Normally I’m not a fan of rewriting history in the name of political correctness. But this is an exception I wouldn’t lose any sleep over. Tillman was NOT a good man.
give the money back to the estate
and then remove the name
Normally I’m not a fan of rewriting history in the name of political correctness.”
Well said....we should NEVER do that!
But....sometimes...as you note, we must, as conservatives striving to be in touch with history, revisit things and with grounded principles (enduring ones) make some determinations as to how we interact with history.
It’s important to note, as you say, that Tillman is perhaps not worth lionizing. It’s very important.
It’s also important to note that some great Southerners are very much worth lionizing.
Likewise with Yankees. I mean Northerners.
This is hard, and important work. But conservatives must do it, b/c it is important and if left to liberals only, they will eviscerate us and crap on whatever remains.
The problem I see here is that if you give the Left an inch, they’ll take a yard.
George Washington, after all, owned slaves. So did Thomas Jefferson. And then there’s Madison and Monroe, Jackson, Tyler, Polk and Taylor—all while they served as President.
And the following had owned slaves, but not while serving as president: Van Buren, W. H. Harrison, A. Johnson, and even US Grant, but he set his slave free in 1859.
Given this, can our history even go on? Are we to blot the Founding Fathers names away—at least those who owned slaves?
And seriously, how does one reconcile Jefferson, a slave owner, who, even as he owned, bought and sold slaves wrote these words?
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
I look at it this way: Jefferson’s words were prophetic, and laid the groundwork to the freeing of Africans in bondage in the United States. The words hold even more meaning when you think of it that way, because we as a nation actually applied them. Yes, it took many years and a bloody civil war, and 100 years of Jim Crow, but the words still echo through our Republic and bind us back to them to do the right thing.
The names should remain to let us know how far we have come.