The Heritage of Dylann Roof
Ten years after the Charleston massacre, reverence for the Confederacy that Roof idolized is going strong.
by Elizabeth Robeson
Ten years after the Charleston massacre, reverence for the Confederacy that Roof idolized is going strong.
by Elizabeth Robeson
June 17, 2025
The Nation
The Confederate flag is seen waving behind the monument of the victims of the Confederation Army during the American Civil War in front of the State Congress building in Columbia, South Carolina, on June 19, 2015.
(Mladen Antonov / AFP via Getty Images)
At 4:44 pm on June 17, 2015, a young white man living in Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, put the final touches on a manifesto uploaded to a homemade website with the suggestive name, “The Last Rhodesian.”
A doodled coat of arms identified him with contemporary fascists, its centered othala surrounded by a swastika, a Lebensrune, and a Celtic cross. The signifying numerals 14 and 88 sat on either side; the initials “DSR” were centered below.
Within hours, Dylann Storm Roof, a 21-year-old lone wolf, would reignite the kind of terror carried out by Norwegian Anders Breivik and inspire copycat mass murder in Christchurch, Pittsburgh, Halle, and El Paso.
The manifesto traced Roof’s journey to a state of “racial awareness” and his conviction that only a race war could avert a genocide of Caucasians. His grievances were many but focused on Black Americans, whom he disparaged with the worn tropes of ignorance, criminality, and sexual deviance. It was time, he asserted, “to take drastic action.”
A photo gallery depicted him standing sullenly in iconic Carolina landscapes—a moss-strewn cypress swamp, a plantation’s slave quarters—bedecked in the iconography of white nationalism: the Confederate flag and the crests of dismantled apartheid African states. He brandished a Glock .45 pistol—bought with birthday money from his father—the equivalent of the old regimes’ rifles and shotguns.
“I have been blessed with a significant amount of German blood,” he wrote,” and a German surname.”
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(Mladen Antonov / AFP via Getty Images)
At 4:44 pm on June 17, 2015, a young white man living in Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, put the final touches on a manifesto uploaded to a homemade website with the suggestive name, “The Last Rhodesian.”
A doodled coat of arms identified him with contemporary fascists, its centered othala surrounded by a swastika, a Lebensrune, and a Celtic cross. The signifying numerals 14 and 88 sat on either side; the initials “DSR” were centered below.
Within hours, Dylann Storm Roof, a 21-year-old lone wolf, would reignite the kind of terror carried out by Norwegian Anders Breivik and inspire copycat mass murder in Christchurch, Pittsburgh, Halle, and El Paso.
The manifesto traced Roof’s journey to a state of “racial awareness” and his conviction that only a race war could avert a genocide of Caucasians. His grievances were many but focused on Black Americans, whom he disparaged with the worn tropes of ignorance, criminality, and sexual deviance. It was time, he asserted, “to take drastic action.”
A photo gallery depicted him standing sullenly in iconic Carolina landscapes—a moss-strewn cypress swamp, a plantation’s slave quarters—bedecked in the iconography of white nationalism: the Confederate flag and the crests of dismantled apartheid African states. He brandished a Glock .45 pistol—bought with birthday money from his father—the equivalent of the old regimes’ rifles and shotguns.
“I have been blessed with a significant amount of German blood,” he wrote,” and a German surname.”
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Later described as “so frail you could snap him like a twig,” Roof consciously crafted the persona of a fierce soldier in a war he meant to spark that very night.
By 9 pm, Roof had driven 115 miles to the coastal city of Charleston, been welcomed into a Bible study at the South’s most historic Black church, and squeezed his Glock’s trigger 77 times, leaving the shredded bodies of nine African Americans, including its pastor and an 87-year-old woman, on the floor of their fellowship hall.
