Nikki Haley's flub when quizzed about cause of Civil War puts spotlight on her ties to alma mater Clemson - and claims that as trustee of the university she helped whitewash its long history of racism

Nikki Haley caused an uproar last month when she failed to mention slavery when asked about the cause of the Civil War.

After the ensuing outcry, the Republican presidential candidate acknowledged it was a mistake but rubbed salt in the wound when she tried to walk back the damage by saying she ‘had black friends growing up.’

Now Haley’s attempt to backtrack on her fumble has only led to more questions about her record on race and slavery – and the former South Carolina governor’s role in related long-simmering disputes at her alma mater Clemson University is a prominent focus.

Haley was the clear loser in the head-to-head match-up with Governor Ron DeSantis in third Republican presidential debate on Wednesday night, according to an exclusive DailyMail.com poll of viewers. 

A lifetime board trustee at Clemson, Haley, 51, opposed renaming a building at the university dedicated to one of its founders, Benjamin Tillman, an open advocate of lynching who was known as ‘Pitchfork Ben.’

Presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s attempt to backtrack on her fumble when asked about the cause of the Civil War  has only led to more questions about her record on race and slavery 

The former South Carolina governor’s role in  long-simmering disputes at her alma mater Clemson University is a prominent focus -  including the renaming of Tillman hall (above)

A lifetime board trustee at Clemson, Haley opposed renaming a building at the university dedicated to one of its founders, Benjamin Tillman, an open advocate of lynching who was known as ‘Pitchfork Ben'

And when she was running for governor in 2010, Haley described the Civil War as a conflict between two sides fighting for ‘tradition versus change,’ and after being elected defended Confederate History Month, which is only celebrated in South Carolina and three other states.

‘South Carolina is the home of racist terrorism,’ former state Representative Bakari Sellers told DailyMail.com.

‘I grew up in the same part of the state as Haley and there’s no way she can be so ignorant of South Carolina’s history or our country’s history to say what she did.’

Sellers, whose father was injured when police opened fire on civil rights protestors in 1968, described Haley as ‘an extraordinarily skillful politician, and viewed her remarks about the Civil War as less of a flub than a political calculation to appeal to Trump voters.

Haley's history with her alma mater is a large reason for the current scrutiny of her record on race.

Benjamin Ryan Tillman Jr. (August 11, 1847 - July 3, 1918), was the governor of South Carolina and U.S. senator.

Clemson University students held a sit-in 2016 which began  after a campus march to demand more diversity and improved race relations

Clemson, South Carolina’s second largest college, was established by Confederate diehards and built on the Fort Hill plantation previously owned by former Vice President Senator John Calhoun, an ardent believer in white supremacy who owned dozens of slaves.

Slavery was not merely a ‘necessary evil’ but a ‘positive good’, Calhoun argued in an 1837 speech. ‘The black race…came to us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and in the course of a few generations it has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions.’

The university’s primary founder was Calhoun’s son-in-law Thomas Green Clemson.

In his will, Clemson created a 13-member board to oversee the university, with seven lifetime trustees – who can’t be fired and pick their own successors and the other six appointed by the state legislature.

This ‘unique governance system’ was designed to provide ‘long-term stability,’ says a message on Clemson’s website from current board chair Kim Wilkerson.

The message doesn’t note the stability Clemson had in mind when he dreamed up a board with a majority of lifetime trustees was to protect against the ‘possible danger of the Negroes...at some time getting control of the state government,’ in the words of Tillman, one of the original lifetime trustees.

The Confederate flag flew on the Capitol grounds after South Carolina. Then governor Nikki Haley announced that she will could  for the Confederate flag to be removed on June 22, 2015  after nine people were shot and killed during a prayer meeting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston

Confederate flag supporters demonstrate on the north steps of the capitol building in April, 2000 in Columbia

‘We suggested the scheme to make it impossible for an averse legislature to shipwreck the college, or make it a school which negroes would be admitted,’ he said in a 1912 speech. ‘We were anxious to keep down the danger of negro domination of the school and at the same time to prevent the prostitution of the institution to ends not intended by its founder.’

The most famous building on the Clemson campus, a 3-story brick building with a clocktower, is named Tillman Hall in his honor

When protests erupted at Clemson demanding the name be changed then-Governor Haley argued against it – as did the board of trustees.

