In the wake of the passing of U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham a week ago, there emerged a debate about his legacy. President Donald Trump and many of Graham’s colleagues in Congress made glowing tributes. Meanwhile, many commentators condemned his 33-year record as a state legislator (1993-1995), U.S. representative (1995-2003), and especially as a U.S. senator (2003-2026).
The Howard University Institute for Advanced Study started examining Graham’s racial record in the wake of his death. Which led to a deeper study. As we considered the stakes of Graham’s death, we investigated the racial legacy of South Carolina’s “Class Two” Senate seat since the U.S. Senate first convened on March 4, 1789. We specifically studied the role of these South Carolina senators in the construction and reinforcement of anti-Black racism. We found that many of the most anti-Black racist policies and ideas in U.S. history came from the occupant of the seat Graham held for 23 years.
It is known that Graham succeeded Strom Thurmond, the chief defender of Jim Crow, in 2003. But we found some of the most racist senators in history also held this seat, including Pierce Butler, who introduced a proslavery clause in the U.S. Constitution; John C. Calhoun, who called slavery a “positive good” and chiefly defended slavery when the abolitionist movement rose in the 1830s; and Ben Tillman, the most notorious senatorial participant in, and defender of racist violence in the late 19th century.
We compiled a list of the most infamous occupiers of South Carolina’s Class Two Senate seat from 1789 until 2026. We provided a sampling of their racial record during their time in the U.S. Senate, or before or after they occupied this seat.
Pierce Butler
July 11, 1744 – Feb. 15, 1822
Born in Garryhundon, County Carlow, Ireland
U.S. senator (1789-1796)
During the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Pierce Butler proposed the Fugitive Slave Clause, which ordered that enslavers had the right to seize any enslaved or indentured person who escaped to another state.
Butler opposed the Three-Fifths Compromise, pushing instead for enslaved Black people to be fully counted toward political representation. His push would have significantly increased the political power of states with large populations of enslaved people. Butler insisted “that money was power; and that the States ought to have weight in the Govt. — in proportion to their wealth.”
Butler was a wealthy enslaver, owning “more than 1,000” people. His estate was valued at more than $1 million at the time of his death in 1822 ($28.6 million today).
John Hunter briefly served as South Carolina’s Class 2 senator between Dec. 8, 1796 and Nov. 26, 1798.
Charles Pinckney Jr.
Oct. 26, 1757 – Oct. 29, 1824
Born in Charles Town, Province of South Carolina, British America
U.S. senator (1798-1801)
As a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Charles Pinckney Jr. seconded James Wilson of Pennsylvania’s proposal for what became the Three-Fifths Compromise.
Along with fellow South Carolina delegate Pierce Butler, Pinckney proposed an amendment to the Constitution “to require fugitive slaves and servants to be delivered up like criminals,” which became the basis for Butler’s Fugitive Slave Clause.
During the debate on the extension of the Atlantic human trade (which the Constitution protected until at least 1808), Pinckney asserted, “South Carolina can never receive the plan [the Constitution] if it prohibits the slave trade.”
He enslaved more than 200 Black people across several slavery camps.
Thomas Sumter
Aug. 14, 1734 – June 1, 1832
Born near Charlottesville, Virginia
U.S. senator (1801-1810)
Thomas Sumter served as an officer in the Continental Army. He devised a scheme to incentivize White enlistment by offering enslaved Black people confiscated from loyalists as a bounty. White men who joined the Continental Army as colonels received three enslaved adults and one enslaved child, and White men who joined as privates received one enslaved adult. Sumter enlisted 773 White men under the scheme.
In 1803, Sumter was on the Senate committee that considered a House report that led to the “An Act to prevent the importation of certain persons into certain states.” The act upheld racist state laws that had been passed in response to the Haitian Revolution to prohibit the migration of Black people from the Caribbean.
At one point imprisoned for debt, Sumter eventually enriched himself with the labor of people he enslaved in his South Carolina slavery camps. Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, which the Confederate Army attacked on April 12, 1861, is named after Thomas Sumter. The attack triggered the Civil War.