In the aftermath of Roof’s nightmarish rampage, South Carolina governor and future presidential aspirant Nikki Haley teamed with US Senator Lindsey Graham to speak for the state’s Republicans, the ardent defenders of the Confederate battle flag, itself the creation of a South Carolinian. To contain the unfolding crisis and its threat to the state’s lucrative draw as an idyllic tourist and retirement mecca, Haley and Graham moved quickly to frame Roof as an outlier.
Appearing on The View the morning after the carnage, Graham stated emphatically: “Let’s talk about one thing it’s not. It’s not a window into the soul of South Carolina. It’s not who we are. It’s about this guy [who] has got tons of problems.” He described Roof as “sick and twisted.”
Haley called a press conference to say that she would ask the legislature to remove the Confederate banner from a 30-foot flagpole in front of the Capitol next to the Confederate monument, a soaring obelisk with a soldier standing aloft. Republicans had placed it there in 2000 as a cynical response to the NAACP’s demand that it be removed from the capitol dome, where it had flown since 1961 as a derisive reminder of slavery.
State Republicans had marketed their resistance to the “Take it Down” crusade with their own branded slogan of “Heritage Not Hate,” a retort that fueled even more agitation. As white supremacists predictably do, the “Heritage” crowd waged an ideological campaign grounded in revisionist fantasy. By attempting to sever the flag from the savage racism that birthed it, they risibly argued that it represented a benign tradition of ancestor veneration.
By the time Haley’s press conference began, photographs of Roof, the Rebel flag, and his Glock had circled the globe, cementing the (accurate) association of the “Stars and Bars” with deadly white terrorism. But another recurring image played to the governor’s advantage—that of Joey Meek, Roof’s friend and sometimes bunkmate, outside a faded yellow mobile home set in tangled brush. The subliminal projection of Roof as a “poor white” made it easier for Haley to deflect attention away from her more refined embrace of white supremacy and onto a contemptible scapegoat.
Astonishingly, Haley denounced Roof’s “sick and twisted” co-option of the flag, which she called “a symbol of respect, integrity, and duty.” In a flourished crescendo, she declared, “That is not hate, nor is it racism.”
A full week had not elapsed since the Charleston bloodletting and in the middle of Black Carolina’s raw grief, Nikki Haley—a first-generation American of Indian Sikh parentage—had the gall to praise the treasonous banner of white supremacy as a flag of honor.
Which brings us to the heritage of Dylann Roof.
Far from rootless, he is a 10th-generation South Carolinian descended from Johann Sebastian Rueff, a Lutheran Hessian. In the 1740s, Johann and two brothers sailed from Rotterdam to Philadelphia before settling on Cherokee land in the “Dutch Fork” of central South Carolina, where Dylann was born and raised. Enticed by land bounties, the Rueffs joined thousands of Germans to seed a buffer between the aggrieved Cherokee and the oligarchs ensconced in Charleston.
Family historian Michael K. Roof links the Rueffs to Teutonic nobility. The name, he writes, denotes “one versed in the Old Testament and teachings of Christ.” Dylann’s ancestor John Melchior Rueff chose the spelling “Roof,” to align more closely with its German pronunciation, but also to signify a lineage of piety: “My people come from the first caste of Europe; they reared their sons to become Ministers of the Gospel, and Teachers of the young. They shall continue in the top profession of mankind, that of Servant of God. My name shall be spelled, ‘Roof,’ like the housetop.”
In an ironic prophecy, he continued, “For my people shall be as a cover of a building and shall protect and instruct those within, that they will continue to be worthy of ‘the inheritance of the Lord.’”
The divination largely held true. Melchior’s father had built Zion, the Dutch Fork’s first, still-thriving Lutheran church. Across generations, Roofs have filled the ranks of ordained Lutheran ministers. They fought the British during the American Revolution. When the Civil War commenced, they formed a family regiment and fought for the war’s duration. (They were not slaveholders.) Others were elected sheriff. An obituary praised Dylann’s great-great grandfather as “a prominent businessmen interested in progress.” His late grandfather once presided over the Richland County bar.