Nor did she back appeals that arose at the same time to remove a statue of Tillman from the Capitol grounds, which was erected in 1940 after its sponsors raised money by praising him for having ‘legally disenfranchised the negroes’ and making ‘democracy forever safe’ for white people.

‘What we need to do is start looking forward and not looking back,’ Haley said in explaining her opposition to rechristening Tillman Hall.

‘If you start changing the names, you’re gonna be changing the names of a lot of things because there’s a lot of things out there and so I personally don’t think that needs to happen.’

Since her term as governor ended in 2017, Haley, 50, has not publicly supported calls for Clemson to confront the past – even after she became a lifetime trustee at the university four years later.

That has angered African Americans and civil rights leaders, who believe her posture allows the university to whitewash its long history of racism.

The university’s current student body of more than 26,000 is about 80 percent white and only six percent black in a state where African Americans make up 26 percent of the population.

Clemson, South Carolina’s second largest college, was established by Confederate diehards and built on the Fort Hill plantation previously owned by former Vice President Senator John Calhoun, an ardent believer in white supremacy who owned dozens of slaves.

Haley’s comments about the causes of the Civil War were widely mocked.

‘I’d say slavery is sort of the obvious answer as opposed to about three paragraphs of bulls**t,’ former President Donald Trump said on January 6.

‘This is what Black South Carolinians have come to expect from Nikki Haley, and now the rest of the country is getting to see her for who she is,’ said Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison, a native of the state.

Haley’s presidential campaign did not reply to a request for comment.

The Clemson Agricultural College opened its doors in 1893 as a military school that only white males could attend.

Calhoun had died more than four decades earlier and Thomas Green Clemson bequeathed his father-in-law’s slave plantation to the college, which was built by conscripted black convicts and farmhands.

‘The institution of slavery is at all times good for the negro,’ Clemson, who moved to South Carolina from his hometown of Philadelphia when he was 33 and became a slaveholder and Confederate officer, once wrote. ‘No laborers in the world are so well off.’

Before assuming their duties, lifetime trustees were required to take a secret oath. The original wording isn’t known, but a more recent version was revealed during a 2009 lawsuit that unsuccessfully sought to abolish the lifetime positions.

When she was running for governor in 2010, Haley described the Civil War as a conflict between two sides fighting for ‘tradition versus change,’ and after being elected defended Confederate History Month, which is only celebrated in South Carolina and three other states

It required incoming lifetime trustees to ‘solemnly swear [to] uphold, protect and defend the will of Thomas Green Clemson’ – whose pro-slavery views are acknowledged in his biography on the university’s website, which nevertheless favorably spins the founder as a man ‘as complex as the times in which he lived.’

Hundreds of the slaves and conscripts were buried in unmarked graves in Woodland Cemetery, which was established on the campus in 1924 for white employees of Clemson and their immediate families.

University administrators kept their knowledge of that largely under wraps for more than a century. The scope of the situation only began to emerge after complaints from students about the poor conditions of a few unmarked graves led to excavations at Woodland during the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the murder of George Floyd.

Until shortly before then, Clemson football fans unknowingly parked their cars and tailgated on land where the bodies were buried.

Clemson Agricultural College was transformed into a civilian institution in 1955. Eight years later, shortly before changing its name to Clemson University, 21-year-old Harvey Gantt was admitted as the first black student.

Gantt was narrowly defeated in his 1990 race for a US Senate seat in North Carolina by the notoriously racist incumbent Jesse Helms, who "carried the torch of white supremacy" from Ben Tillman, wrote USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham.

Haley was named a lifetime trustee in 2021. She replaced David Wilkins, a former member of the South Carolina House of Representatives who resigned his seat when he was named US Ambassador to Canada by President George W. Bush. He had opposed changing the name of Tillman Hall in 2015 just as Haley did.

Clemson’s board of trustees isn't as retrograde as it once was and has become more diverse, but it remains strikingly conservative, especially by the standards of governing boards at most American universities.

Nine of the current 13 trustees are male and only one, who was appointed by the legislature, is black. Not a single African American has ever become a lifetime appointee.

