The Charleston Massacre, the Legacy of the Confederacy, and the Ongoing Hegemony of Modern White Supremacy in the United States--FURTHER UPDATES AND ANALYSIS

Jitterbugs
by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka

The imperfection of the world
is a burden, if you know it, think
about it, at all. Look up in the sky
wishing you were free, placed so terribly
in time, mind out among new stars, working
propositions, and not this planet where you
can’t go anywhere without an awareness of the hurt
the white man has put on the people. Any people. You
can't escape, there's no where to go. They have made
this star unsafe, and this age, primitive, though yr mind is somewhere else, your ass aint.

(Published in Negro Digest, April 1966)

"...And it still is News..." as the late/always Great LadyDay aka Billie Holiday once put it...


Meanwhile check...this...out...Long Live Black Folks Everywhere!...Yes!

THANK YOU SISTER BREE ANN NEWSOME. IF ONLY THERE WERE A MILLION MORE JUST LIKE YOU...

 
http://www.usatoday.com/…/south-carolina-confeder…/29383973/

Pair released on bond after removing Confederate flag at S.C. Capitol
by Tony Santaella, WLTX, and Doug Stanglin
USA TODAY
June 27, 2015



COLUMBIA, S.C. — A black female activist in a helmet and climbing gear scaled a flagpole in front of the South Carolina State Capitol Saturday morning and briefly removed a controversial Confederate battle flag.

The woman, who law enforcement identified as 30-year-old Bree Ann Byuarium Newsome, and a male companion were arrested and released later in the day after posting bond.

In a video of the incident, security officers can be heard yelling, "Ma'am come down off the pole."

Newsome can be heard saying, "You come against me in the name of hatred, repression, and violence. I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today."

After scaling the 30-foot pole and retrieving the flag, she and her companion were arrested by State Capitol police who waited for her at the bottom inside a small, wrought-iron fence.

As she was being led off in handcuffs, Newsome could be heard reciting the 23rd Psalm from the Bible.

The flag, which is protected by state law, was hoisted again about 45 minutes later. A pro-flag rally was previously planned at the site Saturday morning.

"We removed the flag today because we can't wait any longer. We can't continue like this another day," Newsome said in a statement issued around the time of her arrest. "It's time for a new chapter where we are sincere about dismantling white supremacy and building toward true racial justice and equality."

Sherri Iacobelli, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Public Safety, said that Newsome, and a companion, James Ian Tyson, 30, both from Charlotte, were charged with defacing monuments on state Capitol grounds. The misdemeanor charge carries a fine of up to $5,000 and a prison term of up to three years or both.

A judge gave them each a $3,000 bond and told them they were allowed to leave the state if they wished. Democratic state Rep. Todd Rutherford of Columbia, who also is attorney, will represent Newsome. Rutherford is minority leader of the state House of Representatives.

The activist group known as Ferguson Action released video of the incident on Twitter .

Activist Bree Newsome told police she was "prepared to be arrested" as she removed the Confederate flag flying in front of the South Carolina State House. Newsome scaled the 30-foot pole, retrieved the flag, and was promptly arrested. VPC

"The flag is gone," Ferguson Action said on Twitter, congratulating "local organizers" for the operation. It also tweeted a photo of the woman being taken away by police.

The flag has been at the center of a heated debate following the killing of nine black parishioners at a historic black church in Charleston on June 17.

Gov. Nikki Haley, a Republican, has called for the removal of the flag, and the state General Assembly has agreed to debate the issue next month.

Lonnie Randolph Jr., president of the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, said the two activists were apparently "well-intentioned," but he counseled that "(i)mpatience must always be tempered by purpose and prudence."

"This is not yet the time for civil disobedience, but a time for grieving over the tragedy in Charleston and a reflection on symbols and the hatred they fuel," he said in a statement. He also urged that opponents of the flag give the General Assembly the opportunity to address this issue in July "to at last remove this hurtful symbol from the people's State House."

Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old South Carolinian who has been charged with nine counts of murder in the attack on the Emanuel AME Church, was depicted online expressing white supremacist views and posing with the Confederate flag.

"It's time for a new chapter where we are sincere about dismantling white supremacy and building toward true racial justice and equality."
--Bree Newsome

“You come against me with hatred and oppression and bias,” she cried after she reached the top and unhooked the flag. “I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today.”
—Bree Newsome

"Supporters started an Indiegogo page dedicated to raising money to pay Newsome’s bail and hire a defense lawyer. Within nine hours, it had raised nearly $80,000."

TAKE NOTE:  THIS  IS WHAT IS KNOWN AS RESISTANCE!

https://twitter.com/EdgeofSports

http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-woman-removes-confederate-flag-20150627-story.html

 
'Bree' Newsome's arrest for removing South Carolina's Confederate flag ignites both sides
by Jenny Jarvie and Katie Shepherd
June 27, 2015
Los Angeles Times 

Brittany "Bree" Newsome of Charlotte, N.C., is taken into custody after she removed the Confederate battle flag from a monument in front of the South Carolina Statehouse in Columbia. (Bruce Smith / Associated Press)

A young black woman scaled a flagpole in front of the South Carolina Statehouse just after dawn Saturday and took down the Confederate battle flag that has become the focus of controversy since a gunman killed nine African Americans inside a historic Charleston church.

The woman, whom authorities identified as Brittany Ann Newsome, refused to descend until she had unhooked the flag.

“Ma'am, come down off the pole,” a police officer called when Newsome, who was wearing a helmet and climbing gear, was midway up the 30-foot flagpole.

“You come against me with hatred and oppression and bias,” she cried after she reached the top and unhooked the flag. “I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today.”

“I'm prepared to be arrested,” she told police as she neared the ground. A group of observers cheered.

She was handcuffed along with James Ian Tyson, 30, who allegedly accompanied her inside a prohibited area.

Newsome and Tyson were charged with defacing a monument, a misdemeanor, according to a statement from the South Carolina Department of Public Safety. They were taken to the Alvin S. Green Detention Center. If convicted, they could face fines of up to $5,000 and up to three years in prison.

Both were freed a few hours later after posting $300 bond.

The flag’s position is protected under state law, which legislators have agreed to revisit this summer. Officials put the flag back on the pole soon after Newsome brought it down.

Newsome, who goes by the nickname “Bree” and is from North Carolina, is identified on her Facebook page as a western organizer with Ignite NC, a nonprofit group challenging voting laws that it contends suppress voting and are discriminatory.

In a statement to the TV and radio news program “Democracy Now,” Newsome said she had decided with a group of “concerned citizens” to “do what the S.C. Legislature has thus far neglected to do.”

The social media response to Newsome’s arrest was swift and forceful.

Filmmaker Michael Moore offered to come to her aid. “I will pay her bail money or any legal fees she has. Please let her know this,” he said on Twitter, which lighted up with calls for police to release Newsome under the hashtag #FreeBree.

Comment:

  "Let us not forget that it was the Confederacy that TORE DOWN OUR AMERICAN FLAG and ripped our country apart. Before it was over, more than 600,000 Americans were dead. That anyone still defends this flag of TREASON is shocking." Posted at 7:44 PM June 27, 2015"

Supporters started an Indiegogo page dedicated to raising money to pay Newsome’s bail and hire a defense lawyer. Within nine hours, it had raised nearly $80,000.

The North Carolina chapter of the NAACP lauded Newsome’s protest as “an act of prayerful nonviolent civil disobedience.”

In a statement, Dr. William J. Barber II, the North Carolina NAACP president, likened her to Rosa Parks and urged that the Confederate flag be removed from state property.

The flag’s presence on the grounds of the Statehouse has been a subject of impassioned debate since the shooting attack at Emanuel AME Church on June 17, allegedly at the hands of a white gunman who posed for photos with the Confederate flag and wanted to ignite a race war.

Supporters defend the flag as a symbol of Southern history and culture. Critics decry it as a representation of racism and a reminder of slavery.

“The group took down the symbol of white supremacy that inspired the massacre, continued to fly at full mast in defiance of South Carolina’s grief, and flew in defiance of everyone working to actualize a more equitable Carolinian future,” Newsome said in her statement.

Later Saturday, arguments and scuffles broke out as scores of protesters descended on the Statehouse to applaud and protest Newsome’s feat.

“I’m standing for Bree,” said Bonita Jones, 28, a black activist from Columbia, as she stood below the flag at the base of the Confederate monument. “I’m standing for all the people who died in Charleston. I’m standing for all the people who can’t look after themselves.”

Frank Looper, 50, a white truck driver from Pickens County, drove 2 1/2 hours to the Statehouse to defend the flag after watching the news on CNN. He said he wanted to protect the legacy of his great-great-grandfather, who fought in the 3rd South Carolina Infantry Regiment, and another ancestor who rode in battle with Gen. Wade Hampton in the 2nd Regiment.

“We use the flag to honor our ancestors who died,” he said. “The way it was removed upset me. I don’t hate blacks. I’m not racist. Those poor people who died in Charleston, that’s terrible. … But then politics tried to make out that the flag pulled the trigger. It was a sick individual.”

Although the mood was tense, some demonstrators engaged opponents in friendly discussion on the symbolism of the flag, jobs and inequality.

“I'm just worried that the flag goes to the dust and is forgotten,” said James Green III, 65, a retired computer servicer who brought a large rebel flag to the Statehouse.

“Why not fight for it to be in a museum then?” asked Kimberly Conyers, 25, an insurance representative from Columbia.

Passing cars honked as protesters waved signs saying, “Take it down,” “I can’t believe” and “Evil prevails when good people do nothing!”

A row of pickup trucks and SUVs circled the block, flying Confederate flags on their trailer hitches.

“It's embarrassing to me as a Southerner,” said Tom Clements, 64, director of the environmental group Savannah River Site Watch. His great-great-grandfather fought in the Civil War, he says.

