Alt-America. David Neiwert
In conjunction with an upswing in domestic terrorism and hate crimes that began in 2008, the SPLC saw dramatic increases in the number of hate groups and extremist organizations that got their start in those years; the number steadily increased in each of the following years. In 2012–13, the SPLC counted 1,360 active Patriot groups and 873 other hate groups of various stripes, such as the Ku Klux Klan, skinheads, neo-Nazis, antigay groups, anti-Muslims groups, and so forth.
But then along came a sharp decline between 2013 and 2015, of Patriot groups in particular; the new total was 874. At first it looked like an aberration, but eventually the reason became clear: radicals were taking their acts out of organizations and going online. In March 2015, Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the SPLC, explained what the data was showing them: the advent of social media and other more dispersed means of sharing information had created a shift in how extremists shared their ideologies and how they recruited, too.
The evidence, he said, indicated “that large numbers of extremists have left organized groups because of the high social cost of being known to affiliate with them. Many of those people apparently now belong to no group, but operate instead mainly on the Internet, where they can offer their opinions anonymously and easily find others who agree with them—and where they can be heard by huge numbers of people without the hassles, dues, and poor leadership associated with membership in most groups.” He continued, “In any event, as the movement to the Internet suggests, the importance of organized radical groups is declining for a number of reasons. In an age when ever more people are congregating on the web and in social media, the radical right is doing the same. With almost no charismatic leaders on the scene, there is little to attract radicals to join groups when they can broadcast their opinions across the world via the Internet and at the same time remain anonymous if they wish.”
With these observations on the force of attraction of the Internet, he could have been describing Dylann Roof.
Dylann Roof hardly seemed to live in the real world, because before that day in Charleston he had made so little impact on it. The son of a carpenter and a barmaid, by the age of twenty-one he had never had an occupation other than landscaper, a job he only held for a few weeks. He couldn’t be called a student, since he had dropped out after ninth grade. He had been married and divorced. Mostly he hung out in his room and played video games, taking drugs and getting drunk.
At some point in his late teens, though, a political bug kicked in, and he began posting online: mostly white-nationalist material, including memes promoting the “14 Words”—a white-supremacist creed about “ensuring the future of the white race”—and the symbol “88,” which is a cipher for “Heil Hitler” (h is the eighth letter of the alphabet). Photos of Roof posing with guns, with a Confederate flag, with a Rhodesian flag deck, posing at plantations and at cemeteries in historic slavery sites decked the walls of his bedroom.
One of his favorite websites was a neo-Nazi forum called the Daily Stormer, which he seems to have first encountered after his discovery of the Council of Conservative Citizens website. Roof posted at the Stormer under the handle “AryanBlood1488,” perhaps as early as September 2014, and his hatred of black people was already pronounced then. “White culture is World Culture,” he wrote, “and by that I don’t mean that our culture is made up of ones from around the world, I mean that our culture has been adopted by everyone in the world. This makes us feel as if it isn’t special, because everyone has adopted it.” A nearly identical passage appears in his manifesto.
He began making preparations for his big day. He bought a Glock 41 .45-caliber handgun, even though he had been busted for narcotics possession in February and, under normal circumstances, should have been prevented from buying any guns at all, but the FBI’s background-check system failed to catch him.
He also began telling his friends that soon he was going to start shooting people. Two of his friends tried to hide his gun from him. Another old friend, Dalton Tyler, ran into him just a week before he took his fateful trip to Charleston. “He was big into segregation and other stuff,” Tyler said. “He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.”
But no one took him seriously. No one called the police.
When he set out for Charleston the morning of June 17, Roof probably intended to carry out his shooting spree primarily at the College of Charleston, an elegant old-line Southern school in the older part of the city. That was what he had been telling his friends. But at some point he changed his mind, apparently because of the high levels of security at the college campus, and headed for Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the city’s oldest churches and a historic center of civil-rights activism in South Carolina. Its pastor, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, was a state senator and well-regarded spokesperson for the black community.
When Roof walked into the church at 8:20 p.m., a prayer service was under way with a large congregation in attendance. Roof sat down in a pew. Shortly afterward, the gathering broke up into smaller Bible study groups. Roof, the only white person in the church, joined the group that was being led by Rev. Pinckney. He sought out a seat next to Pinckney. There were eleven others in the group.
All were longtime members of the congregation and their family members. Daniel Simmons, seventy-four, the church’s assistant pastor, had retired a few years before as the head pastor at a nearby African Methodist church. Cynthia Hurd, fifty-four, was the branch manager of St. Andrews Regional Library. Depayne Middleton-Doctor, forty-nine, a longtime singer in the church choir, was an admissions coordinator at the Charleston learning center of her alma mater, Southern Wesleyan University. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, forty-five, also an assistant pastor at the church, was a track coach at Goose Creek High School. Myra Thompson, fifty-nine, a longtime churchgoer and Bible study teacher, was an active member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. Susie Jackson, eighty-seven, was a longtime member of the church. Felecia Sanders, fifty-eight, Jackson’s younger sister, was attending the service to be with her family. Tywanza Sanders, twenty-six, Felecia’s son, a 2014 graduate of Allen University, was an aspiring poet who was renowned for his broad smile. With them was Felecia’s granddaughter, five. Ethel Lance, seventy, was a longtime director of Charleston’s Gaillard Auditorium who had worked at the church for thirty years. Polly Sheppard, seventy-one, was a church trustee.
For nearly an hour the group discussed Scripture among themselves. Roof later told police that he nearly called off his plan because everyone “was so nice to him.” But he eventually steeled himself, deciding he “had to go through with his mission.”
No one is quite sure what set him off, but Felecia Sanders said later the group had just closed their eyes to begin the closing prayer when Dylann Roof stood up, began ranting that he was there to kill “niggers,” and pulled out his Glock. He turned and fired point-blank at Rev. Pinckney, killing him instantly.
Then he pointed it at Susie Jackson, the oldest person in the room. Tywanza Sanders stood up and pleaded with Roof not to take out his hatred on innocent people. “You don’t have to do this,” he said.
“Yes I do,” Roof answered. “I have to do it. You’ve raped our women, and you are taking over the country. You have to go. I have to do what I have to do.”
Sanders dove across his elderly aunt, Susie Jackson, trying to shield her, and Roof opened fire, killing him first. Then he shot Susie Jackson too.
The room erupted in the sound of gunfire and screams. Roof was between the door and everyone else, so they had nowhere to go but to cower on the floor. He methodically roamed about the room, shooting all of the other occupants—first Rev. Simmons, and then the rest, shooting each victim multiple times. He reloaded the Glock five times. He screamed racial epithets at his victims, and taunted them: “Y’all want something to pray about? I’ll give you something to pray about.”
Somehow, when it was all over, he had missed Felecia Sanders and her five-year-old granddaughter, who lay still on the floor, pretending to be dead, and Polly Sheppard, who also lay quivering on the floor. Roof stood over her.
“Did I shoot you?” he asked.
“No.”
He