Reflections on family, an ongoing project

This is a topic that, for potentially narcissistic reasons, has held my attention for several years. As I explored further into the annals of my family history, I discovered many interesting people. The more I read, the clearer it became that my legacy was in many ways the legacy of South Carolina. Governors, poor white farmers, slaveholders, fierce populists, soldiers, etc.

One day, I hope to properly research this and have a better constructed argument. For now, all I have are pieces of family history.

In this, my first post to this blog, I wanted to explore the life of my great-great-great grandfather, George Dionysius Tillman. My father's mother was a Tillman, and the great-granddaughter of George. They grew up on the coast of SC, right around where George was born as well [Monck's Corner, Clarks Hill]. Below is a picture of George.


In doing research, I have always found that he is better known as the older brother of Benjamin "Pitchfork" Tillman, a notorious character, 84th Governor of SC, House of Representatives, and also a founder of Clemson University and Winthrop. He is known for fiercely fighting the Reconstruction-era government and any subsequent federal interference with a Democratic military of sorts called the "Red Shirts." [Parallel to current Thai situation noted.] He was a farmer and idealized the agrarian way of life, speaking the language of the "common man" during his speeches. A quote to describe his other views is as follows: "I have three daughters," he once told Congress, "but so help me God, I had rather find either one of them killed by a tiger or a bear and gather up her bones and bury them, conscious that she had died in the purity of her maidenhood, than to have her crawl to me and tell me the horrid story that she had been robbed of the jewel of her womanhood by a black fiend." Photo below.


So, while reading an excerpt from Ben Tillman's biography, I came across this passage about George and my great-great-great-great grandfather, Ben Tillman, Sr. (From the book Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy, by Stephen Kantrowitz):

The violent careers of Ben Tillman's older brothers suggested yet another fissure among white men in this society — the tension between slaveholders' rhetoric of white male equality and their well-learned habit of violently asserting their authority against all challenges....In the 1850s, as Ben Tillman gained a formal education at the hands of country schoolmasters, he also learned from the dramas of white male violence that pervaded his society.

His father had left a mixed legacy to Tillman's older brothers, and they in turn instructed their youngest sibling in the rules governing violence among white men. The elder Benjamin Tillman, fond of drinking and gambling, was among a group of nine men convicted for "riot, assault & battery" by an Edgefield jury in 1841. He subsequently sought to cultivate the virtues of restraint, becoming a member of a local temperance society. But his "rehabilitation" would have been swift in any case: physical conflicts such as brawling and assault were common, and county juries included many men who had recently been disciplined by those same bodies....

Benjamin Tillman's sons understood from an early age that no slight or suggestion of insincerity would pass unanswered. Their obsession with "honor" — their refusal to let another person question their words, deeds, or appearances — took its urgency from the exigencies of slaveholding.

Benjamin Tillman feared that his teenage son George, having spent a year as an overseer, had learned the lessons of plantation management and white manhood too well. In an 1844 letter to prospective schoolmaster Iveson Brookes, Tillman noted that George might become involved in social "collisions." The teenager's "disposition is such not to submit to imposition or insult by any," he explained.

To "submit," of course, was to act like a slave, not an independent, honorable man, so the father was perhaps boasting as well as warning. But a young man had to learn how to handle his honor. A carefully nuanced negotiation, mediated by mutual acquaintances, might restore social equilibrium; this, and not a potentially deadly duel, was the goal of the "affair of honor." One way or another, however, white men had to maintain both individual images (and self-images) of indomitability and a collective solidarity that transcended their individual squabbles.

Although George became a lawyer and state legislator, his "disposition" eventually proved to be just as dangerous as his father had feared. In July 1856, at a gaming table in an Edgefield hotel, Tillman demanded his winnings on a bet of $10. A local white artisan, J. H. Christian, supported the dealer's contention that Tillman had bet only $5. Tillman called Christian "a damned liar." Christian replied in kind, whereupon Tillman pulled out a pistol and shot his gainsayer dead.

This was not a legitimate expression of white male mastery. As one witness opined, "[T]here was nothing said sufficient to provoke the murder, but if there was it was Tilman [sic] who gave it." The Edgefield grand jury indicted Tillman for murder, whereupon he fled, joining William Walker's campaign to create a slaveholding republic in Nicaragua.

