by Herb Frazier
The racial rhetoric that might have been absent from Roof’s speech before he dropped out of the ninth grade began to appear when he was reunited with childhood friends via social media. In 2015, he joined Facebook and contacted Kimberly Konzny’s sons, his friends in Lexington. Roof spent several nights a week sleeping on Konzny’s sofa, watching movies. Because he had a car and pocket money, he chauffeured his friends and provided bottles of domestic vodka. Twenty-year-old Joseph C. Meek Jr., Konzny’s older son, was quoted as saying that after he reconnected with Roof, he found Roof to be “a lot more quiet. He was, like, emotionless.” Meek’s fifteen-year-old brother, Jacob, said Roof “doesn’t use the N-word. He says ‘African-American.’ ”39 But Joseph Meek revealed that he knew Roof talked about doing “something big” and that he was prone to have racist views—although Meek didn’t attempt to inform police. He didn’t know then that Roof wanted to start a race war. “He wanted it to be white with white, and black with black . . . He had it in his mind, and he didn’t really let nobody know (what he was going to do),” Meek said.40
Although Roof did occasionally make racist statements, he was not linked with any particular racial groups, so Meek didn’t take him seriously. But after Roof said on June 10 that in seven days he wanted to carry out a mass shooting at the College of Charleston, Meek and another friend, who is an African American, took Roof’s gun from his car and hid it. They had been drinking vodka, and Meek hid the handgun until they all sobered up. Meek returned the weapon after another friend became concerned that Meek should not have it while he was on probation.41
After a search began for a suspect, Carson Cowles, Roof’s maternal uncle, called police to identify his nephew. “The whole world is going to be looking at his family who raised this monster,” Cowles said.42 “He’s guilty as hell. He’ll get no sympathy from us, any of us.”43
THREE
THE FLAG COMES DOWN
As information about Dylann Roof’s racist ideology—complete with photographs of him waving the Confederate battle flag—permeated the Internet and news media, the response from Charleston church and civic leaders was immediate. Presiding Elder Joseph Darby, who was also the first vice president of the Charleston branch of the NAACP, pointed out that Roof’s “manifesto is instructive to those who throw around reckless language for political gain . . . They have to first remove the blood from their hands.”1
Charleston’s Mayor Riley spoke openly about the ways in which the Confederate flag was co-opted by Roof and others as a symbol of racial hatred. Protesters demonstrated repeatedly in front of the South Carolina statehouse, demanding the flag’s removal from the capitol grounds. Six days after the church shooting, almost every major South Carolina political figure, including Governor Nikki Haley, called for the removal of the flag. The prevailing sentiment was that if the flag didn’t come down under these dire circumstances, then there was something deeply, deeply wrong with South Carolina. It was a redemptive gesture, but one with profound meaning for the people of the Palmetto State. There was an urgency around the issue because Senator Pinckney would be lying in state under the capitol dome on Wednesday, June 25, and the notion that his casket would have to pass by the Confederate flag still flying in front of the building was abhorrent to those demanding its removal.
But the battle over the Confederate flag has a long, contentious history in this state, and one’s view of history (in particular the reasons for the Civil War) often determine one’s attitude toward it. The Confederate flag was first raised in the state House chambers in the late 1930s; then it was raised in the Senate in 1956, but passion for the flag really heated up in the 1960s, during the civil rights era, when the flag was raised over the statehouse dome on April 11, 1961, to commemorate the centennial of the Civil War. This action came with no end date to take it down and was seen by many to be a clear political statement against desegregation and civil rights reforms. During the decades that followed, African American leaders and others called for the flag’s removal, and in 1994 the chairman of the NAACP and many African American ministers threatened a boycott. The mayor of Columbia, along with business leaders, sued to force removal of the flag. The state legislature, however, did not vote to remove the flag. The next year, legislators passed a law while the statehouse was being renovated, giving lawmakers complete power over the flag’s removal. In 1996, Republican governor David Beasley suggested moving the flag to a monument on the statehouse grounds. His suggestion was met with vociferous disapproval, and although he lost his bid for reelection, he never regretted the decision and was awarded the Profiles in Courage Award by Caroline Kennedy—the only South Carolinian to receive the honor.
In 2000, there were numerous marches and rallies at the statehouse. The NAACP boycott of South Carolina started on January 1, 2000, and was followed by a protest march of approximately forty-five thousand people that took place on the weekend of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. (There was a subsequent pro-flag rally of six thousand.) In April, Mayor Riley participated in the start of a five-day, 110-mile march to Columbia to call for the flag’s removal. Thousands marched with the mayor, and a protest with thousands more convened at the capitol. That spring both the Senate and the House voted to remove the flag, and a compromise arrangement was reached and signed into law by Democratic governor Jim Hodges. On June 30, the Confederate flag was transferred from the dome, and a smaller version of the flag was raised on a flagpole at the monument to South Carolina’s Confederate dead, directly in front of the statehouse building facing Gervais Street, which is a central thoroughfare in downtown Columbia.
