The-Ave.US

A few evenings ago  I watched a TV news program with a white politician defending the right of southerners to have confederate flags on their license plates.  After all, the man said, it is time for reconciliation … this long after slavery every Southerner, black and white,  should take pride in being from the south.

As I have asked many times, how can any rational person choose to live in the confederate states?   This a special issue for me because my sister and her husband have chosen to retire there … I suppose because it does not bother them to live in a state where horrid education and the ninth highest poverty rate are the plain result of of low taxes.

This TV bit reminded me of the time Theodore Roosevelt invited his adviser Booker T. Washington, to dine at the White House.  Benjamin Tillman,  Democratic Senator  from South Carolina. remarked, “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.”

The event of  16 October 1901, was also commemorated by the poem,  NIGGERS IN THE WHITE HO– USE.  Is it a wonder that folks from South Carolina are still electing Repugnant Tea Partiers to the Senate?  Why, 114 years after this idiotic poem was written, is Congressman Trey Goudy still obsessed with getting the nigger out of the White House?

Frankly, I think little has changed in the Palmetto state despite the decision to move the Stars and Bars

(what I call the tilted cross) from the flag pole on top of the capitol to a monument in front of the capitol.  Even with the election of Tim Scott as US Senator, the memory of Senator Benjamin Tillman lives on in the most evil of the state’s traditions … lynching.  In April 1893, Mamie Baxter, a fourteen-year-old girl in Denmark, Barnwell County, alleged that an African American unknown to her had attempted to attack her.  About twenty black men were detained and paraded before her; she stated that Henry Williams looked something like the man she had seen. Placed on what passed for a trial by the mob that took him from the jail, Williams produced several respected white men to support his alibi. A majority of the mob voted against killing him, and Williams was returned to jail. More searches were made for Baxter’s attacker. A suspect in the case, John Peterson, appealed to Tillman for protection, fearing he would be lynched if taken to Denmark, and stating he could prove his innocence. Tillman sent Peterson to Denmark with a single guard. He was taken by the mob, put on “trial”, and after the mob found him guilty, was murdered. There was widespread outrage among both races across the country, both at the actions of the lynchers and at what Tillman had done. The governor said, in response, that he had assumed that, as the mob had been convinced by Williams’ defense, it would allow Peterson to prove his innocence as well. He thereafter ignored the issue of the Denmark lynching.

There were five lynchings in South Carolina during Tillman’s first term, and thirteen during his second.^[84] Tillman stated that he would  “willingly lead a mob in lynching a Negro who had committed an assault on a white woman”. Under criticism, he amended this to a willingness to lead the lynching of “a man of any color who assaults a virtuous woman of any color”—the adjective “virtuous” limiting the commitment, in Tillman’s eyes, to assaults on white women.