By 9 pm, Roof had driven 115 miles to the coastal city of Charleston, been welcomed into a Bible study at the South’s most historic Black church, and squeezed his Glock’s trigger 77 times, leaving the shredded bodies of nine African Americans, including its pastor and an 87-year-old woman, on the floor of their fellowship hall.
In the aftermath of Roof’s nightmarish rampage, South Carolina governor and future presidential aspirant Nikki Haley teamed with US Senator Lindsey Graham to speak for the state’s Republicans, the ardent defenders of the Confederate battle flag, itself the creation of a South Carolinian. To contain the unfolding crisis and its threat to the state’s lucrative draw as an idyllic tourist and retirement mecca, Haley and Graham moved quickly to frame Roof as an outlier.
Appearing on The View the morning after the carnage, Graham stated emphatically: “Let’s talk about one thing it’s not. It’s not a window into the soul of South Carolina. It’s not who we are. It’s about this guy [who] has got tons of problems.” He described Roof as “sick and twisted.”
Haley called a press conference to say that she would ask the legislature to remove the Confederate banner from a 30-foot flagpole in front of the Capitol next to the Confederate monument, a soaring obelisk with a soldier standing aloft. Republicans had placed it there in 2000 as a cynical response to the NAACP’s demand that it be removed from the capitol dome, where it had flown since 1961 as a derisive reminder of slavery.
State Republicans had marketed their resistance to the “Take it Down” crusade with their own branded slogan of “Heritage Not Hate,” a retort that fueled even more agitation. As white supremacists predictably do, the “Heritage” crowd waged an ideological campaign grounded in revisionist fantasy. By attempting to sever the flag from the savage racism that birthed it, they risibly argued that it represented a benign tradition of ancestor veneration.
By the time Haley’s press conference began, photographs of Roof, the Rebel flag, and his Glock had circled the globe, cementing the (accurate) association of the “Stars and Bars” with deadly white terrorism. But another recurring image played to the governor’s advantage—that of Joey Meek, Roof’s friend and sometimes bunkmate, outside a faded yellow mobile home set in tangled brush. The subliminal projection of Roof as a “poor white” made it easier for Haley to deflect attention away from her more refined embrace of white supremacy and onto a contemptible scapegoat.
Astonishingly, Haley denounced Roof’s “sick and twisted” co-option of the flag, which she called “a symbol of respect, integrity, and duty.” In a flourished crescendo, she declared, “That is not hate, nor is it racism.”
A full week had not elapsed since the Charleston bloodletting and in the middle of Black Carolina’s raw grief, Nikki Haley—a first-generation American of Indian Sikh parentage—had the gall to praise the treasonous banner of white supremacy as a flag of honor.
Which brings us to the heritage of Dylann Roof.
Far from rootless, he is a 10th-generation South Carolinian descended from Johann Sebastian Rueff, a Lutheran Hessian. In the 1740s, Johann and two brothers sailed from Rotterdam to Philadelphia before settling on Cherokee land in the “Dutch Fork” of central South Carolina, where Dylann was born and raised. Enticed by land bounties, the Rueffs joined thousands of Germans to seed a buffer between the aggrieved Cherokee and the oligarchs ensconced in Charleston.
Family historian Michael K. Roof links the Rueffs to Teutonic nobility. The name, he writes, denotes “one versed in the Old Testament and teachings of Christ.” Dylann’s ancestor John Melchior Rueff chose the spelling “Roof,” to align more closely with its German pronunciation, but also to signify a lineage of piety: “My people come from the first caste of Europe; they reared their sons to become Ministers of the Gospel, and Teachers of the young. They shall continue in the top profession of mankind, that of Servant of God. My name shall be spelled, ‘Roof,’ like the housetop.”
In an ironic prophecy, he continued, “For my people shall be as a cover of a building and shall protect and instruct those within, that they will continue to be worthy of ‘the inheritance of the Lord.’”