But this compromise really didn’t change or solve anything. The next year the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) banned the state from hosting postseason sporting events. Three years later, on MLK Day, a march to the statehouse called for the flag’s removal. It became a hot-button issue in both the state and national political arenas—a kind of litmus test for a candidate’s attitudes about race and social justice issues. As late as 2014, the Democratic candidate for governor, Vincent Sheheen, called for the removal of the flag in his failed attempt to unseat Governor Haley. Following the election, the state poet laureate’s inaugural poem was banned from the inauguration ceremonies in January 2015, because the poem mentioned the flag and the civil rights issues it represents.
It took the massacre of nine innocent African Americans by a young white supremacist to finally get the Confederate flag off the statehouse grounds and placed under glass at the South Carolina State Museum. Even under these circumstances it almost didn’t happen, although calls for the removal of the Confederate flag began almost immediately after the massacre.
On June 22, Mississippi House Speaker Philip Gunn, a Republican, called for the removal of the Confederate symbol from that state’s flag. In his statement he described himself as a Christian and urged that a dialogue on the subject should commence. Less than a week after the church shootings, Governor Haley and US Representative James Clyburn, a Democrat from South Carolina, and US Senator Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican—both African Americans—called for the removal of the flag. “One hundred fifty years after the end of the Civil War,” the governor stated, “the time has come.”2 But there was still much opposition, and it would take a late-night battle in early July to gather the necessary votes. Business and community leaders throughout the state continued to call for the removal of the flag.
As the days passed, calls for changes involving a myriad of Confederate symbols went out across the country. Walmart pulled Confederate battle flag items from its stores. Amazon, eBay, Sears, and Kmart quickly followed. The flag was not the only target. Kentucky leaders called for the removal of a statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis from the capitol rotunda. On June 23, Governor Terry McAuliffe of Virginia announced the state would begin to phase out specialty license plates for the Sons of Confederate Veterans organization, whose logo includes the Confederate battle flag. Nathan Deal, the governor of Georgia
, made a similar announcement regarding specialty license plates in his state. It’s worth noting that the day of the shooting in Charleston, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that Texas was within its rights to disallow license plates with the Sons of Confederate Veterans logo. In Tennessee, lawmakers demanded that a bust of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest (also the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan) be removed from their statehouse grounds. In early July the mayor of New Orleans asked the city council to remove the statues of generals P. G. T. Beauregard and Robert E. Lee and the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. And as far north as Baltimore, plans were announced by city officials to change the name of the city’s Robert E. Lee Park.
Other reactions were more spontaneous. An American flag was burned by protesters in Denver at a rally outside the Colorado state capitol in support of removing the flag in South Carolina. Activists in Minnesota called for the renaming of a lake named after John C. Calhoun, and the Robert E. Lee Elementary School in San Diego considered changing its name. Political figures around the country began to weigh in. White House statements indicated the president believed the flag belonged in a museum.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called it a symbol of a racist past,3 and former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who had made statements in favor of the flag’s removal during the primaries in 2008, tweeted, “Remove it now to honor #Charleston victims.”4 The 2016 Republican candidates weighed in as well. Both Jeb Bush and Florida senator Marco Rubio issued statements suggesting the state would “do the right thing.”5 Even flag manufacturers decided to stop making it.
A seismic shift seemed to be happening within the very bedrock of the Christian South, when even the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Russell Moore, wrote in a June 19 blog post, “The cross and the Confederate flag cannot co-exist [sic] without one setting the other on fire.”6
In South Carolina, debate inside and outside the halls of government heated up. Randy Burbage, a Charleston leader of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told the Post and Courier, “The flag didn’t cause Dylann Roof to do what he did.”7 College of Charleston president and former state senator Glenn McConnell, well known for his local Civil War memorabilia store and his longtime support of the flag, made no comment. Many state lawmakers did the same.
There were numerous rallies and protests at the statehouse, and although they were overwhelmingly in favor of removing the flag, there were plenty of pro-flag demonstrators as well. At dawn on Saturday, June 27, the same day funerals were held in Charleston for Cynthia Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, and Tywanza Sanders, thirty-year-old African American activist Bree Newsome climbed up the flagpole in front of the statehouse and took down the Confederate flag. Newsome and her supporters felt that they couldn’t wait any longer for the legislature to take action. She was arrested almost immediately and charged with defacing a monument. And within an hour a replacement flag was raised.
The battle over the flag came to a showdown on Wednesday, July 8, when the South Carolina House of Representatives was engaged for ten hours in a heated debate. The Senate had passed a measure the day before in favor of removing the flag, but events in the House were not so smooth. One representative in particular, Republican Mike Pitts from Laurens, South Carolina, repeatedly introduced amendments to derail the flag bill. More than sixty amendments were offered. Debate became emotional. Democrats and some Republicans accused an extreme faction of Republicans of delaying the vote, but the wind was largely blowing the other way—even the son of the late US senator Strom Thurmond, a segregationist, spoke about the need to remove the flag.
