***Clemson's trustees
- Thread starter Larry_Williams
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dude, what? You assume the entire BOT is racist (and yes, not wanting to have a black man eat dinner with you would make you a racist)?? What is wrong with you
That's a little surprising. I hope they will still continue to study Calhoun's thought, as wrong as he was about many things. He was a major figure in America's history, and I think Clemson should maintain some acknowledgement of its connection to him. They can always contextualize it by also acknowledging that many of his better known ideas were in defense of slavery.
I don't think it's some huge problem to change the names of things based on changing standards and mores. We should all also recognize when honoring certain people or things is a bigger problem for some people than its worth. That is just sensitivity. However, we also need to recognize that the fact of time changing people's standards and mores means naming anything after a person will always lead to some incongruence with people's views in the future. That's as much because of whatever wrong views that person held and wrong acts that person committed as it is because of changing priorities over time. Racial equality is a good priority, but regnant priorities won't always be eternally good by virtue of the same fact of change over time. For instance, while I hope we continue to emphasize racial equality, we might not always view race as the defining factor in national and individual lives, such that we need to raise a historical figure's rightness or wrongness on something to do with race (based on current standards) to the sole defining factor of their lives.
I don't think it's some huge problem to change the names of things based on changing standards and mores. We should all also recognize when honoring certain people or things is a bigger problem for some people than its worth. That is just sensitivity. However, we also need to recognize that the fact of time changing people's standards and mores means naming anything after a person will always lead to some incongruence with people's views in the future. That's as much because of whatever wrong views that person held and wrong acts that person committed as it is because of changing priorities over time. Racial equality is a good priority, but regnant priorities won't always be eternally good by virtue of the same fact of change over time. For instance, while I hope we continue to emphasize racial equality, we might not always view race as the defining factor in national and individual lives, such that we need to raise a historical figure's rightness or wrongness on something to do with race (based on current standards) to the sole defining factor of their lives.
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It's called "Fort Hill" and it's a museum. Like most plantation houses, you contextualize it within the history of what was going on back then, which includes slavery. Anyway, it's not called the "John C. Calhoun House."
You sir obviously don't know all of our BOT very well. Comments like that show ignorance and are just wrong
Abraham Lincoln's statue was defaced in London. Some people at UVa want Jefferson to be more or less canceled. It's not out of the realm of possibility. But it's not really inevitable, either. One thing's for sure, though, if popular history keeps going the way of the 1619 Project or the documentary The 13th, then just about everybody is going to be problematic in some way, but especially everybody until somewhere in the 70s.
I get you like to play devils advocate in all scenarios but what Clemson did today was a great thing. Theres no debate to that.
I think there is debate to erasing Calhoun. It's also a fact that there doesn't seem to be much of a bottom to this stuff for many activists.
It isn't just a building with his name on it. It includes papers and artifacts from his career and is a resource for research into a long era of US and SC history. What on earth should it be called?
neither Calhoun nor Tillman was just a slave owner
Do some research. There are big differences
Wow. Dont think unrealized that. Always called it the nursing building!
Thanks
Actually Thurmond apol
Actually Thurmond apologized for his previously racist stance in his later years. Look it up
Actually Thurmond apologized for his previously racist stance in his later years. Look it up
You might want to ask Bill Smith and several others Dick......I mean Richard. You're a dumbass
Wonder if Hopkins and Watson got wind of this and that is why they pushed for it now. They knew it was a good time to try to get it done.
Of course current events cannot be ignored.
Thurmond was also a Clemson grad and WWII Veteran. He had some redeeming qualities.
Ignoring your INCREDIBLY CLEVER takedown of my board name, how about some evidence?
15 years from now, people won't care that its no longer called Calhoun honors. And if you do still care, society has probably passed you by.
Regarding Strom, my father who was born in India was studying for his masters at Wayne St university in Detroit on a student visa In the early ‘70s. In order to pay the bills with my mom and sister, he worked cleaning tables at a local restaurant. He was caught working without a working visa and was set to be deported. Thankfully, my dad’s uncle who was living in SC and wore a turban, approached Thurmond about this. Strom attached an amendment to a senate bill that allowed for my dad to not be deported and stay in the country. This action towards an Indian/minority has never been forgotten by my dad.
I know for a fact that Thurmond was not supportive of segregation for his whole career. I'm not sure how much this piece speaks directly to that, but it's interesting with regard to his career, even while he was opposing integration: https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1166. Certainly, a complicated legacy.
