The United States Department of Justice investigated whether the shooting was a hate crime or an act of domestic terrorism, eventually indicting Roof on 33 federal hate crime charges. Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is one of the United States' oldest black churches and has long been a site for community organization around civil rights. Roof is to be indicted on federal hate crime charges, and has been charged with nine counts of murder by the State of South Carolina. If convicted, he could face a sentence of death or thirty years to life in prison. A website apparently published by Roof included a manifesto detailing his beliefs on race, as well as several photographs showing him posing with emblems associated with white supremacy. Roof's photos of the Confederate battle flag triggered debate on its modern display.
The church's senior pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, had held rallies after the shooting of Walter Scott by a white police officer on April 4, 2015, in nearby North Charleston, and as a state senator, he pushed for legislation requiring police to wear body cameras. Several observers noted a similarity between the massacre at Emanuel AME and the 1963 bombing of a politically active African-American church in Birmingham, Alabama, where the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) killed four black girls and injured fourteen others, an attack that galvanized the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.
A number of scholars, journalists, activists and politicians have emphasized the need to understand the attack in the broader context of racism in the United States, rather than seeing it as an isolated event of racially motivated violence. In 1996, Congress passed the Church Arson Prevention Act, making it a federal crime to damage religious property because of its "racial or ethnic character", in response to a spate of 154 suspicious church burnings since 1991. More recent arson attacks against black churches included a black church in Massachusetts that was burned down the day after President Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009.
At around 9:05 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, June 17, 2015, the Charleston Police Department responded to calls of a shooting at Emanuel AME Church. A man described as white, with sandy-blond hair, around 21 years old and 5 feet 9 inches (175 cm) in height, wearing a gray sweatshirt and jeans, opened fire with a Glock 41 .45-caliber handgun on a group of people inside the church at a Bible study attended by Pinckney. The shooter then fled. He had been carrying eight magazines holding hollow-point bullets, which are designed to inflict maximum damage. This was the largest mass shooting at American place of worship, alongside a 1991 attack at a Buddhist temple in Waddell, Arizona.
During the hour preceding the attack, 13 people including the shooter participated in the Bible study. According to the accounts of people who talked to survivors, the shooter asked for Pinckney and sat down next to him, initially listening to others during the study. He started to disagree when they began discussing Scripture. Eventually he stood up and pulled a gun from a fanny pack, aiming it at 87-year-old Susie Jackson. Jackson's nephew, 26-year-old Tywanza Sanders, tried to talk him down and asked him why he was attacking churchgoers. The shooter responded, "I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go." When he expressed his intention to shoot everyone, Sanders dove in front of Jackson and was shot first. The suspect then shot the other victims, all the while shouting racial epithets. He also reportedly said, "Y'all want something to pray about? I'll give you something to pray about." He reloaded his gun five times.
In this manifesto, Roof says he became "racially aware" as a result of the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, writing that because he kept hearing people talk about the incident, he "decided to look him up" and read the Wikipedia article about it. He concluded that George Zimmerman had been in the right, and he was unable to comprehend why the case had gained national attention. He then searched for "black on White [sic] crime" on Google and found the website of the Council of Conservative Citizens, where he read "pages upon pages" of cases involving black people murdering white people. Roof then writes he has "never been the same since that day".
According to unconfirmed reports, Roof confessed to committing the attack and said his purpose was to start a race war. He reportedly told investigators he almost did not go through with his mission because members of the church study group had been so nice to him.
Heidi Beirich, the director of the Intelligence Project for the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit that maintains an online list of its designated American hate groups, said the gunman's reported self-declared motivation reflected a major topic on white supremacist websites, which are preoccupied with the idea that "whites are being hugely victimized by blacks and no one is paying attention." In particular, the shooter's reported claim that "you rape our women" ties into a long history of violence against blacks in the name of white womanhood; Beirich said, "[Black men sexually assaulting white women] is probably the oldest racist trope we have in the U.S." According to her, it was a particularly effective trope because of the way white femininity has historically been viewed and positioned. Lisa Lindquist-Dorr, associate professor at the University of Alabama, explained the myth of black rapists that dominated white, Southern culture, saying, "Sexual access to women is a trophy of power, white women embodied virtue and morality, they signified whiteness and white superiority, so sexual access to white women was possessing the ultimate privilege that white men held. It makes women trophies to be traded among men."
Jamelle Bouie itemized for Slate, "Make any list of anti-black terrorism in the United States, and you'll also have a list of attacks justified by the specter of black rape." The Tulsa race riot of 1921, the Rosewood massacre of 1923, and the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 were cited as examples. Beirich said it was unclear at that point in the investigation whether the suspect had any connection to hate groups, but such groups have been growing over the past decade, and "for several years South Carolina has been the place with the highest density of hate groups."
The Rabbinical Assembly, in its own statement, quoted Leviticus, saying, "'Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.' Hateful, violent acts such as this have no place in our society, in a country known for its diversity and blending of various cultures."
Many national Muslim organizations and individual imams, such as Council on American-Islamic Relations, Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and Islamic Circle of North America issued statements condemning the attack and offering sympathy for the victims. In a joint statement, CAIR and Muslim leaders in Baltimore quoted the Quran, saying, "The Qur'an, the Muslim holy book, says: 'He who takes one life, it is as if he has slain all of mankind. And he who saves one life, it is as if he has saved all of mankind.'"
Muslim and Jewish religious organizations have raised several hundred thousand dollars to help rebuild black churches that were burned down in the weeks after the shootings.
He seemed nice enough.
And I'm sure he doesn't mean ill will toward anyone.
But after our conversation,
here's what I didn't like about this young man:
I thank ... HIS GOD ... I wasn't
born a black man!
If the best I can get out of him when trying to discuss god and politics,
that he votes what is in his best interest;
he ...
(as opposed to "our" best interest)
probably does the same with the gun..?
How could you not?
The night following the attack, Jon Stewart delivered a monologue on The Daily Show discussing the tragic nature of the news, condemning the attacks as well as the media's response to it. Stewart argued that in response to Islamic terrorism, politicians declare they will do "whatever we can" to make America safe, even justifying torture, but respond to this mass shooting with "what are you gonna do, crazy is as crazy does".
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