The divination largely held true. Melchior’s father had built Zion, the Dutch Fork’s first, still-thriving Lutheran church. Across generations, Roofs have filled the ranks of ordained Lutheran ministers. They fought the British during the American Revolution. When the Civil War commenced, they formed a family regiment and fought for the war’s duration. (They were not slaveholders.) Others were elected sheriff. An obituary praised Dylann’s great-great grandfather as “a prominent businessmen interested in progress.” His late grandfather once presided over the Richland County bar.
The grave of Dylann Roof’s great-great-great grandfather.(Elizabeth Robeson)
Dylann Roof has a legitimate claim to the heritage that Nikki Haley upholds for its devotion to family and tradition, traits visibly entwined throughout his patrimony.
He is no outlier.
Cracks appeared immediately in Haley’s homage. Following her press conference, she quietly dispatched an armed detail to the statehouse grounds to guard the bronze statue of Benjamin Ryan “Pitchfork” Tillman, the vicious white supremacist politician whose glowering one-eyed visage seemed to intensify as July 9, the day of the flag’s final lowering, drew near.
The monument lauds Tillman as a “statesman,” a “patriot,” and his “life of service and achievement.” The monument reifies everything repugnant about South Carolina’s true heritage, built on a vicious “Negrophobia” and an insatiable appetite for inflicting human suffering. Tillman towers over all of South Carolina’s detestable 20th-century pols, experts in the proselytization of a virulent white supremacy. He modeled, incited, encouraged, and praised the basest behavior in his acolytes and protégés, which they performed without shame. His influence has yet to subside.
Tillman strode to power on his boasts of massacring Black Republicans during Reconstruction. From 1890 to 1918, he ruled South Carolina with an iron fist as governor and US senator. His legacy is enshrined in the 1895 Jim Crow Constitution, a document that consigned South Carolina’s Black majority and poor white people to a grueling fate captured in the title of Franz Fanon’s classic work, The Wretched of the Earth.
Tillman delighted in shocking his Senate colleagues with crude rants about Black people, whom he depicted as lascivious, lazy, and innately criminal. His obsessive diatribes warned of mongrelization, “race suicide,” and the threat of a Black rapist around every corner. The Congressional Record has preserved his bile for the ages, which no heritage spin can mitigate—pronouncements like “We must hunt these creatures down. If all of them were shot as ruthlessly as we shoot wild beasts, the country would be better off,” and “The Negro must remain subordinate or be exterminated.”
Tillman called lynching a “higher law” than the US Constitution; he took perverse pleasure in both the shudders of Senate patricians and roars on the Carolina stump to his bellowed signature line, “I would lead a mob to lynch the negro who ravishes a white woman!”
Dylann Roof’s manifesto echoed these themes.
Even more chilling: At the center of Roof’s plotted atrocity is an eerie reenactment of Tillman’s experience as a young accessory to the assassination of Simon Coker, a Black state senator, during the calamitous terror of September 1876 that brought down “Negro rule.”
A roving band of paramilitary Red Shirts kidnapped Coker from an Aiken County train depot as he traveled the state, exhorting Black men to remain vigilant for the fall election despite engulfing violence. Realizing that a death squad held him, Coker asked if he might pray. While he was on his knees, bullets from Tillman’s gun cut through his head. The last words Coker heard were the churlish rebukes of white men saying that he’d prayed long enough.
Tillman loved to taunt Senate Republicans who had abandoned the freedmen for Gilded Age gluttony. Rubbing their faces in the audacity of white supremacy, Tillman gleefully admitted what had long been denied: “We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.” If necessary, he swore, “we will do it again.”
Some 140 years later, Dylann Roof assassinated another Black state senator, Clementa C. Pinckney, who also served as Mother Emanuel’s pastor. Roof sat next to Pinckney, 41, for nearly an hour, then shot him first and repeatedly after the small Bible study stood for closing prayer. Roof shrieked racial epithets as he lacerated his victims, “You’re raping our women and taking over our country. Ya’ll want something to pray about? I’ll give you something to pray about!”