“It's part of my heritage, but I think [the flag] should come down,” he said. “It was all about slavery, and it's a symbol of divisiveness and white supremacy.”

katie.shepherd@latimes.com

Special correspondent Jarvie reported from Columbia and Times staff writer Shepherd from Los Angeles.
Copyright © 2015, Los Angeles Times

UPDATES

7:03 p.m.: This report has been revised throughout for additional details and for clarity.

4:09 p.m.: Updated the money raised on line for Newsome.

2:58 p.m.: Updated with the release of Newsome and Tyson.

2:18 p.m.: Updated with more interviews from protesters at the Statehouse grounds.

1:45 p.m.: Updated with NAACP statement.

1:00 p.m.: This post has been updated with protests at the Statehouse.

11:23 a.m.: This post has been updated with staff reporting.

This post was originally published at 4:44 a.m.

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/06/27/we-cant-wait-any-longer-activist-removes-confederate-flag-sc-statehouse
 
'We Can't Wait Any Longer': Activist Removes Confederate Flag from SC Statehouse

Saturday, June 27, 2015by Nadia Prupis
Common Dreams

Activist Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole in front of the South Carolina capitol on Saturday to remove the Confederate flag from Statehouse grounds. (Photo: bbond/Twitter)

An activist and youth organizer named Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole in front of the South Carolina capitol in Columbia early Saturday morning and pulled down the Confederate flag still flying on Statehouse grounds, telling media, "we can't wait any longer."

Newsome, 30, of Charlotte, was about halfway up the 30-foot flagpole when police demanded she climb back down, but she kept going until she was able to remove the flag from its perch. Upon returning to the ground, Newsome was arrested along with another activist, James Ian Dyson, and taken to the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center on misdemeanor charges of defacing a monument on state capitol grounds. News of their action spread quickly under the hashtag #FreeBree, sparking a petition to remove the flag and drop the charges against Newsome.

"We removed the flag today because we can't wait any longer," Newsome said in a written statement on Saturday. "We can't continue like this another day. It's time for a new chapter where we are sincere about dismantling white supremacy and building toward true racial justice and equality."

After Newsome's arrest, officials ordered the banner to be raised again around 8:30am—just in time for a pro-flag rally.

The action came just hours before funeral services continued for the third day for the victims of an attack on Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in which a gunman shot dead nine black men and women. Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, has been charged in the murders. The attack is being investigated as a hate crime and has sparked a renewed demand by activists to take down the Confederate flags flying on capitol grounds in numerous states.

Watch video of the action below:

"We could not sit by and watch the victims of the Charleston Massacre be laid to rest while the inspiration for their deaths continue to fly above their caskets," the group which organized the action said in a statement.

"The flag represents white supremacy," another activist, 25-year-old Tamika Lewis, told the Guardian on Saturday.  "The image alone is used to ignite fear and intimidation, especially among people of color and minorities. This was a long time coming."

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley this week called on the state legislature to vote in favor of removing the flag. But, as Lewis told the Guardian, "This was a Confederate symbol that ignited an individual to kill and murder innocent black people in a church, and it was still erected. The legislature was just taking too long to act morally and justly. They’re dragging their feet." 

http://act.colorofchange.org/sign/DropTheFlagDropTheCharges/

‪#‎FreeBree‬

Sign the Petition

Early Saturday morning, a multiracial group of Carolinians led by teachers and activists took down the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol grounds — within an hour the state had raised the hateful banner once again in time for an 11 A.M. white supremacist rally.

Bree Newsome, the Black woman who climbed the pole and cut down the flag, was arrested and taken into custody by Capitol Police. She should be promptly released from jail, any charges should be dropped, and the legislature should immediately vote to permanently remove the flag.

According to a statement from the activists they took down the flag because:

"We could not sit by and watch the victims of the Charleston Massacre be laid to rest while the inspiration for their deaths continue to fly above their caskets."

The confederate flag was born out of a government defending the enslavement of Black people and resurrected as an emblem for whites violently opposing racial integration. Any government that recognizes the flag is declaring that it cherishes a history of racial terror.

Taking down the flag is just one step but a symbolically meaningful one. Make no mistake about it, however, racism isn't just a flag or words it's baked into our economy and inequities in our democracy and criminal justice system.

In Bree's own words:

"It's time for a new chapter where we are sincere about dismantling white supremacy and building toward true racial justice and equality."

South Carolina officials have sided with white supremacists in choosing to restore the flag before a planned rally. The legislature must immediately vote to permanently remove the Confederate flag from the capitol and all state buildings.

ColorOfChange stands with Bree and the courageous activists who took down South Carolina's confederate flag. You can add a comment using the box provided.

UPDATE 10:01 AM: Bree Newsome was arrested along with a white ally, Jimmy Tyson. We will update this page with more information as it becomes available.

UPDATE 3:47 PM: Bail has been posted and Bree Newsome is scheduled to be released in the next few hours.

I demand that Bree Newsome is immediately released and any charges against her are dropped.

All,

RE: the Charleston Massacre and the vicious criminal hegemony and domination of White Supremacy in the United Hates

Forget about all the endless BS empty platitudes, misguided religious rhetoric, presidential celebrity grandstanding, absurd and ultimately self negating appeals to (of all of all things) "forgiveness", the torrential downpour of white media LIES, DISTORTIONS, AND DENIALS, the massive national indifference to and dismissal of black suffering by a substantial majority of American citizens, and the pervasive and utterly contemptible insincerity, dishonesty, and opportunism of politicians in general in the unrelenting mass murder of innocent black people across the country in the 21st century.

Just put all that aside for the moment and consider the following heinous data:

--According to the FBI's most recent statistics, blacks in 2013 were targeted in hate crimes more than all other races COMBINED.

Meanwhile consider the absolutely delusional responses to the calculated racist murder of nine people among a very large number of Americans generally, who out of hatred, indifference, fear, ignorance, and cynicism continue to pretend that these incidents are far from isolated or aberrant events and that much worse is definitely going to continue to happen VERY SOON…Stay tuned…And pass the word...

Kofi 

The Charleston Massacre, the Legacy of the Confederacy, and the Ongoing Hegemony of Modern White Supremacy in the United States--FURTHER UPDATES AND ANALYSIS

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31530-obama-we-are-not-cured-of-racism

Obama: "We Are Not Cured" of Racism

Tuesday, 23 June 2015
by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video Interview
 
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/6/23/its_not_just_a_matter_of

 

President Obama spoke openly about racism in the United States during a podcast with comedian Marc Maron. In the interview, recorded two days after the Charleston massacre, Obama said, "Racism, we are not cured of, clearly. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say 'n*****' in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t overnight completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior." We get a response from the Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP.

TRANSCRIPT:

AMY GOODMAN: We’re speaking on this day after the Republican governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, reversed her position and said that the Confederate battle flag must come down off the grounds of the South Carolina state Capitol, but she’s putting it to the Legislature first. I want to go back to President Obama’s interview with Marc Maron on his podcast, WTF.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives, you know, that casts a long shadow, and that’s still part of our DNA. That’s passed on. We’re not cured of it.

MARC MARON: Racism.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We are not cured of, clearly. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say "n*****" in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. We have—societies don’t overnight completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.

AMY GOODMAN: This clip is being played across the country, I dare say in many parts of the world, President Obama using the N-word. And I wanted to get first a response from Reverend Dr. William Barber, head of the state chapter of the NAACP in North Carolina, speaking to us from Raleigh. Your response?

REV. WILLIAM BARBER: Well, first of all, the context of what President Obama is saying is exactly right. He’s saying that to talk about race, we have to move away from just thinking it’s the extreme—i.e. just a flag, or i.e. just saying the N-word. We have to recognize, as I said earlier, what Lee Atwater explained about the Southern strategy, that Kevin Phillips designed in 1968. He said, "I know how to win the South, but we have to move away from talking about race openly. We can’t do like George Wallace or Goldwater. We have to find a way to talk about race without sounding like it." And he listed a number of things—tax cuts, forced busing, states’ rights—as code language for talking about race. Ronald Reagan used it when he started his campaign. He did not—he went—he started his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi. And he never said the N-word, but he used all of the code words. And by being in Philadelphia, where Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman were killed, it was clear.

And so, today, what the president is saying, you’ve got to look at structural, systemic racism. That’s what that young man meant when he said, "Somebody’s trying to take over and destroy my country." He had heard politicians and others saying the president is ruining the country; he’s a socialist; he’s a communist; Medicaid, healthcare reform, is destroying the country; if we raise the wages, it’s destroying the country. Only the willfully deaf, said one author that wrote a book called Racism Without Racists, cannot hear the racialized implications of that kind of rhetoric, in that kind of policy, which is why I agree with the president that we have to talk about race in terms of systemic racism and institutional racism. For instance, why is it that of the 24 states that are denying Medicaid expansion, six out of 10 African Americans live in those states? Why is it that we talk about entitlements in a way that suggests that it’s about them? The very programs that lifted up white Americans in the '40s and ’50s, after the ’60s, became an anathema in certain arenas. Why is it that we don't talk about the fact that our schools are resegregating faster now than they were in the 1970s?

We have to talk about wage disparity, both generally for all Americans, but then the disparate impact upon black people and brown people. And we’ve got to get black and brown and poor white people to understand that, in many ways, we are being played by an oligarchy that knows how to use these racialized code words to create wedge issues rather than to create the kind of moral transformative fusion of blacks, whites and browns that need to happen in this country, particularly in the South, to move us forward.

Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,100 public television and radio stations worldwide. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its "Pick of the Podcasts," along with NBC's Meet the Press.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/…/charleston-isnt-about-gun-…/

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Panopticon-Review/342702882479366

"While stories about guns generate clicks and sound-bytes, not every every shooting is a referendum on gun policy. Rather, the gun debate too often hijacks conversations, serving as a stand-in for the discussions we desperately need to be having — and actions we should be taking — about race, violence and inequality. That’s not to say we shouldn’t talk about guns, but when it is the only debate we are capable of having, that is a problem. Calling this incident out as racial terrorism, embedded in a deep, unsavory but persistently relevant history, is a  first step."
--Jennifer Carlson, "Charleston isn’t really about gun control. It’s about racial violence"--Washington Post

All,
 
President Obama has once again shown a profound political and moral cowardice and fear based EVASION OF REALITY in categorically refusing to talk publicly in explicit and unambiguous terms about the real reasons behind the vicious racial terrorism committed by the arch white supremacist ideologue and mass murderer Dylann Roof. By focusing only on gun control concerns (a legislative and political effort that has been a spectacular failure for his administration given the overpowering financial and political opposition to any and all forms of gun control proposals by the national gun lobby led by the NRA and the craven prostrate subservience to its madness by politicians in not only the Republican/Tea party but among many representatives in the Democratic Party as well) Obama has once again shamefully sought to cloak his outright fear of the rhetorical and political white backlash of the national racist rightwing forces in and out of government by making the utterly absurd and cowardly claim that the murders of the nine black members of Emanuel Church in Charleston, SC. last wednesday night was simply the result of a lack of proper gun control and that if this legislation had been in place the event would never have happened or at least could have been averted somehow.

Of course in this instance (and in all instances like this one) NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH. For the ugly fact is whether Obama or anyone else wants to face it or not is that the .45 handgun that Roof used in the murderous rampage was a gift from his father for his 21st birthday just two months ago and as such the firearm was not only legally registered in this particular case but that it wouldn't have made a difference in any event given the murderer's clearly stated determination to murder black people in Charleston regardless of the nature of the weapons chosen. Keep in mind that in many previous instances of racial terrorism in this country's evil history BOMBS and other weapons of mass destruction have more often been used in effectively engaging in the politics of mass murder. One could take the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing by Timothy McVeigh in April of 1995 and the infamous bombing of the 16th Street Baptist church that murdered four black girls, ages 11-14 in Montgomery, Alabama in September of 1963 as just two notorious examples in what have literally been thousands of bombings of black communities, churches, business centers, as well as the assasinations and attempted assassinations of black political and civic leaders over just the past 200 years in the U.S. alone. The point being that Roof and others like him were not--and I might ominously add here--WILL NOT be deterred by any gun control legislation either now or in the future given what the real motivation was and is in these racist and terrorist acts--which of course is NOT to say of course that national gun control is not desperately needed in a country as bloody and obsessed with guns and both homicide and suicide via gun violence as is the United States.

So given these overwhelming facts and the real historical, social, cultural, ideological, and political CONTEXT of these specific and particular FACTS in this heinous mass murder in South Carolina, what are we make of not only Obama's but far too many other public figures, black and white, COWARDLY REFUSAL to openly and honestly address and publically confront the REAL REASONS why nine innocent black human beings were slaughtered in their own church by an all too typical and extremely familiar white supremacist beast masquerading as a human being (if one knows anything about African American history at all).

Because unless and until the President as well as all the rest of us in this criminally violent and brazenly oppressive white supremacist society begin to face, confront, and actually deal with the horrific reality of who and what we are and have become in this monstrous veil of tears and mass destruction we call "our country" no amount of rhetorical evasion, social posturing, and cowardly denial of what actually exists and why is going to save us.

Kofi


Charleston isn’t really about gun control. It’s about racial violence

The debate about guns ignores the major crisis we're facing
 
by Jennifer Carlson
June 19, 2015
The Washington Post
 
It’s been just a day since a gunman burst into the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., killing nine. But already, the media is abuzz with its usual response to mass shootings. On the one hand, pro-gun proponents bemoaned “pistol-free zones” like churches, where guns aren’t allowed. If the victims had been armed, they argue, this violence could have been prevented. Gun control advocates, on the other hand, lamented that easy access to guns emboldened criminals to carry out “unthinkable” crimes. Even President Obama linked the shooting to gun violence, saying “at some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.” Now Wayne LaPierre has explicitly blamed the massacre on there being too few guns in the church that night.”

But turning this shooting into a referendum on the gun debate misses the point. It obscures a deeper, more uncomfortable conversation about race that can’t be resolved by passing gun laws or loosening gun restrictions. Too often, the gun debate serves as a powerful device for avoiding explicit challenges to racial violence, whether by adhering to a colorblind narrative of “good guys” and “bad guys” (at best) or playing into racial imagery (at worst). Instead of rehashing a hackneyed gun debate that has never taken us very far in national conversations on race and racism, we should be explicitly addressing the core issue at stake: racial violence.

To say it differently, this isn’t a story about guns. It’s a story about racial terrorism.

What we know so far is that suspect Dylann Roof targeted the Emanuel AME Church both a place of worship and a historical site of black empowerment. He sat quietly for an hour, then broke out into gunfire, reloading his gun five times. As his victims pleaded with him to stop, he refused.

“I have to do it,” he reportedly said. “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” He apparently wanted to spare at least one woman, so she could recount to others what happened in the church. If you substitute a noose for a gun, Roof’s actions are a shockingly unsurprising repetition of a long-standing history of Southern horrors; his desire to punish African Americans for the alleged rape of white women (“our women”), the fears of African Americans “taking over” government institutions, the insistence on using the public spectacle of white-on-black violence not just to victimize individuals but to warn and intimidate entire groups of Americans — all of these are textbook elements of the rampant racial terrorism marking the South (and, in some cases, the North) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Extralegal violence — whether in the form of rope, clubs, guns, fists, knives or other weapons — sustained this racial terrorism in Jim Crow America. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, 4,000 lynchings occurred from 1877 to 1950 in just 12 states. Race riots — such as the “Burning of Black Wall Street” in 1921 — decimated black wealth and destroyed black communities. Meanwhile, “racial cleanings,” as Elliot Jaspin explains in “Buried in Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleaning in America,“ compelled the forced expulsion of African Americans from towns across the South and the North. Each of these served to reinforce segregation and racial subordination.

Against this historical backdrop, the Charleston shooting is far from inexplicable, as South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said.

The FBI keeps a tally on “hate crimes:” Not only do racially motivated crimes constitute roughly half of hate crimes reported to police, but African Americans are by far the largest group of victims — 65 percent in 2012 among race-motivated hate crimes. While a majority of hate  crimes go unreported, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates around 200,000 to 300,000 happen every year, the vast majority of which are robberies, sexual assaults, aggravated assaults, simple assaults and murders.

But even as America continues to be haunted by a violent past, there is a key difference: In the past, the state was at best complicit and at worst actively involved. Today, the police chief of Charleston called the massacre as he saw it: a “hate crime” that “no community should have to experience.” Naming these acts as hate crimes is a first step in coming to terms with a violent past that continues to haunt us.

Like racial disparities in violence more generally, racial terrorism is not inevitable, but it can only begin to be addressed if we are willing to first forefront a conversation about the valuation of human life in the United States and how race continues to shape it. We need to have these conversations and use them to direct initiatives that can reduce violence across racial lines. While stories about guns generate clicks and sound-bytes, not every every shooting is a referendum on gun policy. Rather, the gun debate too often hijacks conversations, serving as a stand-in for the discussions we desperately need to be having — and actions we should be taking — about race, violence and inequality. That’s not to say we shouldn’t talk about guns, but when it is the only debate we are capable of having, that is a problem. Calling this incident out as racial terrorism, embedded in a deep, unsavory but persistently relevant history, is a first step.


Jennifer Carlson is author of Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline"


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/us/south-carolina-confederate-flag-dylann-roof.html?emc=edit_na_20150622&nlid=7352823&ref=cta&_r=0

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Panopticon-Review/342702882479366
 

All,

ONLY IN AMERICA (spelled as usual with three Ks):  Take an openly reactionary Republican governor and proud member of the Tea Party right who has always been openly supportive of the confederate flag--as recently as three days ago in fact (Gov. Nikki Haley) along with an equally reactionary and Tea Party endorsed black Republican politician (Senator Tim Scott) who was appointed as senator in 2013 after South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley named him to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jim DeMint [Scott ran in a special election in 2014 for the final two years of DeMint's second term] and who is and has always been openly reviled as a groveling "Uncle Tom" by a very substantial majority of black voters in South Carolina since his political career began over 20 years ago.  Then take these two notoriously rightwing politicians plus a large and equally shameless group of other Republican/Tea Party leaders and mix them vigorously in with a genuinely progressive/liberal group of other black and white South Carolina politicians and activists. Then add the threat of absolutely certain national demonstrations and economic boycotts that would have ensued if the arch conservative Governor and Senator plus other white state representatives and the general business community in the state had not finally insisted that the confederate flag be finally taken down from flying over the state house.

Finally add the certain political and economic pressure the Bush family dynasty undoubtedly put on Governor Haley, Senator Scott and other major South Carolina Republican political leaders to take down the flag because JEB BUSH fears (rightly as it turns out) that any refusal to do so at this point by his party would absolutely ensure that he would be defeated for the Presidency against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and you have the net result that more than even the hen horrific deaths of nine black human beings at the hands of a 21st century white supremacist who believed fervently in the confederate flag and all it has stood for throughout its notorious history and you have a political compromise regarding the removal of the confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse grounds that is deeply mired in the opportunism, evasion, hypocrisy, dishonesty, bad faith, and moral posturing that defines American politics at its core.

So now the confederate flag will finally be taken down some 150 years after the Civil war of 1861-1865 and the military defeat of the treasonous Confederacy (or a "mere" 53 years late if you count the official decision by the state of South Carolina to publicly demonstrate their intense allegiance to the doctrine and practice of White Supremacy  as well as determined racist opposition to Jim Crow segregation by hoisting the flag over the statehouse in 1962.

It would be 'nice' to think of course that these rancid politicians are finally doing what should have been done nearly two centuries ago or that they're now doing it because they simply believe in the end of Jim Crow/Apartheid policies, values, and behavior, but let's not be coy or delusional about the real reasons why they've chosen to do it  nowand just remind ourselves once again in our history that as Frederick Douglas in 1852 "without struggle there is no progress" and just leave it at that.  Because as any sane person who has ever been oppressed knows THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES/ A LUTA CONTINUA...