It was two years before George returned to Edgefield to face justice, but neither his crime nor his flight rendered him anathema to polite society. Convicted of manslaughter, he served his two-year sentence under lenient conditions; he practiced law from within his jail cell, and before his term was over, he had been elected to the state senate. To be sure, he had murdered a respectable white mechanic — "an independent and an honest man," according to the Edgefield Advertiser — but his act was hardly unique.

The same hotel where he killed Christian had been the scene of another murder of one white man by another only six months before. Furthermore, Tillman's was a crime of passion. Had he committed a different sort of murder — had he, for instance, plotted to murder his wife and then blamed a slave for the crime, as a white Edgefield man had done earlier in 1856 — he might have earned the death sentence. George's crime, by contrast, was palliated by its close connection to qualities that his society valued in its leaders — self-assertion and the capacity for explosive violence. After Serving his sentence, he was welcomed into the highest levels of his community's civic life.

He returned just in time to save the family household from the ruin of improper governance. In his absence, John (the next oldest son) had run roughshod over the family's feelings and finances. Ben, the youngest, remembered John as a bully, "naturally tyrannical in his disposition," who "lorded over my mother and the other children to his heart's content." John also speculated in slaves, amassing a $20,000 debt that took his mother several years to pay off.

His depredations extended beyond the household: at least three times between 1854 and 1860, he was indicted for riot or assault. In 1858, found guilty in two separate cases, he served ten weeks in jail and was fined $80. Even a convicted miscreant could claim gentlemanly status; that year, John also initiated an ominous exchange of letters with a neighbor, asking him to clarify whether or not he had "characterized my conduct as inconsistent with that of a gentleman."

To Ben Tillman, looking back a half-century later, the contrast between George and John was far more stark than their comparably violent careers would suggest. Indeed, he offered George and John as models of legitimate and illegitimate authority, the one "a second father to us all," the other "wild and dissipated."

The final confrontation he remembered between them made the contrast clear. When George returned to Edgefield in 1858 and confronted John about his misdeeds, John drew a pistol. George, Ben recalled, "tore his shirt open and said `shoot, you dam' coward. You are afraid to shoot, for no brave man ever treats widows and orphans as you have done.' After waiting a minute with his bared bosom, he turned and walked up stairs, and John slunk off." John's undisciplined and irresponsible power — potentially the ruin of the Tillmans' fortunes — had been overcome by George's proper understanding of patriarchal responsibilities, which included sound financial practices, proper treatment of dependents, and (not least) physical courage.

Christian's loved ones might not have seen George's virtues in the same light, but to ten-year-old Ben, they had embodied proper white manhood. John, by contrast, followed his ruinous course to his own destruction. While under indictment for assault with intent to kill, John was himself murdered in May 1860.
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I read a preface in a book about Edgefield, SC in the nineteenth century that read “The Bible taught black and white Southerners long ago what historians are now asserting: that the family is a crucial determinant of human behavior.”

I am left to ponder what it means to be a loving, open-minded, and progressive white Southern Christian woman in the 21st century at peace with those who have come before me. Hopefully, more to come on this.

And, because I love this picture...

Septima Clark teaching reading, writing, voter registration, and social revolution at a "Citizenship School," in the South Carolina Sea Islands under the asupices of first Highlander and then SCLC (date of photo unknown). Standing in the background is Citizenship School teacher and dedicated organizer Bernice Robinson.

[This website has great photos to check out and is worth a look http://www.crmvet.org/images/imgeyes.htm. It is where the above photo came from.]

Article by Paul Loeb on Rosa Parks

I encourage all to read the following article on the "mythology of social change."

We learn much from how we present our heroes. A few years ago, on Martin Luther King. Day, I was interviewed on CNN. So was Rosa Parks, by phone from Los Angeles. "We're very honored to have her," said the host. "Rosa Parks was the woman who wouldn't go to the back of the bus. She wouldn't get up and give her seat in the white section to a white person. That set in motion the year - long bus boycott in Montgomery. It earned Rosa Parks the title of 'mother of the Civil Rights movement.'"
I was excited to hear Parks's voice and to be part of the same show. Then it occurred to me that the host's description --the story's standard rendition -- stripped the Montgomery boycott of all its context.