And yet, Lindsey Graham would surely huff if asked to distinguish between Ben Tillman and Dylann Roof as two “sick and twisted” men, just as most white Carolinians would agree with a reported opinion that Roof’s crime “isn’t connected to anything to do with our heritage.”
Illustrating this willful denial, the state senate has refused repeatedly to adopt a hate crimes statute, despite a white supremacist’s murder of their colleague a decade ago. South Carolina joins Wyoming, where Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man, was lynched in 1998, as the only other state without one.
A federal judge sentenced Roof to death in January 2017; several appeals of his sentence have been denied, the latest in April.
Roof has never wavered from a defiant unrepentance, a callousness he also displayed toward the agony of his family. (His mother suffered a heart attack while attending his murder trial. His father and grandfather have both since died.) When captured in the North Carolina mountains by the FBI, Roof readily confessed, saying, “What I did was so minuscule [compared] to what [Black people] are doing to white people everyday.”
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Throughout the tortuous court proceedings, Roof battled and eventually fired David I. Bruck, the renowned capital defense attorney, for insisting that he undergo psychiatric evaluation. In two closed-door hearings, Roof told the presiding judge, “I don’t want anybody to think that I did it because I have some kind of mental problem. I wanted to increase racial tension.”
In fact, expert examination of Roof did not yield evidence of insanity but a high IQ and diagnosis of mild-to-moderate autism, “debilitating social anxiety, and precursor symptoms of psychosis.” The report concluded, “Dylann pursued his preoccupation with racism with an autistic intensity. It pervaded all aspects of his life.”
To Kevin Sack, the New York Times reporter who covered the murder trial (and has just written a magisterial book about Mother Emanuel), Roof wrote in the spring of 2020, “I’m not the bad guy. I’d like to think I’m not even a bad person,” before returning to his obsession: “I am a member of a group targeted for genocide. What complicates things is that many of the people doing the targeting are also part of this group.”
By that logic, white anti-racists are the naïve and willing collaborators in their own destruction. But through ingesting the noxious brew of his twin legacies, it is Dylann Roof who is slated to die.
On today’s 10th anniversary of what Black Charlestonians refer to as “the tragedy,” South Carolina’s neo-Confederate leaders will don their best pained faces and utter words of condolence before returning to their cravenly cultish work of heritage promotion—work that has proceeded intensely since 2015. Their actions underscore how deeply impervious they remain to the full spectrum of trauma and degradation endured by Black Carolinians for 355 years.
In January, Governor Henry McMaster, whose great-great-grandfather defended the murderous outrages of the Reconstruction Klan in federal court, issued this clarion call: “We must protect and preserve our history and heritage. It is why we are who we are and why we are here. It is why we stay here and why others come here. It informs our strengths, purpose and duty.”
The heritage obsession fosters derangement. Lodged today in the state House Judiciary Committee is a bill to construct a monument to the state’s “African American Confederate Veterans.” The brainchild of Greenville Republican Bill Chumley, the legislation conjures kepi-headed Black soldiers riding into battle whooping the Rebel yell. No such group ever existed. Even more absurdly, the legislation decries the excision of these fantasy characters from school curricula, lamenting it as “completely unacceptable” and a “manipulation of facts” that redound to a “distorted perspective of our State and national history.”
Whether on a wartime plantation, digging trenches for the Confederate Army, or keeping the body and clothing of their soldier-slaveholder clean, “African American Confederate veterans” lived under the deadly coercion of oligarchic rule: They were slaves. To propose a monument to a bonded people that celebrates their purported efforts to remain enslaved is purely hateful.
Meanwhile, courses in AP African American history have been so curtailed in South Carolina as to be effectively banned.