STROM THURMOND: MODERATE ON RACE
Thurmond proved a wise choice as a presidential candidate. In a movement that was short on leaders of solid reputation, he brought a certain seriousness and legitimacy to the cause. But in terms of his political history, Thurmond was in many ways an odd fit with the other Dixiecrats. Although his subsequent political career has made him into the poster boy for the defense of white supremacy, Thurmond's gubernatorial politics and policies characterize him as a moderate. His 1946 gubernatorial campaign had been remarkably free of racist appeals. Compared to other southern governors elected during that politically schizophrenic year, Thurmond stood somewhere in the middle, halfway between Alabama populist James Folsom and Georgia racist Eugene Talmadge As governor he helped streamline government agencies, supported a minimum wage and maximum hour law, consistently urged abolition of the state's poll tax, advocated legislation to provide secret ballots in the general election, and championed the creation of a merit system for state government employment. In 1947, when a brutal lynching in upstate South Carolina shocked the nation, Thurmond quickly mobilized the state constabulary to apprehend the lynchers. Like other moderates in the 1940s and 1950s, Thurmond focused on modernization, undertaking an intense campaign to promote industrial development and economic growth in the state. Thurmond heartily believed that the South's racial dilemma would be solved through economic growth and development, not through federal interference.
Thurmond's assumption of the Dixiecrat mantle shocked South Carolina's small but active liberal community, which had great hopes when Thurmond was elected in 1946. In a letter to Thurmond, one African-American activist claimed he would have voted for Thurmond in the 1946 primary "were I not disfranchised" because "not once did you raise the race issue for political purposes." As late as October 1947, Thurmond remained a loyal Truman man. Thus, South Carolina liberals were shocked and disappointed when Thurmond moved to the front of the states' rights revolt in February 1948. State NAACP leader James Hinton criticized Thurmond's involvement as "a keen disappointment to the negroes of South Carolina." Up to that point, Hinton claimed, blacks felt that in Thurmond, "they had a Chief Executive, free from White Supremacy attitudes and expressions, and one who would hasten the day, when Negroes in South Carolina would enjoy 'EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY.'" South Carolina's tiny but active liberal community had come to expect better from its governor.
But even if his gubernatorial policies distinguished him from his fellow Dixiecrats, like his more conservative compatriots, Thurmond opposed all proposed federal civil rights legislation, which he considered unwarranted intervention and interference into the rights of states. In many ways, the South Carolinian personified the gendered components of the region's conservative states' rights political culture, making him particularly well suited to serve as point man in the states' rights crusade.
...
THURMOND WASN'T THE TYPE TO SAY "N*****"
With his moderate record, Thurmond's nomination mitigated, or at least complicated, outsiders' negative assessment of the southern party. In an editorial immediately following the Birmingham convention, the New York Times said the States' Right platform illustrated a lack of "good sense," but regarded Thurmond's nomination as politically astute. A columnist from the New York Star labeled Thurmond a "Dixie Paradox," who "embodies in one personality the Old South and the New." Both New York papers were impressed by Thurmond's record as governor: his opposition to the poll tax; his abhorrence of mob violence; his support of a minimum wage and maximum hour law; and his support for industrialization and for the removal of discriminatory regional freight rates.
The most colorful assessment of Thurmond's candidacy came from Baltimore editor and critic H. L. Mencken. The curmudgeonly Mencken considered Thurmond "the best of all the [presidential] candidates" but lamented that "all the worst morons in the South are for him." John Ed Pearce of the Louisville, Kentucky, Courier-Journal, however, was less enamored of the South Carolinian. He noted that Thurmond's racism differed from the more outspoken white supremacists in style but not in substance. "On the platform Mr. Thurmond and his fellow travelers shout of Americanism, our way of life, the right to choose one's associates, Communism, Reds. But they mean N*****. Mr. Thurmond, of course, never says the word; he's not the type."
Pearce was right: Thurmond was not the type, but many in the Alabama and Mississippi Dixiecrat camps were, and to Thurmond, at least, the difference was important. Thurmond constantly differentiated himself from the Mississippi and Alabama Dixiecrats. Thurmond and his advisors clearly distinguished between their brand of conservatism and what they referred to as "the reactionary and conservative background" of the Alabama and Mississippi Dixiecrats. Beyond style, though, Thurmond's pro-development philosophy and his belief that the problem of the color line was at heart an economic problem differentiated him from the Mississippi and Alabama Dixiecrats who were tied to traditional Black Belt and industrial interests that did not pursue economic expansion and who were, at best, ambivalent about racial violence."
This speaks a little more to his change later in life:
https://www.greenvilleonline.com/st...mond-spent-lifetime-public-service/721586002/
"Changing parties
His disenchantment with the Democratic Party was complete. Thurmond bolted from the party in 1964, throwing his support to Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater in his campaign to defeat Johnson. He went to work building the party in South Carolina.