Before refusing to give up her bus seat, Parks had spent twelve years helping lead the local NAACP chapter, along with union activist E.D. Nixon, from the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, teachers from the local Negro college, and a variety of ordinary members of Montgomery's African American community. The summer before, Parks had attended a ten - day training session at Tennessee's labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she'd met an older generation of civil rights activists and discussed the recent Supreme Court decision banning "separate - but - equal" schools.


[With Martin Luther King, Jr and Myles Horton, among others at Highlander]

During this period of involvement and education, Parks had become familiar with previous challenges to segregation: Another Montgomery bus boycott, fifty years earlier, successfully eased some restrictions; a bus boycott in Baton Rouge won limited gains two years before Parks was arrested; and the previous spring, a young Montgomery woman had also refused to move to the back of the bus, causing the NAACP to consider a legal challenge until it turned out that she was unmarried and pregnant, and therefore a poor symbol for a campaign. In short, Parks didn't make a spur - of - the - moment decision.

Rosa Parks didn't single - handedly give birth to the civil rights efforts, but she was part of an existing movement for change, at a time when success was far from certain. This in no way diminishes the power and historical importance of her refusal to give up her seat. But it does remind us that this tremendously consequential act might never have taken place without all the humble and frustrating work that she and others did earlier on. And that her initial step of getting involved was just as courageous and critical as her choice on the bus that all of us have heard about.

People like Parks shape our models of social commitment. Yet the conventional retelling of her story creates a standard so impossible to meet, it may actually make it harder for us to get involved. This portrayal suggests that social activists come out of nowhere, to suddenly take dramatic stands. It implies that we act with the greatest impact when we act alone, or at least when we act alone initially. It reinforces a notion that anyone who takes a committed public stand, or at least an effective one, has to be a larger - than - life figure -- someone with more time, energy, courage, vision, or knowledge than any normal person could ever possess. This belief pervades our society, in part because the media tends not to represent historical change as the work of ordinary human beings, which it almost always is.

Once we enshrine our heroes on pedestals, it becomes hard for mere mortals to measure up in our eyes. However individuals speak out, we're tempted to dismiss their motives, knowledge, and tactics as insufficiently grand or heroic. We fault them for not being in command of every fact and figure, or being able to answer every question put to them. We fault ourselves as well, for not knowing every detail, or for harboring uncertainties and doubts. We find it hard to imagine that ordinary human beings with ordinary flaws might make a critical difference in worthy social causes.

Yet those who act have their own imperfections, and ample reasons to hold back. "I think it does us all a disservice," says a young African - American activist in Atlanta named Sonya Tinsley, "when people who work for social change are presented as saints -- so much more noble than the rest of us. We get a false sense that from the moment they were born they were called to act, never had doubts, were bathed in a circle of light. But I'm much more inspired learning how people succeeded despite their failings and uncertainties. It's a much less intimidating image. It makes me feel like I have a shot at changing things too."

Sonya had recently attended a talk given by one of Martin Luther King's Morehouse professors, in which he mentioned how much King had struggled when he first came to college, getting only a 'C', for example, in his first philosophy course. "I found that very inspiring, when I heard it," Sonya said, "given all that King achieved. It made me feel that just about anything was possible."

Our culture's misreading of the Rosa Parks story speaks to a more general collective amnesia, where we forget the examples that might most inspire our courage and conscience. Apart from obvious times of military conflict, most of us know next to nothing of the many battles ordinary men and women fought to preserve freedom, expand the sphere of democracy, and create a more just society. Of the abolitionist and civil rights movements, we at best recall a few key leaders -- and often misread their actual stories. We know even less about the turn - of - the - century populists who challenged entrenched economic interests and fought for a "cooperative commonwealth." Who these days can describe the union movements that ended 80_hour work weeks at near - starvation wages? Who knows the origin of the social security system?

How did the women's suffrage movement spread to hundreds of communities, and gather enough strength to prevail?

As memories of these events disappear, we lose the knowledge of mechanisms that grassroots social movements have used successfully in the past to shift public sentiment and challenge entrenched institutional power. Equally lost are the means by which their participants managed to keep on and eventually prevail in circumstances at least as harsh as those we face today. As novelist Milan Kundera writes, "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Think again about the different ways one can frame Rosa Parks's historic action. In the prevailing myth, Parks decides to act almost on a whim, in isolation. She's a virgin to politics, a holy innocent. The lesson seems to be that if any of us suddenly got the urge to do something equally heroic, that would be great. Of course most of us don't, so we wait our entire lives to find the ideal moment.