In March, a group of 100 Sons of Confederate Veterans attended an annual fete at the Capitol. House Speaker Murrell Smith of Sumter rallied the gathering, urging them to remain steadfast to “the way we were raised.” South Carolinians, he said, are duty-bound to “preserve our heritage and to celebrate our heritage.”
The event featured state Representative Bill Taylor of Aiken, where Simon Coker and more than a hundred other Black men were massacred in 1876, and Senator Danny Verdin of Greenville, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as a white nationalist. They assured the Sons that their legislation to strengthen the Heritage Act would become law.
The controversial statute governs the disposition of monuments and the names of structures on public land. The Taylor-Verdin bill would extend its reach to private land, withhold funding from local governments that violate its provisions, and forbid the posting of contextual information as an educational tool.
The fortified provisions strike some as a subterfuge to restore the John C. Calhoun monument to Charleston’s Marion Square, a short walk from Mother Emanuel. The city council circumvented the Heritage Act when it removed the looming 115-foot structure in June 2020 from privately owned ground. Speculation is rife that additional language will be added to make its provisions retroactive, thus paving the way to overturn the city’s decision.
At a press conference to discuss the proposal, Representative Taylor decried “the war against all these monuments,” noting that a “small minority of the offended” has waged it, a remark that appeared intended for the legislature’s dwindling number of Democrats, most of whom are Black.
One of those is Wendell Gilliard, the senator from Charleston. He has described the Taylor-Verdin bill as “dangerous.” “We’re trying to correct the past,” he told a reporter with the Post and Courier. “We’re not trying to relive it or go back to it. What are you going to ask for next, for the Confederate flag to be put back on the state Capitol?”
Gilliard’s is not simply a rhetorical question, but a shrewd reading of the heritage of Dylann Roof, who personifies the still-beating heart of South Carolina’s intolerance for expressions of Black dignity and self-determination. It is unclear what Roof knew about Mother Emanuel—how, in 1817, a free man of color, boldly led his people, slave and free, out of the slaveholders’ congregations and into their own “African church.”
“At some level,” writes Kevin Sack, “[Roof’s] purpose had not been simply to assail whichever Black people he happened to find inside. Rather, he took aim at the audacity of Black resistance to white supremacy, and the still-unrealized promise that 50 million African Americans might live without fear that their skin tone could cost them their lives.”
Ten years later, that fear has not been quelled.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Elizabeth Robeson
Elizabeth Robeson is an independent historian with expertise in South Carolina's vigilante and state-sponsored violence.
Jeet Heer
The Escalating Political Violence Didn’t Come From Nowhere
Michele Goodwin
Elizabeth Robeson
The Cruel World According to Stephen Miller
Books & the Arts / David Klion
Throughout the tortuous court proceedings, Roof battled and eventually fired David I. Bruck, the renowned capital defense attorney, for insisting that he undergo psychiatric evaluation. In two closed-door hearings, Roof told the presiding judge, “I don’t want anybody to think that I did it because I have some kind of mental problem. I wanted to increase racial tension.”
In fact, expert examination of Roof did not yield evidence of insanity but a high IQ and diagnosis of mild-to-moderate autism, “debilitating social anxiety, and precursor symptoms of psychosis.” The report concluded, “Dylann pursued his preoccupation with racism with an autistic intensity. It pervaded all aspects of his life.”
To Kevin Sack, the New York Times reporter who covered the murder trial (and has just written a magisterial book about Mother Emanuel), Roof wrote in the spring of 2020, “I’m not the bad guy. I’d like to think I’m not even a bad person,” before returning to his obsession: “I am a member of a group targeted for genocide. What complicates things is that many of the people doing the targeting are also part of this group.”
By that logic, white anti-racists are the naïve and willing collaborators in their own destruction. But through ingesting the noxious brew of his twin legacies, it is Dylann Roof who is slated to die.