There were three Class 2 senators between Thomas Sumter and John C. Calhoun: John Taylor (1810-1816), William Smith (1816-1823), and Robert Y. Hayne (1823-1832).
John C. Calhoun
March 18, 1782 – March 31, 1850
Born in Abbeville District, South Carolina
U.S. senator (1832-1843, 1845-1850)
John C. Calhoun was the Senate’s most vocal proponent of “states’ rights” to enslave and to expand slavery nationwide.
On Feb. 6, 1837, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Calhoun argued, “But let me not be understood as admitting, even by implication, that the existing relations between the two races in the slaveholding States is an evil:–far otherwise; I hold it to be a good, as it has thus far proved itself to be to both, and will continue to prove so if not disturbed by the fell spirit of abolition. I appeal to facts. Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually.”
Calhoun opposed the Wilmot Proviso’s failed attempt in 1848 to outlaw slavery in the territories taken from Mexico in the Mexican-American War. He warned the measure would result in Northern domination of the South and cause “political revolution, anarchy, civil war, and widespread disaster.” Calhoun struck similar tones in his last senatorial speech against the Compromise of 1850.
Calhoun’s filibustering strategy to defend enslaving interests would be deployed by segregationists like future Class 2 seat occupant Strom Thurmond to try to delay or defeat civil rights legislation.
Calhoun enslaved between 70 and 80 people at his Fort Hill slavery camp.
Six men held South Carolina’s Class 2 Senate seat between John C. Calhoun and James Chesnut Jr: Franklin H. Elmore (1850-1850), Robert W. Barnwell (1850-1850), Robert B. Rhett (1850-1852), William F. De Saussure (1852-1853), Josiah J. Evans (1853-1858), and Arthur P. Hayne (1858-1858).
James Chesnut Jr.
Jan. 18, 1815 – Feb. 1, 1885
Born in Camden, South Carolina
U.S. senator (1858-1860)
His father having large property holdings in land and people, Chesnut strongly defended slavery. A lawyer by trade, he looked upon secession as a last resort. But four days after Abraham Lincoln’s election as U.S. president, Chesnut became the first southern senator to resign from his seat. He returned to South Carolina and helped draft South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession, issued on December 20, 1860.
In January 1861, the Secession Convention elected Chesnut to the Confederate Provisional Congress. He sat on the committee that wrote the constitution for the Confederate States of America, adopted on March 11, 1861. “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed,” the Confederate constitution stated.
It was Chesnut who gave the order to fire on Fort Sumter in the early morning of April 12, 1861. A neglected figure among historians, his biographer called him the “man who started the Civil War.”
In 1862, Chesnut led South Carolina’s Military Department and impressed upon enslavers to provide enslaved Black people to build up the state’s coastal defenses. By the year’s end, he had taken up his post as an aide-de-camp to Confederate president Jefferson Davis in Richmond. He became a brigadier general in April 1864 and held that position until the Confederate surrender a year later.
Thomas J. Robertson (1868-1877) held South Carolina’s Class 2 Senate seat between James Chesnut Jr. and Matthew C. Butler.
Matthew C. Butler
March 8 1836 – April 14, 1909
Born near Greenville, South Carolina
U.S. senator (1877-1895)
On July 4, 1876, a Black militia paraded in the streets of Hamburg, South Carolina. The militia had been organized to protect the Black community from White terrorists. Two White men ordered the parading militia to make way in the road. Following an argument with the unit’s commander, Doc Adams, a formerly enslaved man, the White men sought local lawyer Matthew C. Butler’s services. Butler and at least 70 armed White supremacist “Red Shirts” returned to Hamburg on July 8. Butler demanded that the Black militiamen apologize to the White men and surrender their weapons. The White men then opened fire, eventually killing at least seven of the Black men. This terrorist attack is known as the Hamburg Massacre.