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY NEVER FORGET HOW OR WHY THESE NINE PRECIOUS BLACK LIVES WERE SNUFFED OUT OR WHO AND WHAT DID IT TO THEM AND THE REST OF US...

Kofi

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/us/south-carolina-confederate-flag-dylann-roof.html?emc=edit_na_20150622&nlid=7352823&ref=cta&_r=0

U.S.

Nikki Haley, South Carolina Governor, Calls for Removal of Confederate Battle Flag
by FRANCES ROBLES, RICHARD FAUSSET and MICHAEL BARBARO
JUNE 22, 2015
New York Times

Gov. Nikki Haley, center, embraced Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, surrounded by Democratic and Republican lawmakers at the State House on Monday. Credit Tim Dominick/The State, via Associated Press

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Gov. Nikki R. Haley called on Monday for South Carolina to do what just a week ago seemed politically impossible — remove the Confederate battle flag from its perch in front of the State House building here. She argued that a symbol long revered by many Southerners was for some, after the church massacre in Charleston, a “deeply offensive symbol of a brutally offensive past.”

“The events of this week call upon us to look at this in a different way,” said Ms. Haley, an Indian-American, who is the first member of an ethnic minority to serve as governor of the state as well as the first woman.

She spoke at an afternoon news conference, surrounded by Democratic and Republican lawmakers including both of the state’s United States senators, Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, an African-American. “Today we are here in a moment of unity in our state, without ill will, to say it’s time to move the flag from the capitol grounds,” she said.

It was a dramatic turnabout for Ms. Haley, a second-term Republican governor who over her five years in the job has displayed little interest in addressing the intensely divisive issue of the flag. But her new position demonstrated the powerful shock that last Wednesday’s killings at Emanuel A.M.E. Church have delivered to the political status quo, mobilizing leaders at the highest levels.

Gov. Nikki R. Haley, Republican of South Carolina, on Monday called for removal of a Confederate battle flag from the State Capitol grounds.

by Reuters on Publish Date June 22, 2015. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

On Monday, the White House announced that President Obama will travel to Charleston on Friday and deliver the eulogy for the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, the slain pastor of the Emanuel Church and a state senator. The political aftershocks from the shootings were also felt in Mississippi, where the House speaker, a Republican, unexpectedly declared in a statement Monday night that the Mississippi state flag, which includes the Confederate banner, “has become a point of offense that needs to be removed.”

Interviews suggested that Ms. Haley’s rapidly evolving position on the flag was shaped by several factors: the horror of seeing the unsmiling gunman posing with it in photos; her conversations with congregants at the church; intensifying pressure from South Carolina business leaders to remove a controversial vestige of the state’s past; and calls from leaders of her own party, including its leading presidential contenders, urging her to take it down once and for all.

The result on Monday was a moment of political and racial drama, and a signature moment for Ms. Haley, who blended the traditional values of the South — faith, family, empathy — into a powerful call for taking down the flag as a gesture of unity, healing and renewal.

She acknowledged that some South Carolinians respect and revere the flag not as a racist symbol but as “a way to honor ancestors.” However, she added, the flag, “while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state.”

The suspect in the Wednesday massacre, a 21-year-old itinerant landscaper named Dylann Roof, had posed for numerous photos with the Confederate battle flag. In the aftermath of the shootings, protesters on the streets and on social media demanded that the flag — which was unfurled over the State House in 1962, largely as a symbol of defiance of efforts to expand the civil rights of black Americans — finally be removed.

Divisive Symbolism of a Southern Flag
 
“Ms. Haley,” declared one prominent sign outside the church, where mourners had piled thousands of flowers. “Tear down that flag!”

The sentiment, over the years, was held by African-Americans and most liberal South Carolinians. The N.A.A.C.P. declared an “economic boycott” of the state in 1999 that remains in effect. But some white Southern voters consider the flag to be a symbol of the sacrifice of their Civil War ancestors, not of racism. As a rule, white Southerners tend to vote Republican, and over the years they have helped defeat Republicans who have tried to diminish the flag’s prominence.

In the days since the shooting, the Republican presidential hopefuls Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida have issued vague or equivocal statements, perhaps wary of losing support in the crucial South Carolina primary. (Mr. Bush, who ordered the removal of the flag from the Florida statehouse while governor, said he was confident that South Carolina would “do the right thing,” while Mr. Rubio said the state would “make the right choice for the people of South Carolina.”)

But inside the governor’s office, Ms. Haley’s phone line lit up with messages from national Republican officials offering words of condolence, among them Mr. Bush, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Mitt Romney, all current, likely or former candidates for president, and Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. In some cases, there was also something else: subtle encouragement to dispatch the flag.

Mr. Romney, a financial backer of Ms. Haley’s campaigns, was explicit, according to an adviser: The flag, he believed, had to come down, a message he delivered Saturday morning on Twitter to an extraordinary response. Thousands of people, including Mr. Obama, retweeted the message, many of them heralding his stand.Photo


Jennice Barr, 10, wrote on a board in front of Emanuel A.M.E. Church, where nine were killed. Credit Joe Raedle/Getty Images
 

Mr. Romney was taken aback by the reaction and told an aide he was glad he had spoken out. Ms. Haley, a rising star in the Republican Party, had her own political future to consider. The flag would inevitably complicate her selection as a cabinet member or even vice-presidential nominee, if she wanted either.

Over the weekend, Ms. Haley and her staff reached out to top officials like Representative James E. Clyburn, the ranking African-American member of Congress, sounding them out on the issue, and on Monday, she summoned officials to her office and told them of her decision: It was time for the Confederate flag to stop flying over the historic building’s grounds. Every leading South Carolina politician — stunned by the massacre, moved by the church’s demonstration of grace and fearful of the repercussions from inaction — agreed.

“If you want to credit anybody here, credit the families of the victims and the church members who displayed Christianity and love,” Mr. Graham said. “The politicians followed their moral authority.”

The repercussions from the church attack went beyond politics. Walmart said Monday that it would remove all Confederate battle flag merchandise from its stores.

Some opposition remains within the legislature. State Senator Lee Bright, a conservative lawmaker from Spartanburg, said it was unfortunate that the flag issue was being taken up in the midst of so much grief. He said supports the flag as a symbol of the state’s history.

The Confederate battle flag outside the State Capitol in Columbia, S.C., on Saturday. Credit Jason Miczek/Reuters
“There are those of us who have ancestors that fought and spilled blood on the side of the South when they were fighting for states’ rights, and we don’t want our ancestors relegated to the ash heaps of history,” he said. “Through the years, the heroes of the South have been slandered, maligned and misrepresented, and this is a further activity in that.”

However, a leader of the Sons of Confederate Veterans group in South Carolina, while signaling his disappointment in the governor’s recommendation, said the organization — which prominently features the battle flag at the State House on its website — said he expected his group’s members would go along with whatever decision was made.

“With the winds that started blowing last week, I figured it would just be a matter of time,” said Ken Thrasher, the lieutenant commander of the group’s South Carolina division. “Whatever the legislature decides to do, we will accept it graciously.”

Mr. Thrasher said he and others in his organization were “saddened, but we’re going to move forward.”

“We’re not a racist group,” he added.

Graphic

The Shootings in a Charleston Church

Where the attack happened, some statistics behind hate crimes, and maps of Charleston’s shifting population.

OPEN Graphic

Cornell William Brooks, president and chief executive of the national N.A.A.C.P., who hails from South Carolina, said Monday that the governor “had done what was needed. She, as a governor of a Southern state, has done a very Southern thing,” he said. “And here’s what I mean: The South is known for its hospitality, and what could be more hospitable than to be inclusive? Bringing that flag down is a symbol to the rest of the country. It’s a symbol that South Carolina stands with inclusiveness.”

The fate of the recommendation in the Republican-dominated General Assembly is far from certain. Some senior Republicans in the state were concerned about the scope of the eventual bill. And others were frustrated that Mr. Scott, the only black Republican in the United States Senate and a popular figure among conservatives, did not speak at the news conference.

The governor made her announcement nearly 15 years after a delicate compromise took effect in South Carolina: The American and state flags remained above the State House, but the Confederate battle flag was moved to a position in front of the building. In a reflection of the sensitivity of the debate, the agreement was detailed — it called, for instance, for the battle flag to be flown 30 feet in the air from a flagpole set 10 feet from the base of the Confederate Soldier Monument — and it sharply restricted when war memorials across the state could be “relocated, removed, disturbed or altered.”

The agreement also required that any changes be subject to two-thirds votes in each chamber of the legislature.

On Monday, a number of state legislators, including some Republicans, said the two-thirds requirement may not be legally binding. But Ms. Haley said she would like the legislature to act soon. State Senator Tom Davis, a Republican who supports the proposal, said there were a number of potential procedural complications.

The General Assembly is currently in session by virtue of a “sine die” resolution that allows lawmakers to take up specifically enumerated issues. To address the flag issue, Mr. Davis said, the resolution would have to be amended — and that, he said, would take a two-thirds vote in each house.

As a candidate in 2010, Ms. Haley said the issue had been “resolved to the best of its ability” by the compromise a decade earlier. As a candidate in 2014, she said that when she was trying to recruit business to the state, “not a single C.E.O.” had mentioned the flag as a potential sticking point.

On Monday, Ms. Haley mentioned her ethnicity, and that of Mr. Scott — who also called for the removal of the flag in a statement Monday — as part of an argument that the state had changed for the better.

Shortly after the governor’s announcement, drivers honked their horns as they drove past the State House, in apparent support of her decision.

Jayne Williams stood beside the Confederate flag, with small American flags assembled in tiny flower pots — one for each of the Emanuel victims. She held a sign that said, #Its ComingDown.