Parks's real story conveys a far more empowering moral. She begins with seemingly modest steps. She goes to a meeting, and then another. Hesitant at first, she gains confidence as she speaks out. She keeps on despite a profoundly uncertain context, as she and others act as best they can to challenge deeply entrenched injustices, with little certainty of results. Had she and others given up after her tenth or eleventh year of commitment, we might never have heard of Montgomery.

Parks's journey suggests that change is the product of deliberate, incremental action, whereby we join together to try to shape a better world. Sometimes our struggles will fail, as did many earlier efforts of Parks, her peers, and her predecessors. Other times they may bear modest fruits. And at times they will trigger a miraculous outpouring of courage and heart -- as happened with her arrest and all that followed. For only when we act despite all our uncertainties and doubts do we have the chance to shape history.
From: http://housingforall.org/real_rosa_parks.htm, by Paul Loeb



[With Septima Clark at Highlander]

Just for fun

Looking at a radish.

This is making me laugh so hard right now.

http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com/page/1

25 days until Christmas!!

The storm before the calm

It is official: CIEE has entered final project time, which means the past few days have been a whirlwind of meetings, planning trips across Isaan, making sure students/p'facs/staff are all on the same page, and that everyone has a plan. Whew!

For me, it is a bit anti-climatic right now. Allison is off to Rasi Salai w/ students (see water unit post) to work with their learning center, Sam is headed to Na Nong Bong to support Thai university students and our students while they lead a joint campaign in local schools against gold mining, and Lukas is off to Yasothorn with two students while they do consumer surveys in conjunction with Kutchum Hospital and the Green Farmer's Market.

WOW, that's a lot, right? Our 10 students, together for the whole semester, and now spread across Isaan with very different projects and schedules. Everyone is coming back on Dec 4 for a check-in, and then it's off again!

Now, you might be asking... how am I writing a blog post during all this craziness?

Well, I am actually working on two projects, but neither of them will get going until more like Dec 5. The projects I'll be working on are as follows:

Baw Kaew with two students: The villagers in the protest village located in Chaiyaphum province have been charged, among other things such as trespassing, with causing global warming. (See previous post about Baw Kaew for more info). The government claims that the villagers are causing global warming because when they plant things and move the soil, it releases gases into the air. Aside from being completely laughable, these charges carry a hefty fine. Apparently the government ripping out the forest and planting soil depleting eucalyptus trees is nothing compared to these farming protesters. Thus, the students are going to work on constructing a 3 pg summary of what is happening and research a legal argument in support of the Baw Kaew villagers.

Civil/Political Rights: The program did a series of human rights reports 2 years ago that looked at Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ESCR) and evaluated several communities in Isaan to see how these rights were being affected by government and global policy. These two UN Declarations, CP and ESC, have both been signed onto by Thailand. While the program has focused more on ESCR in the past, we are now looking at more CPR, especially in light of the contentious political situation in Thailand and the Emergency Decree which is still in effect in some places. Myself and three other students will research and compile info, write something, and put together a detailed pass-on for next semester. The goal is a series of CPR reports that can serve as a mechanism to unite several of the communities already working together as a part of P'Kovit's law internship program. This program means that law school grads are placed in communities and educate villagers about their legal rights.

SO, both of these projects are "B", meaning they are no one's primary projects ("A"). At the moment, I am spending my time reading UN Declarations, Thai Constitutions (there have been quite a lot), General Comments on CPR/ESCR, and previous Human Rights reports. Pretty exciting stuff!

And hopefully, in the next few days, I can post the 2010 CIEE epic talent show in which many odd things happened, along with the students' videos from Thai class. Maybe no one else will think they're funny... but I was weeping with laughter by the end. They did such a good job! :) But I will have to translate them, hahahaha, which is almost as funny.

Also just discovered Girl Talk... I know, I'm probably way behind the trends. But it is perfect work music, and a nice change from my usual iTunes mix.
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1zmLda/mashupbreakdown.com/

LAST, but not least.... LESS than a month until I get to see these fabulous people!!! [If you got left off... oops, I probably still love you. And we should try to take a pic together while I'm home, how about that?]