On Dec. 12, 1889, while in the U.S. Senate, Butler introduced the Butler Emigration Bill, “to provide for the emigration of persons of color from the Southern States.” Butler’s bill, which never left the Senate, called for $5 million in annual federal aid to pay for Black Southerners to leave the United States. It capped a century of bills and schemes from enslavers and former enslavers striving to mass deport free African Americans. The bill was reportedly “a piece of sarcasm,” to mock the political supporters of integration.
He was a member of the prominent Butler family in South Carolina. Butler lived after his parents’ deaths with his uncle Andrew Pickens Butler, a U.S. senator who enslaved 64 people by 1850 and ardently defended slavery in Congress. Matthew C. Butler himself is listed in census records as enslaving 13 people in 1860. He served as a Confederate general during the Civil War.
Ben Tillman
Aug. 11 1847 – July 3, 1918
Born near Trenton, South Carolina
U.S. senator (1895-1918)
In July 1876, Ben Tillman was among the Red Shirts organized by Matthew C. Butler to terrorize Hamburg’s Black militia. Tillman later proudly recalled that he and his fellow Red Shirts had decided “to seize the first opportunity that the negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the negroes a lesson … [by] having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many of them as was justifiable.”
In September 1876, two months after the Hamburg Massacre, Tillman led 50 Red Shirts to join over one thousand other terrorists in Ellenton, South Carolina. They murdered “at least thirty” Black militiamen. Two men from Tillman’s unit killed Black state Sen. Simon Coker.
As a poll worker in the 1876 election, Tillman “harassed Black voters as they arrived, declaring that he was manager of the poll and would notice if any Republican votes were cast.” His intimidation tactics were successful: only 2 out of 213 votes at Tillman’s poll went for his political opponents.
As governor of South Carolina, Tillman led the drive to effectively disenfranchise Black voters through the state’s 1895 constitution. He warned his fellow constitutional convention delegates, “[A]ll that is necessary to bring about chaos … is for a sufficient number of white men, actuated by hate, or ambition, or from any unpatriotic motive, to climb up and cut it loose, mobilize and register the negroes, lead them and give them a free vote and fair count under manhood suffrage.”
During a speech in the U.S. Senate in 1907, Tillman dismissed the right to a jury trial and condoned lynching Black men who were usually being falsely accused of rape. “I have three daughters, 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,” he said, “than 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.”
Tillman was born into a wealthy enslaving family and firmly believed that Black people were biologically inferior to White people.
There were four Class 2 senators between Ben Tillman and James F. Byrnes: Christie Benet (1918-1918), William P. Pollock (1918-1919), Nathaniel B. Dial (1919-1925), and Coleman L. Blease (1925-1931).
James F. Byrnes
May 2, 1882 – April 9, 1972
Born in Charleston, South Carolina
U.S. senator (1931-1941)
James F. Byrnes was a protege of Ben Tillman who served in the U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Senate, U.S. Supreme Court, and as the 49th U.S. Secretary of State. His influence in state and federal politics caused contemporaries to compare him to John C. Calhoun. An ally of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he supported New Deal legislation that excluded agricultural and domestic laborers, who were disproportionately Black.
In the Senate, Byrnes opposed federal anti-lynching legislation, repeating the lie that most lynching victims had raped or attacked White women. “The proponents of this bill want the United States Government to protect the savage criminal, but deem it unnecessary for the United States Government to protect the innocent girls of the Nation!” he said on the Senate floor. He engaged in a 30-day filibuster of the anti-lynching bill in 1938. After watching NAACP leader Walter White, a key advocate of the bill, leave the Senate gallery to confer with Democratic Senate majority leader Alben Barkley, Byrnes reportedly said, “Barkley can’t do anything without talking to that n***** first.” The NAACP opposed Byrnes’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1941, citing his racist record.
As South Carolina’s governor in the early 1950s, Byrnes led massive resistance to school desegregation. In his inaugural address, he said desegregation would “endanger the public school system in many states.”