On today’s 10th anniversary of what Black Charlestonians refer to as “the tragedy,” South Carolina’s neo-Confederate leaders will don their best pained faces and utter words of condolence before returning to their cravenly cultish work of heritage promotion—work that has proceeded intensely since 2015. Their actions underscore how deeply impervious they remain to the full spectrum of trauma and degradation endured by Black Carolinians for 355 years.
In January, Governor Henry McMaster, whose great-great-grandfather defended the murderous outrages of the Reconstruction Klan in federal court, issued this clarion call: “We must protect and preserve our history and heritage. It is why we are who we are and why we are here. It is why we stay here and why others come here. It informs our strengths, purpose and duty.”
The heritage obsession fosters derangement. Lodged today in the state House Judiciary Committee is a bill to construct a monument to the state’s “African American Confederate Veterans.” The brainchild of Greenville Republican Bill Chumley, the legislation conjures kepi-headed Black soldiers riding into battle whooping the Rebel yell. No such group ever existed. Even more absurdly, the legislation decries the excision of these fantasy characters from school curricula, lamenting it as “completely unacceptable” and a “manipulation of facts” that redound to a “distorted perspective of our State and national history.”
Whether on a wartime plantation, digging trenches for the Confederate Army, or keeping the body and clothing of their soldier-slaveholder clean, “African American Confederate veterans” lived under the deadly coercion of oligarchic rule: They were slaves. To propose a monument to a bonded people that celebrates their purported efforts to remain enslaved is purely hateful.
Meanwhile, courses in AP African American history have been so curtailed in South Carolina as to be effectively banned.
In March, a group of 100 Sons of Confederate Veterans attended an annual fete at the Capitol. House Speaker Murrell Smith of Sumter rallied the gathering, urging them to remain steadfast to “the way we were raised.” South Carolinians, he said, are duty-bound to “preserve our heritage and to celebrate our heritage.”
The event featured state Representative Bill Taylor of Aiken, where Simon Coker and more than a hundred other Black men were massacred in 1876, and Senator Danny Verdin of Greenville, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as a white nationalist. They assured the Sons that their legislation to strengthen the Heritage Act would become law.
The controversial statute governs the disposition of monuments and the names of structures on public land. The Taylor-Verdin bill would extend its reach to private land, withhold funding from local governments that violate its provisions, and forbid the posting of contextual information as an educational tool.
The fortified provisions strike some as a subterfuge to restore the John C. Calhoun monument to Charleston’s Marion Square, a short walk from Mother Emanuel. The city council circumvented the Heritage Act when it removed the looming 115-foot structure in June 2020 from privately owned ground. Speculation is rife that additional language will be added to make its provisions retroactive, thus paving the way to overturn the city’s decision.
At a press conference to discuss the proposal, Representative Taylor decried “the war against all these monuments,” noting that a “small minority of the offended” has waged it, a remark that appeared intended for the legislature’s dwindling number of Democrats, most of whom are Black.
One of those is Wendell Gilliard, the senator from Charleston. He has described the Taylor-Verdin bill as “dangerous.” “We’re trying to correct the past,” he told a reporter with the Post and Courier. “We’re not trying to relive it or go back to it. What are you going to ask for next, for the Confederate flag to be put back on the state Capitol?”
Gilliard’s is not simply a rhetorical question, but a shrewd reading of the heritage of Dylann Roof, who personifies the still-beating heart of South Carolina’s intolerance for expressions of Black dignity and self-determination. It is unclear what Roof knew about Mother Emanuel—how, in 1817, a free man of color, boldly led his people, slave and free, out of the slaveholders’ congregations and into their own “African church.”
“At some level,” writes Kevin Sack, “[Roof’s] purpose had not been simply to assail whichever Black people he happened to find inside. Rather, he took aim at the audacity of Black resistance to white supremacy, and the still-unrealized promise that 50 million African Americans might live without fear that their skin tone could cost them their lives.”
Ten years later, that fear has not been quelled.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Elizabeth Robeson
Elizabeth Robeson is an independent historian with expertise in South Carolina's vigilante and state-sponsored violence.