After hours of debate Jenny Horne, a Republican representative from Summerville—a city near Charleston—made a heartfelt plea to her colleagues, which seemed to turn the tide. She described being a descendent of Confederacy president Jefferson Davis, and with tears streaming down her face and anger in her voice, she pleaded: “I cannot believe that we do not have the heart in this body to do something meaningful, such as take a symbol of hate off these grounds. . . . If you cannot be moved by the suffering of the people of Charleston, then you don’t have a heart.”8 And finally, during the early hours on Thursday, July 9, 2015, the first approval vote came in at 93–27, and a second came in at 94–20. People throughout the state stayed up all night to watch the televised debate unfold. Later that day Governor Haley signed the bill that called for the removal of the flag from statehouse grounds. She used thirteen pens, nine representing the families of those who lost their lives in Charleston. Some of their relatives attended, as well as former governors and dozens of lawmakers. That day, on the floor of the US House, Republicans tabled a bill that would allow Confederate flags at cemeteries managed by the United States Park Service. The hateful, racist associations with this flag suddenly seemed obvious to almost everyone.
Twenty-three days after the church shootings at Mother Emanuel, at 10:10 a.m. on Friday, July 10, the Confederate battle flag was ceremoniously removed from the flagpole in front of the statehouse as ten thousand citizens stood by and thousands more watched from their homes and offices on computers, cellular telephone screens, and televisions. It was taken to the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum, located about a mile away. Soon the flagpole and fence surrounding it were removed. It all happened so fast it was hard to believe how difficult and fraught with conflict the path to that day had been—a day many never thought they would see in their lifetimes. For African Americans and others who had fought so hard for so long to remove the symbol of hate, it was a moment for tears of joy.
Poet Nikky Finney, the daughter of the state’s first African American jurist on the South Carolina Supreme Court since Reconstruction, spoke for multitudes in her prose poem “A New Day Dawns,” which appeared beside a photograph of the empty flagpole on the front page of the State, a South Carolina newspaper, the next day: “In all our lifetimes, finally, this towering undulating moment is here.”9
FOUR
THE SIN OF SLAVERY
On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof pushed open the massive wooden door to a wide, ground-floor room at Emanuel AME Church that parishioners call the basement, an incongruent label in an Atlantic coast city that floods at high tide. Before the twenty-one-year-old Roof made it all the way inside, he knew what he would find—black church members seated with their pastor, most of them twice his age, for Bible study. Instead of choosing to mingle with young, mostly white college students his age who frequent night spots at a nearby commercial district, Roof drove to this house of worship with a history vastly different from his upbringing. A camera captured his image as he entered the vintage church, but modern technology couldn’t detect the hatred Roof harbored or the weapon he toted that would trigger one of South Carolina’s most heinous crimes.
Students of Charleston’s history might find meaning in the date of Roof’s visit to Emanuel on June 17, because 193 years earlier on approximately that date, one of the church’s leaders, Denmark Vesey, had planned to start a slave rebellion. Although no such rebellion ever occurred and Vesey and others were executed by the state, Vesey’s name has been reviled by some whites who have labeled him a murderer and a genocidal maniac.
On his way to Charleston, Roof drove past other historic AME churches and other black churches in cities such as Columbia, the state’s capital, and Orangeburg, the seat of two black campuses of higher learning, one of which is South Carolina State University. In February 1968, the college became the site of major civil rights activism promoting the desegregation of a bowling alley near the campus. After three nights of demonstrations South Carolina highway patrolmen entered the campus. As tensions escalated, some of the patrolmen opened fire, killing three students and injuring twenty-seven others. Known as the Orangeburg Massacre, it was the first time anything like it had happened on an American campus and continues to influence many South Carolinians’ ideas regarding race.
If Roof’s intentions were to start a race war in Charleston, those details may have been significant for his diabolical plan and his distorted understanding of America’s racial history. Roof imagined slavery as a benign institution and perhaps viewed Vesey as an evil by-product of it. In his website screed he bemoaned the failure of the Confederate “nation” and nurtured complaints against people of African descent as the tormentors of his own aggrieved race. On the night Roof arrived at Emanuel, he was blinded by such intense hate that he could not see the humanity his victims shared with him as God’s creations.1
In his 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” How true this is—especially in the South and in a city like Charleston, where its past as the cradle of slavery and its present as a tourist mecca meld as seamlessly as its historic and modern buildings. The hatred that motivated Roof’s assault rose like heat from the sin of slavery, a crime against humanity that antedates the founding of the American nation. That sin has festered for centuries and coexisted with the most fundamental democratic traditions based on the presumed dignity and equality of men. The sin of slavery and its long-term implications have shaped and distorted attitudes toward people of African descent in this country. That night in Emanuel’s basement, it seduced Roof.