Frances Robles reported from Columbia, Richard Fausset from Charleston, S.C., and Michael Barbaro from New York. Reporting was contributed by Richard Pérez-Peña from New York, Alan Blinder from Hilton Head Island, S.C., and Jonathan Martin and Ashley Parker from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on June 23, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Governor Joins the Call to Take Down Rebel Flag.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/06/22/president-obama-to-deliver-slain-pastors-eulogy-in-charleston/

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Panopticon-Review/342702882479366

All,

Let's see now...How does one properly respond to this?...O yeah, I know. The phrase "Do miracles never cease?..." comes to mind.  But in fact this gesture is in my view far too little far too late for a truly lame and self serving President who has never possessed the fundamental courage and commitment to do what is either necessary or right with respect to serious questions of social and economic justice—and especially with regard to those issues and concerns dealing directly with black people as citizens or human beings in this country.  But as we say "it is what it is", right?   BTW I really hate that phrase...
Kofi

 Red Light

(by Amiri Baraka, 1966)

The only thing we know is the thing

we turn out to be.  I don’t care what

you think, it’s true, now you think

your way out of this

Post Politics

President Obama to deliver slain pastor’s eulogy in Charleston
by Juliet Eilperin
June 22, 2015 
The Washington Post

President Obama, with Vice President Biden, pauses while speaking in the White House briefing room Thursday. (Susan Walsh/AP)

This story has been updated.
 

President Obama, first lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Biden will travel to Charleston, S.C., on Friday to attend the funeral services of Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, the White House said Monday.

The president will deliver the eulogy for Pinckney, a state senator and pastor of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where he was killed.

Pinckney, 41, was leading a Bible group when a white gunman opened fire inside the historic African American church on Wednesday, killing nine.

In a statement last week, Biden decried "the senseless actions of a coward" and recalled that he last saw Pinckney at a 2014 prayer breakfast in Columbia.

"He was a good man, a man of faith, a man of service who carried forward Mother Emanuel’s legacy as a sacred place promoting freedom, equality, and justice for all," Biden said.

The president also noted that he and first lady Michelle Obama knew Pinckney.

The pastor's funeral is scheduled for 11 a.m. Friday at TD Arena on the College of Charleston campus.

Speaking on the South Carolina Senate floor just weeks before his death, Pinckney said that his faith required forgiveness, even of those who kill.

"The Lord teaches us to love all," he said, "and we pray that over time, justice will be done."

READ MORE: Clementa Pinckney, preacher and legislator, spoke out for justice

The pastor killed in Charleston gave a chilling speech on racism a few weeks ago


Juliet Eilperin is The Washington Post's White House bureau chief, covering domestic and foreign policy as well as the culture of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. She is the author of two books—one on sharks, and another on Congress, not to be confused with each other—and has worked for the Post since 1998. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/us/campaign-donations-linked-to-white-supremacist.html?_r=0
 
Politics
Campaign Donations Linked to White Supremacist
by ERIC LICHTBLAU
JUNE 22, 2015
New York Times

The leader of a white supremacist group that has been linked to Dylann Roof, the suspect in the murder of nine African-Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church last week, has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republican campaigns, including those of 2016 presidential contenders such as Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Rand Paul, records show.

Mr. Cruz, a Texas senator, said Sunday night that he would be returning about $8,500 in donations that he had received from the Texas donor, Earl Holt III, who lists himself as president of the Council of Conservative Citizens.

“We just learned this evening that Mr. Holt had contributed to the campaign,” a spokesman for the Cruz campaign said in an email to The New York Times. “We will be immediately refunding all those donations.”

The Guardian first reported on Mr. Holt’s donations to the Republican contenders.
A manifesto that appeared on a website registered to Mr. Roof said that the manifesto’s author had first learned of “brutal black-on-white murders” from the Council of Conservative Citizens’ website.

Mr. Holt, in a statement posted online in his name, said he was not surprised to learn that Mr. Roof had found out about “black-on-white violent crime” from his group because, he said, it was one of the few that had the courage to disclose “the seemingly endless incidents involving black-on-white murder.” But he said his group does not advocate violence and should not be held responsible for the shootings.

The group is regarded by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a leading authority on hate crimes, as a white supremacist extremist organization that opposes “race mixing” as a religious affront and that vilifies blacks as an inferior race.

Spokesmen for Mr. Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, and Mr. Paul, a senator from Kentucky, did not respond to requests for comment on the donations.

Mr. Holt, who identified himself in some donation records as a Texas “slumlord,” has also given money to a number of other current and former Republican members of Congress, including Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, former Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, Representative Steve King of Iowa, and former Representative Todd Akin of Missouri.

A version of this article appears in print on June 22, 2015, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Campaign Donations Linked to White Supremacist. 

The Charleston Massacre, the Legacy of the Confederacy, and the Ongoing Hegemony of Modern White Supremacy in the United States

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/31465-we-were-never-meant-to-survive-a-response-to-the-attack-in-charleston
 
We Were Never Meant to Survive: A Response to the Attack in Charleston
Friday, 19 June 2015
by Alicia Garza, Truthout | Op-Ed 

A mourner grieves during a prayer vigil at the Morris Brown African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., on Thursday, June 18, 2015. Nine people were murdered Wednesday night at another historic black church in this city’s downtown. (Travis Dove/The New York Times)

Wednesday night in Charleston, South Carolina, an act of terrorism was committed against a group of Black people who gathered in prayer. The church, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, was a site of slave rebellions as far back as 1822 and one of the oldest Black churches in the country.

Our hearts and our prayers are with the families and communities of those who were needlessly killed.

Yesterday, a 21-year-old white man named Dylann Storm Roof was arrested alive, suspected to be the gunman in this brutal and horrific tragedy. Roof went to the church and asked specifically for the pastor. He prayed with the congregation, and then after about an hour, he rose and said,

"I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go."

In the days following this one, many in the media will portray Roof as a mentally ill gunman with a troubled past who committed an isolated crime against an unsuspecting group of Black people. Facebook photos show Roof wearing a jacket with patches bearing the flag of apartheid South Africa. However, we at #BlackLivesMatter would assert that this is not, in fact, an isolated incident, but just one incident in a pattern of violence enacted against Black people in this country and around the world.

The real question we should be asking is: Who taught Roof to hate Black people, enough to kill nine of us, in a sanctuary? And can we really say that he is the only one?

The honest answer to the above question is that this country has never valued Black people - even though Black people have been of extreme value for this country.

Where are the calls for accountability for those who taught a young white man to harbor such a serious hatred for Black people? Where is the accountability for a nation that has racism in its very DNA?

We were never meant to survive. We were stolen from our families and our land, brought to this country in the bottoms of boats, chained together like animals. We were forced to work for, nurture and nourish, and build a country that never truly considered us human and still refuses to honor our humanity. The founding documents of this country designate us as only three-fifths of a human being. When we dared (and dare) to reclaim our humanity, we were (and are) beaten, lashed, hung from trees, limbs cut off, set on fire, shot and raped. This isn't something that happened in the past. This is still happening to Black people in 2015. In fact, just a few months ago, Otis Byrd was found lynched, hanging from a tree outside of Jackson, Mississippi.

We were never meant to survive. We argue that Roof's actions are not isolated, are not easily and dismissively attributed to mental illness but instead are reflections of a disease that plagues this country - racism. And we argue that until we grapple, as a nation, with the racist violence that infects this country, we will only see such acts increase.

Roof's words remind us that Black people in this country cannot consider ourselves safe anywhere. We cannot expect protection from the police. We cannot expect to be safe in swimming pools, in churches, in stores, on buses, in our communities or even in our homes. Black children are not safe. And we cannot consider ourselves safe from the daily trauma of witnessing the violence exacted against our communities. In this case, a young Black girl played dead underneath her grandmother's dead body in order to stay alive. Roof left one woman alive, telling her that he wanted her to tell the story of what happened that night.

The truth that needs to be told is that even our nation's first Black President has yet to face the fact that violence against Black people is an epidemic of epic proportions. As the demographics of this country shift to that of majority people of color, there exists both a rational and irrational fear that the very people who have and continue to bear the brunt of such blatant and brutal violence will, at some point, resist. Roof's words, "You're taking over our country. And you have to go" reflect the fear that the right has capitalized on since the 1970s - the fear of the majority becoming the minority.

And, as Black people know so very well, being the minority anywhere can literally mean the difference between life and death.

President Obama made a statement on Thursday, saying, "Once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun." Despite what our president says, this is not merely an issue of gun control. In fact, this is an issue of the prevalence of structural anti-Black racism that results, in many cases, in anti-Black violence, and in too many cases, anti-Black murder.

Across the country and increasingly around the world, Black people - young, old and middle-aged; disabled and differently abled; queer; transgender; immigrant; incarcerated and more - have erupted in a wave of rebellion that has transformed our political landscape. And yet, there are still those who, in the face of extreme and unnecessary violence, will use that as an opportunity to call for peace, to distort the real issues, to essentially neutralize what has been bubbling under the surface for a very long time.

But where are the calls for accountability for those who taught a young white man to harbor such a serious hatred for Black people? Where is the accountability for a nation that has racism in its very DNA?

We, as a country, in the face of even more Black lives taken way before their time, have a choice to make. It is no longer a question of whether or not racism exists, nor is it a question of whether or not racism is an epidemic that plagues our very existence. The choice we have to make is whether or not we are willing to take it on in a real way.

Our lives, quite literally, depend on it.

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

Alicia Garza

Alicia Garza is an organizer, writer and freedom dreamer living and working in Oakland, California. She is the special projects director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the nation's leading voice for dignity and fairness for the millions of domestic workers in the United States, most of whom are women. She is also the cocreator of #BlackLivesMatter, a national organizing project focused on combatting anti-Black, state-sanctioned violence. Alicia's work challenges us to celebrate the contributions of Black queer women's work within popular narratives of Black movements and reminds us that the Black radical tradition is long, complex and international. Her activism reflects organizational strategies that connect emerging social movements without diminishing the specificity of the structural violence facing Black lives.