There were four Class 2 senators between James F. Byrnes and Strom Thurmond: Alva M. Lumpkin (1941–1941), Roger C. Peace (1941-1941), Burnet R. Maybank (1941-1954), and Charles E. Daniel (1954–1954).
Strom Thurmond
Dec. 5, 1902 – June 26, 2003
Born in Edgefield, South Carolina
U.S. senator (1954-1956, 1956-2003)
Strom Thurmond was one of the Senate’s most notorious segregationists and opponents of civil rights. In 1948, he ran for U.S. president as a member of the short-lived States’ Rights Democratic Party (commonly known as the “Dixiecrats”) that opposed the national Democratic Party, particularly President Harry S. Truman’s civil rights measures, including desegregating the U.S. military.
Thurmond signed and helped draft the “Southern Manifesto” in 1956. It charged the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregating public schools with “creating chaos and confusion” in the South, “destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races,” and planting “hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.”
Thurmond opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which aimed to ensure that Black Americans would no longer be treated as second-class citizens in public places or by employers. He claimed that the act was premised on “the basic idea that white southerners are not just second-class citizens, but, apparently, should have no rights whatsoever.”
Thurmond alleged that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 represented “rank discrimination” against Southern states. The law outlawed the racist policies and practices like literacy tests, which historically barred Black people from exercising their right to vote. Thurmond’s casting of antiracist desegregation rulings and laws as divisive and anti-White provided the ideological blueprint for the current Republican framing of antiracist measures as divisive and anti-White.
When he was 22, Thurmond had a daughter with a 16-year-old Black girl who worked as a maid for his parents. His daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, came forward publicly in 2003 and published “Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond” in 2005.
Lindsey Graham
July 9, 1955 – July 11, 2026
Born in Central, South Carolina
U.S. senator (2003-2026)
When segregationist Strom Thurmond died in 2003, Lindsey Graham, then a U.S. congressman, remembered Thurmond as a “public servant” who had a “desire to help everyone to the best of his ability.” Graham succeeded Thurmond in the Senate, where he, like Thurmond, hardly helped Black people, LGTBQ people, working class people, and other disadvantaged groups in the U.S. and abroad.
Graham opposed federal hate crimes legislation, cheered the Supreme Court’s gutting of voting rights and affirmative action, and denied the existence of racism in South Carolina and the United States.
Graham was one of the staunchest proponents of the U.S. supplying unlimited weaponry to Israel. Days after the Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Graham said on Fox News, “We’re in a religious war here. I am with Israel. Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place.” On July 4, 2024, as protests spread around the world against the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Graham expressed the racist idea of Palestinians as inherent terrorists. “The Palestinians in Gaza are the most radicalized population on the planet who are taught to hate Jews from birth,” he posted on X. “It will take years to fix this problem.” Graham was a reliable supporter of U.S. strikes and invasions of countries in the Global South.
Graham was a political opportunist. He flip-flopped his positions on the Confederate flag and on police brutality. During Senate hearings on policing reform in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, Graham acknowledged the need for a “systemic approach to problems that continue to happen over and over again” that cause “every black man in America” to believe “that getting stopped by the cops is a traumatic experience.” But then Graham refused to acknowledge “policing in American [is] systematically a racist enterprise.”
He flip-flopped on Donald Trump. When he ran for the Republican nomination in 2015, Graham called Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic” bigot. By the time of his death, Graham was one of Trump’s closest allies in the U.S. Senate.
Graham was from Pickens County, South Carolina, known as “the site of the last documented lynching in South Carolina in 1947.” Graham claimed that he convinced his parents to desegregate their cafe in the 1970s. He said the decision came “much later than it should have,” but that their White patrons’ disapproval of desegregation was, in his father’s words, “just the way it is.” In 2020, Graham referred to “the good old days of segregation,” which he later claimed had been “deep sarcasm.”
On Monday, July 13, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Graham’s younger sister, Darline Graham Nordone, to serve the remaining months of Graham’s term that ends in January. Nordone has been a regular fixture at Graham’s side during his political career.
Ella Wagner contributed to this research and article.
