most pressing causes of the day. These included supporting lynching, near-socialist economic policies, and Tillman’s personal favorite, disenfranchising African-Americans. Said a lot of disgusting and offensive things along the way with impressive regularity.

6.            Unfortunately got elected Senator so the rest of the country could hear how much of an idiot he was on a regular basis. In one famous example, Tillman objected to Teddy Roosevelt inviting Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House, saying this modest gesture of kindness would “necessitate our killing a thousand [African-Americans] in the South before they learn their place again.”

7.            Made sure his derelict family members came to power, thereby ensuring that other like-minded morons could continue to run our beloved state into the ground. We all remember that time that Tillman’s nephew shot and killed the founder of The State newspaper for telling everyone how awful he was. In the middle of downtown Columbia. At lunchtime. While he was Lieutenant Governor.

To sum it up, the Old Main building is fine just like it is. Perched atop the beautiful, sweeping green fields of Clemson, people have come to associate this old building with our cherished school. Ben Tillman, on the other hand, is a disgusting stain on the history of this state, and there’s no telling how much damage he’s done to the people in it. Let’s not make him a part of our story any more than we have to.