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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/06/charleston_ch.html

June 19 2015

Centuries of Violence

For black Americans, it is impossible to separate the massacre in Charleston from hundreds of years of vicious attacks on our churches and communities

by Kidada E. Williams

SLATE 

First African Church, Richmond, Virginia, interior of the church from the western wing, June 27, 1874.

In trying to understand the historical context behind the massacre of nine people attending a prayer meeting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, many people have pointed to the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, or the string of arsons directed at Southern black churches in the 1990s. But black Americans know that the history of white terror against us, and our churches, runs much deeper than that. We know this vicious attack is only the latest manifestation of an intense hatred of black Americans that is stitched throughout the entire fabric of the nation’s history. Black American places of worship have represented a threat to white supremacy’s various forces since they emerged among free black populations living in cities throughout the U.S. in the late 18^th century.

Black churches have long provided physical and spiritual sanctuary from anti-black racism. In their sacred spaces, African Americans can worship and discuss political and personal matters as they wish, often free of white influence or surveillance.

Black churches tend not only to the spiritual and emotional well-being of their members, they address social and economic needs of the larger community by providing a range of services. Historically, churches provided instruction for enslaved and free blacks and often housed schools and benevolent organizations. Churches were a focal point for African American communities’ political organization and mobilization as well.

Throughout history black churches also served as a centralizing force of social justice. Churches aided the fight against slavery, and black congregations and individual members across the nation assisted men, women, and children escaping the horrors of slavery.

Before the Civil War, independent black churches met openly primarily in the North. Southern churches, like “Mother Emanuel,” often met in secret because white Southern lawmakers banned them out of fear that black churches would foment rebellion among enslaved people. After the war, many black Southerners withdrew from white churches and formed their own. Allowed to meet openly, Southern churches were the lifeblood of African Americans’ aggressive fight to make freedom real. For them this included everything from social and economic independence from whites to a degree of political power to protect their interests.

Churches shouldered a lot of the burden for educating and organizing freedpeople during Reconstruction. Many black political figures of the era had direct ties to the clergy. Legal fights against racial discrimination often grew out of churches whose members filed lawsuits to have the right to do everything from being buried where they wanted, to travel with first-class accommodations. Given the historic social and political power of black churches, it is no wonder they have come under literal fire, especially at the hands of individuals and organizations determined to maintain white supremacy. (For more on the political role of the black church, and the threat it’s posed to white supremacists, read Matthew J. Cressler’s essay in Slate.)

Many whites who were looking to preserve white social, economic, and political supremacy over blacks after the war typically used terror to achieve their objectives. White terrorists came from all levels of southern society. Some men struck political figures, and others vented their rage at laborers who rejected working conditions akin to slavery or were prospering under freedom.

White men attacked blacks individually and as members of armed gangs that terrorized communities across the South. Gangs typically raided African Americans’ homes in the middle of the night and held families hostage while they plundered, raped, tortured, and murdered captives. White supremacists maimed and killed hundreds of black people and drove many families from their homes and communities. They also attacked important black institutions like schools, businesses, and churches.

In South Carolina, White men burned and destroyed black churches during reigns of terror throughout the state. African Americans’ testimonies at the congressional hearings investigating the Ku Klux Klan in 1871 open a window into this history.

White men kidnapped Lewis Thompson and murdered him. Klansmen warned his family against burying his remains.

Benjamin Gore, a resident of Chester, was one of more than 200 African Americans who testified about these attacks before the committee. Gore told members of Congress that he witnessed a church burning in 1871 during a battle between whites and a black militia that was fighting back. He said he was standing on his doorstep when he “saw the fire commence kindling.” He testified that he then saw three white men on horseback, leaving the church and rejoining a larger group of men who redirected their assault toward the blacks defending their community.

In 1871 a gang of white men visited the Spartanburg County home of Alberry Bonner. They snatched him, dragged him outside, stripped him naked, and then whipped him. Bonner also testified that white men tore down his church as part of a larger attack on the community.

A deacon from Limestone named Doctor Huskie testified about a raid on his home in December 1870 and an attack on his brother. Huskie and his neighbors started sleeping outside to avoid being trapped in their homes in case the white men returned. His community’s church was burned down the following June.

White terrorists were not always satisfied with attacking places of worship; they also targeted church leaders. White men from Union County ordered Lewis Thompson to stop preaching in 1870–71. They even drew a picture with a coffin and Thompson’s name on it and placed it at a church near Goshen Hill where he was scheduled to preach. His brother, Dennis Rice, testified that Thompson still preached but congregants were so afraid of being attacked in the church that they “wouldn’t stay to hear him.” Thompson was undaunted and continued trying to spread the Gospel.

White men kidnapped Lewis Thompson on June 16, 1871, and murdered him. Thompson’s mutilated body was recovered from a local river shortly thereafter. Klansmen warned the family against burying his remains.

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As violence like this continued, the federal government stepped in. Agents swarmed the South, infiltrated white terror groups, and issued thousands of indictments. In South Carolina, authorities declared martial law and conducted trials.

Thousands of Klansmen and their ilk fled, seeking sanctuary in communities that were hospitable to their mission. Even in cases where authorities tried perpetrators, finding witnesses to testify against them and juries that were willing to convict them was difficult. Only a few men served time for their crimes.

This violence was critical to the restoration of ex-Confederates and their allies to political power across the South. It continued throughout the Jim Crow period when black churches provided sanctuary from the brutal realities of segregation and racial terror and served as meeting centers for the fight against it.

A tradition of activism made church buildings, leaders, and members primary targets of white men who were determined to maintain segregation and deny blacks the right to vote. This is especially clear in the church bombings and burnings of the 1950s and 1960s. Because of the real and imagined threats black churches posed, they remained targets of white violence and hatred throughout the 20^th century, with a spate of burnings and fire-bombings in the 1990s that triggered a 1996 congressional investigation.

When Dylann Roof, the alleged perpetrator of this week’s shooting, walked into the prayer meeting at Mother Emanuel, it is not clear that he knew was striking the site of Denmark Vesey’s 1822-planned revolt against slavery on its 193^rd anniversary. But firsthand accounts of his heinous act, and his participation in white supremacist Internet forums, indicate that he entered the church with an intense hatred for black Americans.

Connecting the dots among Roof’s racism, his living in a state that continues to cloak itself in symbols of white supremacy and the Confederacy, and his decision to enter the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney’s church and pray with congregants before opening fire and killing six women and three men is not difficult. In striking Mother Emanuel, with its tradition of preserving and promoting black solidarity, Roof aimed his gun at the very heart of African American communities in Charleston and around the country.

For some people, Roof’s killing of Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Depayne Doctor, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons Sr., and Mira Thompson is an isolated incident. But for many black Americans, it is impossible to separate them from two centuries of white supremacist violence, from Walter Scott and other victims of police killings; Kalief Browder and the hundreds of thousands ensnared in the carceral state; and from the murder of Renisha McBride and girls and women like her.

Black people know the history of violent racism connecting the massacre to ships carrying African captives across the Atlantic to terror strikes after the Civil War, whether perpetrated by individuals or the state. Carrying this history in our bodies and souls, we see the connections because as a people facing yet another low point in U.S. history, we do not have the luxury of forgetting or ignoring them.

As we join Charleston in mourning, we know that Roof was not alone when he entered Mother Emanuel. He was standing on the shoulders of the white terrorists who came before him. Today black Americans are searching for ways to honor the lives of people taken so brutally. Our knowledge of the U.S.’s long history of racial terror and endless denials about it makes it hard to suppress our rage about how little has changed. Knowing that white terror is not outdated, the fact that authorities have decided to investigate the killings as a “hate crime” offers little comfort.

Read more of Slate’s coverage of the Charleston shooting.

Kidada E. Williams, an associate professor of history at Wayne State University, is the author of They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I

http://www.slate.com/…/charleston_ame_church_shooting_dylan…

History

Why White Terrorists Attack Black Churches

Sanctuaries like Charleston’s AME Church aren’t just places of worship—they’re political institutions that threaten white power.

By Matthew J. Cressler
June 19, 2015
SLATE

Members of the public continue to pay their respects and leave flowers outside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina June 19, 2015, two days after a mass shooting left nine dead during a bible study at the church.  Photo by Brian Snyder/Reuters

On Monday I searched for a new home in Charleston alongside my wife and young daughter; in the fall I begin my first year teaching religious studies at the College of Charleston. On Wednesday I drafted my African American religions course syllabus, featuring a visit to Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church—a church affectionately known as “Mother Emanuel” for its centrality in the history of black Charleston and the South. On Thursday morning I awoke to news of immeasurable loss facing the Mother Emanuel and greater Charleston community.

In the immediate aftermath of tragedies on this scale, talk quickly turns to the senselessness of violence. President Obama expressed his “deep sorrow over the senseless murders” and noted that “there is something particularly heartbreaking about the death happening in a place in which we seek solace and we seek peace, in a place a worship.” South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley invoked similar terms in a statement that offered prayers for the “victims and families touched by tonight’s senseless tragedy at Emanuel AME Church.” She continued: “While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another.”

The harsh truth is that this act of terrorism was not senseless. The language of “senselessness” implies lack of logic or purpose. The true terror of Dylann Roof’s attack on Emanuel AME is the fact that it fits neatly into an ongoing, blood-soaked history of white violence against black women, men, and children in religious institutions. Roof reportedly told a survivor, “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.” Do not be mistaken. This attack embodied white supremacy at its most blunt and brutal. And it is neither inexplicable nor a coincidence that it happened in a “place of worship.”

Black religious institutions were emblems of freedom and thus legitimate targets in the eyes of white supremacists.

