Speaking from the Senate floor on February 26, 1900, he said:
"(W)e have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it."
Addressing the Senate on March 23, 1900, Tillman recalled his successful efforts to deny blacks of rights in South Carolina while governor five years earlier:
"(W)e had a constitutional convention convened which took the matter up calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disfranchising as many of them as we could under the 14th and 15th Amendments."
In that same March 1900 address, Tillman continued his history of violent threats:
"We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him."
The blatant immorality of those actions, let alone their illegality, was of no apparent relevance to Tillman, who closed that same address saying:
"I am not ashamed to have those facts go to the country."
This history left shame on Moredock, though, and for quite some time.
"During the 1980s and 1990s, I lived downtown, a few blocks from the Statehouse and would walk down there late at night many times to appreciate the silent majesty of the Statehouse and grounds. I was surrounded by a number of people in stone and bronze that I would have had great differences of opinion with, but only one that I considered absolutely evil. That was Tillman. In those days, I fantasized about backing a pickup truck onto the grounds there in the early hours of the morning and tossing a rope around his neck and yanking him off that pedestal. I would have gotten a great deal of satisfaction out of that, but I probably would have gone to jail."
Moredock's taken on other enemies in his career as journalist, researcher, and college instructor, with targets ranging from politicians to real-estate developers, as well as a public that continues to use a "let's ignore it and maybe it will go away" response to ever-present racism.
And there were periodic movements to address the discriminatory icons on state grounds, too, such as the 2000 removal of the Confederate flag from the State House (although it was only moved to a memorial right in front of the building).
Some even directly addressed the Tillman statue. In 2008 state Rep. Todd Rutherford (D-Richland) introduced a bill calling for its removal, even offering later compromise that the statue merely bear a plaque telling of Tillman's questionable actions instead of only praise.
The bill never made it out of committee, however. Its stagnation was credited to other state representatives' objection that any action would lead to calls for removal of other memorials from the capitol grounds.
The lack of current response is what prodded Moredock to purchase the advertisement. There's no established battle plan, though.
"This was not an organized effort. This was just a gesture to get people's attention and start the ball rolling."
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