‘South Carolina is deeply attached to its history and so is Clemson,’ said Donald McKale, a professor emeritus of history who taught at the university for 30 years. ‘There’s a white power structure that goes back generations, which is reflected in the board of trustees.’

The university’s primary founder was Thomas Green Clemson. In his will, Clemson created a 13-member board to oversee the university, with seven lifetime trustees – who can’t be fired and pick their own successors and the other six appointed by the state legislature.

‘The state legislature is extremely conservative and the views of the six trustees it picks aren’t much different from those of the lifetime appointees. The board still acts to protect the university from outside influences and sometimes remains a barrier to change.’

When he was South Carolina’s Republican Lieutenant Governor, trustee Bob Peeler supported taking the Confederate flag down from the Capitol dome following years of protests, but only as part of a compromise he helped craft that was approved in 2000.

The measure moved the flag to a spot next to a monument to the Confederacy on the State House grounds.

But it was only passed in combination with the Heritage Act, which barred future removal of monuments on public property or rechristening buildings or public areas named after historical figures, which Peeler as well as Wilkins fought for.

‘The Heritage Act will forever more protect all streets, monuments and public squares bearing the names of our Confederate leaders,’ Peeler, an executive with a waste management company, said several years earlier when the compromise was first drawn up.

The Confederate flag would ‘always be a symbol of immense pride’ and he was as proud of it as ever, he added.

The agreement was bitterly opposed by almost all black members of the state assembly and denounced by civil rights groups such as the NAACP, which maintained an economic boycott of South Carolina it imposed over the flag’s presence atop the Capitol Dome.

During her campaign for the presidential nomination, Haley has frequently told the story of how as governor she removed the Confederate flag from the State House grounds in Columbia fifteen years after it last flew at the Capitol Dome.

Clemson University Board of Trustees group portrait as of January 2024

Nikki R. Haley - One of the 13-member Clemson University Board of Trustees. Since her term as governor ended in 2017, Haley, 50, has not publicly supported calls for Clemson to confront the past – even after she became a lifetime trustee at the university four years later.

But Haley only acted after the murder of Pastor Clementa Pinckney, a state Senator, and eight other African Americans at a Charleston church in 2015, five years into her term as governor.

Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old killer, who embraced the Confederate flag, had hijacked it from the many state residents who viewed it as ‘a symbol of respect, integrity, and duty’, said Haley.

‘The flag will always be a part of the soil of South Carolina,’ Haley said at the time.

Much of the criticism of Haley on race relates to Clemson in general and ‘Pitchfork Ben’ Tillman in particular. She remained opposed to renaming Tillman Hall even after Roof’s killing spree and demonstrators spray painted the building with words its namesake once uttered: ‘Blacks must remain subordinate or be exterminated’.

Nor did the church massacre cause her to reconsider her opposition to removing Tillman’s statue from the Capitol grounds when she was governor or since, despite growing cries from the African American community and other quarters.

That includes a major campaign in 2020, when a bill was introduced in the legislature to take the statue down that was backed by a wide range of groups, including Historic Columbia, a nonprofit organization that says Tillman ‘represents the most obvious strain of white supremacy in our state’.

Supporters cited Tillman’s role in the collapse of South Carolina’s post-Civil War Reconstruction government in 1877 and his hand in the state’s new constitution that was unveiled 18 years later that created poll taxes and other barriers designed to keep blacks from voting and paved the way for more than another half century of legal racial segregation.

Harvey Bernard Gantt  was the first African-American student admitted to Clemson University after attending Iowa State University. He graduated with honors from Clemson in 1965, earning a Bachelor's degree in Architecture and later a Master of City Planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Tillman later happily reminisced about what he and his compatriots accomplished during his glory days disenfranchising and terrorizing blacks: ‘We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of It.’

‘Removing the statue from the Capitol grounds and changing the name of Tillman Hall should have been easy calls’ said Leidy Klotz, a former professor at Clemson who wrote a letter to university administrators in support of the latter demand. 

'Leaders should stand up for what they know is right.'

Clemson’s board of trustees finally came out in favor of renaming the building in 2020, the year before Haley was appointed.

However, thanks to passage of the Heritage Act two decades earlier, the board can’t do that without approval from the state legislature, and there is insufficient support to gain it.