We often imagine religious spaces as set apart from other spheres of life, which makes an attack on a church seem especially abhorrent. But the lines that divide the religious from the political have always been more porous than Thomas Jefferson’s imagined “wall of separation” between church and state. Black churches exist as simultaneously religious and political institutions, and that has made them targets. Sermons unpacking scriptural passages also mobilize resistance to racism; hymns that praise God affirm the value of black life in the same breath. For this reason, institutions like Emanuel AME stand as affronts to white supremacy. To paraphrase Frederick Douglass, black churches have long distinguished the “Christianity of Christ” from slaveholding religion, the “Christianity of this land” that is Christian in name only. Because of this, black churches have served as ever-present threats to white power.

When we think of white terrorist attacks on black churches, the first that comes to mind is the infamous civil rights–era bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which claimed the lives of four black girls, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair. But to fully understand what has motivated white people to enter black places of worship and kill people for centuries—whether with nooses or bombs or guns—we must look back further still. One hundred and fifty years before Dylann Roof killed nine people at Mother Emanuel and a century before four members of the Ku Klux Klan dynamited the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963, a wave of white Christian violence against black religious people and institutions swept the South.

Gods and spirits, songs and sermons, dancing and drums, scriptures and other sacred stories all played pivotal roles in black resistance to white domination, ever since the first Africans were carried across the Atlantic as slaves. When black Americans became Christian—which did not happen in large numbers until the 18th century—they did so in ways that challenged white assertions of black inhumanity. Slaves identified with the plight of the Israelites in the Book of Exodus and anxiously awaited the day when the wrath of God would rain down on the Egyptland of America, and they too would be set free.

Denmark Vesey is a poignant example of the role of black religion in battling white supremacy. Vesey was among the founding members of Emanuel AME, then known as “the African Church,” and most famous for his leadership in a slave rebellion planned for June 17, 1822—193 years to the day before the Mother Emanuel attack. The church played an instrumental role in supporting Vesey’s thwarted plot, and whites treated the church accordingly. In his social history Black Charlestonians, Bernard Powers Jr. called the formation of the African Church in Charleston “a rebellious act of revolutionary proportions,” and it was punished as such. Once discovered, white Charlestonians executed members and burned the church to the ground. (For more on Vesey, and the plight of the African Church in 1822, read Maurie McInnis’ Slate essay.)

Independent black religious institutions emerged en masse for the first time at the end of the Civil War, 43 years later. Freed from the economic exploitation and dehumanization of slavery, African Americans labored to liberate themselves from the surveillance and control of  white religious institutions as well. Black Christians left predominantly white denominations in droves and established their own. In Charleston, Powers reports that in 1859 more than 4,000 African American parishioners remained in four Methodist Episcopal churches; by  1866 those same churches could not count a single black member. On the national level, this trend amounted to nothing short of a “black religious awakening,” as termed by the scholar Eddie Glaude Jr. It represented a “declaration of independence and self-determination” that initiated widespread institution building and led to a flowering of black political power, albeit a short-lived one.

If Emancipation precipitated the rise of independent black churches, Reconstruction’s collapse a decade later transformed those churches into prime targets of a systematic campaign of white terrorism. In the 1870s and 1880s, Northern whites once allied with black abolitionists withdrew their support. The historians David Blight and Edward Blum have both demonstrated how white people in the North and South prioritized reunion with each other over and against the prospect of rebuilding the nation free of white supremacy. With federal troops withdrawn from what had been the Confederate South, black churches and the women and men and children who made them met with destruction and devastation. White Christian paramilitary organizations like the Ku Klux Klan fought to restore white ruling order. (For more on the Klan’s activities in this period, read Kidada Williams’ article in Slate on the long history of white terrorism.) Black religious institutions were emblems of freedom in the face of domination and thus considered legitimate targets in the eyes of white supremacists. Terrorists burned black churches and lynched black people by the thousands. Vigilante violence paved the way for legal Jim Crow apartheid.

The Mother Emanuel massacre should be situated squarely in this long history of African Americans struggling to be free and the death dealing they so often meet because of it. We may never know, on an individual level, what “motivated” Dylann Roof to sit in the pews of Emanuel AME for an hour before killing nine praying people. But we certainly can and do know why white terrorists would target black people in a church. By their very nature, black churches pose threats to white dominance in both quotidian and structural ways. It would be a grave mistake to conclude that this attack bears no meaning, that it cannot be explained, that it does not “make sense.” Black churches and the people who give them life have far too frequently faced death for their resistance to racism. Failing to recognize this most recent attack for what it is does disservice to the lives lost in building this beloved community.

Read more of Slate’s coverage of the Charleston shooting.

Matthew J. Cressler, Ph.D., will be assistant professor of religious studies at the College of Charleston beginning in the fall. Connect with him at matthewjcressler.com. 

As Nation Mourns Nine Black Victims of Church Massacre, Details of Suspect's White Supremacy Emerge
Friday, 19 June 2015 

By Amy Goodman and Juan González, Democracy Now!  Video Interviewhttp://www.democracynow.org/2015/6/19/as_nation_mourns_9_black_victims



A 21-year-old South Carolina man with apparent sympathies to white supremacy has been arrested for the massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Dylann Roof reportedly sat with the church members for an hour before before he opened fire. Roof’s capture came as the names of the nine slain African-American churchgoers were released. The Department of Justice is investigating Wednesday’s attack as a hate crime, motivated by racism or other prejudice.

TRANSCRIPT:

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to the massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, where nine clergy and parishioners were shot dead Wednesday while participating in a Bible study in one of the most historic black churches in the South. On Thursday, we learned the names of the nine victims. The church’s pastor, 41-year-old Reverend Clementa Pinckney, a state senator, at the age of 23 he became the youngest African American to be elected to the state Legislature. He was elected to the state Senate at age 27.

AMY GOODMAN: Sharonda Coleman-Singleton was a 45-year-old mother of three, reverend and high school track coach.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Cynthia Hurd was a 54-year-old librarian. She was the manager at St. Andrews Regional Library since 2011.

AMY GOODMAN: Daniel Simmons was a 74-year-old ministry staff member at EmanuelAME and the former pastor of Greater Zion AME Church in the nearby town of Awendaw.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Myra Thompson was the wife of the Reverend Anthony Thompson of Charleston’s Holy Trinity REC Church.

AMY GOODMAN: The Reverend Depayne Middleton-Doctor was a 49-year-old mother of four.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ethel Lance was a 70-year-old grandmother who had worked at Emanuel AME for more than three decades.

AMY GOODMAN: Susie Jackson was Ethel Lance’s cousin and the oldest victim of the massacre at the age of 87. She was a longtime member of the church.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Susie Jackson’s nephew, Tywanza Sanders, was the youngest victim at 26 years old. He was a recent graduate of Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina. He graduated from the university’s Division of Business Administration. Before the shooting took place, Tywanza posted a short video clip on Snapchat, where you can briefly see the suspected gunman, Dylann Roof, sitting at a table with all of the victims during the Bible study. Roof reportedly sat with the church members for an hour before he opened fire.

Sylvia Johnson, the cousin of slain pastor Clementa Pinckney, said a survivor described to her what happened inside the church.

SYLVIA JOHNSON: From my understanding, the suspect came to the church, and he asked for the pastor: "Where is the pastor?" They showed him where the pastor was. He sat next to my cousin, Reverend Clementa Pinckney, for throughout the entire Bible study. At the conclusion of the Bible study, from what I understand, they just start hearing loud noises just ringing out. And he had already wounded—the suspect had already wounded a couple of individuals, including my cousin, Reverend Clementa Pinckney.

AMY GOODMAN: Sylvia Johnson also recounted what she had been told by the survivor of the assailant’s motives.

SYLVIA JOHNSON: She said that he had reloaded five different times. And her son was trying to talk him out of doing that act of killing people. And he just said, "I have to do it." He said, "You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go."

AMY GOODMAN: The suspected gunman, 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof, fled the church. He was arrested Thursday morning in Shelby, North Carolina. A friend of Roof’s said he wanted to start a new civil war. Dalton Tyler said, quote, "He was big into segregation and other stuff. He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself."

In a photo posted on Facebook, Dylann Roof is seen wearing a black jacket that prominently features the flags of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and apartheid-era South Africa from when the two African countries were ruled by the white minority. Another photo posted online appears to show Roof posing in front of a car with the front plate, license plate, that reads, "Confederate States of America."

The Department of Justice is investigating Wednesday’s attack as a hate crime, motivated by racism or other prejudice. President Obama addressed the nation on Thursday and spoke of the significance of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: There is something particularly heartbreaking about a death happening in a place in which we seek solace and we seek peace, in a place of worship. Mother Emanuel is, in fact, more than a church. This is a place of worship that was founded by African Americans seeking liberty. This is a church that was burned to the ground because it’s worshipers worked to end slavery. When there were laws banning all black church gatherings, they conducted services in secret. When there was a nonviolent movement to bring our country closer in line with our highest ideals, some of our brightest leaders spoke and led marches from this church’s steps. This is a sacred place in the history of Charleston and in the history of America.

AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, we’ll be joined by two leaders of two of the most prominent black churches in the country. We’ll also discuss the issue of why so many are afraid to use the word "domestic terrorism." Then we’ll talk about gun control in the United States. Stay with us.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

Juan González

Juan González co-hosts Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman. González has been a professional journalist for more than 30 years and a staff columnist at the New York Daily News since 1987. He is a two-time recipient of the George Polk Award.

Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,100 public television and radio stations worldwide. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its "Pick of the Podcasts," along with NBC's Meet the Press.

THIS IS THE MAJOR MODERN PUBLIC SYMBOL OF WHITE SUPREMACY IN THESE UNITED HATES:

IN OTHER WORDS: THE ENEMY

PHOTOS BELOW:  The Confederate flag and an undated photo of Roof sitting on the hood of a car with a Confederate flag on its license plates. The photo was shared by WLTX of Columbia, South Carolina. It has been suggested that the shooting was timed to coincide with two large political rallies in the city, as just hours before Rev. Pinckney met with Hillary Clinton as part of her presidential campaign and Jeb Bush was also due to visit Charleston today. It is understood his appearance has now been cancelled.