"When he switched, it just made all the difference in the world," said Fowler. "He made the Republican Party legitimate in South Carolina and by implication, the rest of the South."
The importance of the switch became clear in 1968 when Thurmond aligned himself with Richard Nixon and held Southern delegates for Nixon against a challenge by Alabama Gov. George Wallace. Thurmond had become a national political force. Fowler said Thurmond delivered several Southern states to Nixon.
Edgar, the historian, said Thurmond's break to the Republicans in 1964 and his success in 1968 "changed the course of American history" in building the Republican Party in the South. His work for Nixon "gave him an inside track that no other Southern senator had."
Thurmond's moves to keep Wallace bottled up and promote Nixon in the South signaled an important political shift. The last move away from open racial politicking, however, would come after the 1970 South Carolina race for governor between Republican U.S. Rep. Albert Watson and Democratic Lt. Gov. John West.
Watson ran against busing, and the campaign whipped racist flames across the state. West said Thurmond worked harder for Watson than Watson worked for himself. Watson lost, and Thurmond began charting a new course.
He hired a black staff member in 1971, and he began working to change his image as a racist. He began broadening his legendary work for constituents to include black South Carolinians.
Modjeska Simpkins, a longtime advocate for civil rights in South Carolina, told The News before her death that she believed Thurmond had genuinely changed. "Down there somewhere, there was something fundamentally all right" about the senator. She said she asked Thurmond for help, and "he has never refused to help, and he has helped in every case."
I.S. Leevy Johnson was one of the first blacks elected to the South Carolina General Assembly in the 1970s. He said Thurmond was "not forgiven for the obstacles he put in the path of African-Americans to exercise the rights and privileges taken for granted by others." But he said Thurmond worked to address black concerns and was a strong supporter of black colleges.
Another black political pioneer, state Sen. Kay Patterson, said Thurmond's early record on race is indefensible. But Patterson said he believes Thurmond had "a change of heart on the road to Damascus, like Paul. He woke up and saw the light."
...
Sen. Edward Kennedy said an important part of Thurmond's Senate legacy is his work with him to reform the nation's criminal sentencing laws.
Kennedy said he and Thurmond fought mandatory sentencing laws as a solution to sentencing disparities by crafting guidelines in the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984. Kennedy said he and Thurmond "came to the issue from different perspectives, but we agreed on the goal of fair sentencing laws. It took several years of debates, but Sen. Thurmond and I stood together."
In your incessant crusade to be tolerant and woke you continue to prove that you are the biggest dumbass on this board and like most ultra liberals who rail against intolerance prove to be the MOST intolerant. Sad really. Whoever coined the phrase " I'd like to buy him first what he's worth and sell him for what he thinks he's worth " must have had you in mind. I'll let Camcgee's reply serve as mind. Thank you Csmcgee! BTW, Assheart, your beloved Joe Biden gave a very poignant eulogy at Thurmond' s funeral. Perhaps you can find it. I heard it. Dickweed.
Thank you Sir! Assheart will argue regardless. His hatred of anyone who doesn't share his liberal opinions is as bad as those whom he decries. Pathetic actually. See my reply below also. Again thank you
I don't think he hates people he disagrees with. He seems like a pretty decent dude. But he's deep in the partisan campaign weeds, and that unfortunately requires you to portray people on the other side as worse than they really are. Most campaign people are just trying to win and they're not true believers, but some of them really are.
I'll give you that and Iceheart if you can hear me I apologize for my venom…...but dang I am tired of uneducated opinions on this board and a lot are yours. Hated was too strong, but you seem incapable of ever considering the other side even when confronted with facts. If you like, I will be happy to share what Biden said about Thurmond at his funeral. You might like it!
Honestly man, I don't understand how me asking you for evidence engendered this response?
+ Joe Biden is a ****ing disaster. I'm embarrassed for my party that this is the best we can do. I'd have preferred almost anyone else in the field (other than Bernie and Marianne) to Biden. To be clear though, hes a million times better than Donald trump.
Hatred? You might notice that only one of us has spent this entire thread throwing insults at the other.
Yes. I have zero tolerance for @Trading Tiger and @jmh9713 being ignorant bigots. Those aren't policy differences. Those are morals and values.
But if you look you'll see me engage in plenty of constructive conversations with folks with whom I disagree. I honestly believe Republicans want the same thing for our country and have many of the same values as I do. We obviously differ a great deal on the tactics to accomplish those great things though.
But that's a whole lot more than can be said for a large chunk of this board. People who believe that liberals want to destroy America. That liberals are evil and scheming and need to be shot or controlled or arrested. And there are tons of liberals who believe Republicans are those things too. Even some on this board. But that's not me man.
Sad.