DYLAN STORM ROOF POSING WITH CONFEDERATE FLAG SYMBOLS

http://jezebel.com/is-south-carolina-just-gonna-fly-that-confederate-flag-1712235994

Is South Carolina Just Gonna Fly That Confederate Flag Today or What?
by Jia Tolentino
JEZEBEL

 
South Carolina, a state that thoughtfully welcomes its 19 known hate groups by flying a Confederate flag over the statehouse, is facing a real quandary today. When a white man walks into a black church—a church that was targeted, surveilled and burned down 200 years ago in a period when black churches were prohibited from meeting without a white person present, and which has since served as a powerful site of resistance to a state that lynched black men as recently as 1947—and is accepted by them in prayer before he opens fire and kills nine people, including a state senator: what are you gonna do with that damn Confederate flag?

When Governor Nikki Haley was asked about the Confederate flag’s dubious official presence in 2014, she answered, “What I can tell you is over the last three and a half years, I spent a lot of my days on the phones with CEOs and recruiting jobs to this state. I can honestly say I have not had one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag.”

Right, right, nice, nice. Last night, Haley wrote on Facebook, “We’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another.” Haley seems confused, or something—but the rest of us could easily leap to the possibility that a racist murderer might be highly motivated by a number of things, such as racism, as well as a desire to murder, and also maybe a governor who is like, “What I can tell you about this slave-state white supremacy symbol officially sponsored by my administration is that CEOs think it’s pretty chill.”

Anyway, photos show the state flag and the American flag at half-staff above the House:

And the report, so far, is that the Confederate flag is still flying high atop its pole.

Here’s to the wildly unrealistic hope that the next time it’s moved, it’s taken down. But we know, of course, that it won’t be. This breed of racism is the state’s origin, a strand of its DNA: South Carolina was the first state to fly a Confederate flag over war-captured territory, its slave-loving, red-white-and-blue banner marking the official start of the Civil War at Fort Sumter in 1861.

FORT SUMTER 
 

http://abcnews.go.com/…/confederate-flag-flying-sout…/story…

U.S.

Confederate Flag Flying on South Carolina Capitol Grounds Provokes Anger After Charleston Shooting
June 18, 2015
By AVIANNE TAN
ABC NEWS

Commentators on social media are calling for the Confederate flag that remained flying outside South Carolina's state house this afternoon  after nine people were shot dead at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, to be removed on the grounds that it is "insulting" to the victims of the shooting.

Gov. Nikki Haley, who was in tears during a news conference this morning on the mass shooting at the historically black church, previously rejected the notion of removing the flag at a debate last year, saying it was a "sensitive issue" but that she didn't believe the flag presented an image problem for the state because she never had "one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag.”

Haley's press secretary told ABC News today, "In South Carolina, the governor does not have legal authority to alter the flag. Only the General Assembly can do that."

The offices of South Carolina's General Assembly and South Carolina Lt. Gov. Henry D. McMaster did not immediately respond to ABC News' requests for comment.

South Carolina, which is one of five states that still doesn't have a state hate crime law, recently celebrated "Confederate Memorial Day" this past May, during which a large Confederate flag was displayed on the steps of the South Carolina State Capitol.

Many object to the flying of the Confederate flag, which some say recalls the South's support for slavery during the Civil War. Supporters say it's a symbol of southern heritage.

The governor and the state is now under fire on social media, where many are linking the state's acceptance of the Confederate flag to the Charleston shooting, which is being investigated as a federal "hate crime," according to federal authorities.


PHOTO: Confederate re-enactors position a gigantic Confederate flag on the steps of the South Carolina State Capitol building on May 2, 2015 in Columbia, SC
.
Richard Ellis/Getty Images
PHOTO: Confederate re-enactors position a gigantic Confederate flag on the steps of the South Carolina State Capitol building on May 2, 2015 in Columbia, SC.
There were over 36,600 tweets with the word "Confederate flag" over the past day, according to Twitter analytic service, Topsy.  
 
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/06/18/white_extremist_murders_killed_at_least_60_in_u_s_since_1995.html 

June 18 2015

The Long List of Murders Committed by White Extremists Since the Oklahoma City Bombing

by Ben Mathis-Lilley

SLATE

Wade Michael Page, who killed six at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012.  Photo by FBI via Getty Images

Wednesday's mass murder of black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina is the most high-profile example of white extremist terror in the United States since Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. But though not each incident makes national headlines, a tally kept by the Southern Poverty Law Center indicates that the murder of law enforcement officials and innocent civilians by racial supremacists, anti-government paranoiacs, and other believers in white fringe movements has been depressingly common in the two decades since Timothy McVeigh's attack. Below (taken from SPLC's records and confirmed by outside news accounts) is a list of 29 deadly attacks since Oklahoma City—comprising a total of 63 victims—carried out or believed to have been carried out by white extremists.

October 9, 1995. An Amtrak employee is killed when a train derails near Hyder, Arizona because the track it's traveling on has been sabotaged. The perpetrators are never found, but anti-law enforcement propaganda messages from the "Sons of Gestapo" are found near the scene.

April 12, 1996. A neo-Nazi named Larry Wayne Shoemake, who is found to have owned at least 22 firearms and an estimated 20,000 rounds of ammunition, kills a black man in a random Jackson, Mississippi attack.

July 27, 1996 A bomb set by Eric Robert Rudolph, who is affiliated with the "Christian Identity" fundamentalist movement, kills one person at the Atlanta Olympics.

January 29, 1998. Another bomb set by Rudolph kills a man at a Birmingham abortion clinic.

May 29, 1998. Three militia sympathizers named Alan Pilon, Robert Mason and Jason McVean fire 29 shots at a Cortez, Colorado police officer who is trying to apprehend them because they've stolen a water truck, killing him. The three evade capture but are believed to ultimately have died in the desert wilderness surrounding the crime scene.

October 23, 1998. With his wife and children nearby, an abortion provider in Amherst, New York is shot and killed through the window of his home by James Charles Kopp.

July 1, 1999. Brothers Benjamin Matthew Williams and James Tyler Williams, who also have connections to the "Christian Identity" movement, kill a gay couple in Redding, California.

July 2-July 5 1999. Neo-Nazi Benjamin Nathaniel Smith kills black basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong and and a Korean graduate student and wounds nine other non-white victims in a three-day shooting spree.

August 10, 1999. Neo-Nazi Buford Furrow kills a Filipino immigrant after firing 70 shots inside a Jewish community center near Los Angeles.

April 28, 2000. An unemployed immigration attorney named Richard Baumhammers who believes "non-white immigration" should be banned shoots and kills five people in the Pittsburgh area.

December 8, 2003. Steven Bixby kills two police officers in Abbeville, South Carolina during a dispute over the state's decision to use a 20-foot strip of the Bixbys' land to widen a highway.  

May 24, 2004. Wade and Christopher Lay, a father-son pair obsessed with the 1993 government siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, kill a bank security guard in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

January 21, 2009. Neo-Nazi Keith Luke rapes and kills an immigrant from Cape Verde in Brockton, Massachusetts, then kills a 72-year-old homeless immigrant.

April 4, 2009. Richard Andrew Poplawski, a frequent poster on the white supremacist Stormfront website who apparently believes a national "gun ban" is imminent, kills three Pittsburgh police officers.

April 25, 2009. Joshua Cartwright kills two Okaloosa County, Florida sheriff's deputies. Per a police report, Cartwright's wife says he was paranoid about the U.S. government and "extremely disturbed" by Barack Obama's election.

May 30, 2009. Shawna Forde, Albert Gaxiola, and Jason Bush kill a Latino man and his nine-year-old daughter in Arivaca, Arizona during a robbery intended to raise funds for the "Minutemen American Defense" group.

May 31, 2009. Scott Roeder kills Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, in the Wichita, Kansas Lutheran church where Tiller serves as an usher.

June 10, 2009. An 89-year-old white supremacist named James von Brunn kills a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. from point-blank range.

Feb. 18, 2010. Joseph Andrew Stack flies a plane into an Austin, Texas IRS office, killing one person.

May 20, 2010. A father-son pair named Jerry and Joseph Kane (who conduct "seminars" about how "sovereign citizens" can evade debt) kill two West Memphis, Arkansas police officers.

September 26-October 3, 2011. Avowed white supremacists David Pedersen and Holly Ann Grigsby kill Grigsby's father and stepmother in Washington, a man they believe is Jewish in Oregon, and a black man in California.

August 5, 2012. A white supremacist named Wade Michael Page kills six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.

August 16, 2012. "Sovereign citizen"-movement adherents Brian Smith and Kyle Joekel, who are now awaiting trial, allegedly kill two Louisiana sheriff's deputies in a trailer-park ambush.

September 4, 2012. Christopher Lacy, a software engineer who lives in a rural trailer and apparently sympathizes with the "sovereign citizen" movement, shoots a California Highway Patrol officer who dies the next day.

April 13, 2014. Frazier Glenn Miller, a 73-year-old with a long history of KKK activity, kills three people in the area of a Jewish community center and Jewish retirement community in Overland Park, Kansas.

June 8, 2014. Jerad and Amanda Miller kill two police officers in a random attack at a pizza restaurant in Las Vegas, then kill a customer at a Walmart. The Millers had spent time on Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's property during protests related to Bundy's dispute with the federal government.

September 12, 2014: Eric Frein allegedly shoots and kills a Pennslyvania state trooper; he's caught 48 days later after hiding from authorities in "survivalist" fashion in a rural area.

June 17, 2015. Dylann Roof allegedly kills nine people at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

July 24, 2015: John Russell Houser, a 59-year-old man with a history of expressing extremist and anti-feminist beliefs, kills two women at a screening of the Amy Schumer comedy Trainwreck in Lafayette, Louisiana.

*This article has been updated to include attacks that were not mentioned in the original post.