Alt-America. David Neiwert
be the only survivor.”
Then he turned away, pointed the gun to his head, and pulled the trigger—but it only clicked. He had run out of ammunition. So he walked out the door and into the night.
On the day after Dylann Roof’s rampage, the flags over the South Carolina statehouse in Columbia flew at half-staff except for one, the Confederate battle flag at the nearby Confederate Monument, which was affixed atop a pole by state law and could only come down at the behest of the state legislature. Half-staff wasn’t even an option. (The flag had been moved there after a controversy surrounding the flag’s flying over the statehouse itself.) But even before Roof was caught, the photos of him waving Confederate flags began to appear, along with his manifesto, and suddenly that flag’s position came into sharp focus.
Roof himself was captured the next morning in his car in Shelby, North Carolina. Another driver, Debbie Dills of Gastonia, North Carolina, spotted him while driving alongside him on US Route 74, and followed him for thirty-five miles while phoning the police with details of his whereabouts. Police surrounded his car and he surrendered without incident.
The massacre outraged and stunned the world. Most shocked were Americans, who had seemingly forgotten about the racial hatred that fueled white supremacism, both the street variety and the institutional kind. A number of acts of shocking terrorist violence had been committed for a variety of motives in recent years, but this one was fueled by pure old-fashioned racial hatred. It was as though Dylann Roof had summoned an ancient demon out of the American cellar that everyone had hoped had withered away out of neglect. Instead it had grown large and ravenous in the dark.
The shooting took place in the midst of rising racial turmoil in the United States. The Trayvon Martin shooting in February 2012 had sparked a growing national conversation about the disproportionate numbers of deaths of young black men while their murderers went free. Some of them had died while in police custody. The heated conversation turned into a bonfire when a young black man named Michael Brown was shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. The shooting sparked several days of civil unrest in Ferguson as large protest crowds confronted police riot forces. A grand jury’s decision in November not to charge the police officer triggered another week of riots and some looting.
There were other similar incidents of inexplicable lethal force applied to black men and boys. In July 2014, Eric Garner died in a New York City policeman’s chokehold. Tamir Rice, twelve, was shot in November 2014 by a Cleveland policeman for having a toy gun at a playground. Eric Harris was killed by Tulsa police detectives while trying to run away from an undercover sting in April 2015. Less than a week later, in Baltimore, Freddie Gray, twenty-five, died while in police custody after sustaining injuries to his neck and spine. The incidents kept mounting and drove the black community to become increasingly organized to push back. The movement called Black Lives Matter began making its presence felt in demonstrations around the United States.
South Carolina had had its own moment that spring in the unwelcome spotlight of racial strife—just weeks before Roof’s attack: On April 4, Michael Slager, a white North Charleston police officer, confronted Walter Scott about the brake lights on Scott’s 1991 Mercedes. Scott tried to flee; Slager caught up to him in a nearby vacant lot; Scott ran away again; Slager pulled his gun and shot him to death in the back. A bystander caught the shooting on video. Soon it went viral across the nation on social media and nightly newscasts.
But this time the policeman did not get away with it. After police viewed the video, Slager was arrested on April 7 and was indicted by a grand jury on June 8. Roof went on his rampage on June 17.
As it happened, Slager was Roof’s cell-block neighbor at the detention center in North Charleston where police took him after his capture (the two were unable to communicate). Roof reportedly confessed immediately to his crime and told investigators it was his hope that he would start a race war.
But nothing of the sort happened. The black community did not rise up in violence and anger in response to the murders. Instead, the survivors and the victims’ family members publicly forgave Roof and his fellow haters and urged the community to come together to heal. The black community chose to focus on helping that healing process happen. At the funerals for the victims, and in interviews with the survivors, forgiveness was the overriding theme.
“We welcomed you Wednesday night in our Bible study with open arms,” said Felecia Sanders in a public statement she read aloud to Roof at his first court hearing. “You have killed some of the most beautifulest people that I know. Every fiber in my body hurts, and I will never be the same. Tywanza Sanders is my son, but Tywanza was my hero … May God have mercy on you.”
Ethel Lance’s daughter said, “I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul. You hurt me. You hurt a lot of people, but God forgives you, and I forgive you.”
President Obama came to Charleston and delivered the eulogy at Rev. Pinckney’s memorial. As for Dylann Roof’s hopes for a race war, Obama called the massacre “an act that he presumed would deepen divisions that trace back to our nation’s original sin. Oh, but God works in mysterious ways,” Obama continued. “God has different ideas. He didn’t know he was being used by God. Blinded by hatred, the alleged killer could not see the grace surrounding Rev. Pinckney and that Bible study group.”
“We all have one thing in common. Our hearts are broken,” said Mayor Joseph Riley Jr. at an interfaith prayer service. Riley received a standing ovation at the service when another speaker recalled a 120-mile march to Columbia that Riley led in 2000 to demand the removal of the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds—a demand that was never fully met.
The Confederate flag had been hoisted over the South Carolina statehouse in 1962 on the orders of Governor Ernest Hollings, a Democrat, at the behest of the state legislature, as a protest against desegregation. Everyone knew what the flag stood for, and they weren’t afraid to say it: White power. Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. Keep the niggers down.
By 2000, no one was willing to say that anymore. Defenders of the flag’s continued use relied on a set of euphemisms—“states’ rights,” “Southern heritage,” “regional identity”—for what they all knew was an abiding belief in white supremacy. The historian Gordon Rhea explains:
It is no accident that Confederate symbols have been the mainstay of white supremacist organizations, from the Ku Klux Klan to the skinheads. They did not appropriate the Confederate battle flag simply because it was pretty. They picked it because it was the flag of a nation dedicated to their ideals: “that the negro is not equal to the white man.” The Confederate flag, we are told, represents heritage, not hate. But why should we celebrate a heritage grounded in hate, a heritage whose self-avowed reason for existence was the exploitation and debasement of a sizeable segment of its population?
South Carolina’s display of the Confederate flag from atop its state-house dome was one of the more notorious examples of officialdom flaunting the symbol. The pressure remained intense to remove it from the grounds altogether, including boycotts of the state by both the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Finally, after the Charleston massacre, South Carolina’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, was suddenly faced with the need for major damage control. Haley and others knew that it was time to act. On June 22, five days after the massacre, she held a press conference. “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,” Haley said. The removal, she explained, was necessary to prevent the symbol from causing further pain.
Even some of the flag’s staunchest defenders conceded the need for change. “With the winds that started blowing last week, I figured it would just be a matter of time,” said Ken Thrasher of the South Carolina division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “Whatever the Legislature decides to do, we will accept it graciously.”
On June 23, the Assembly began to consider a measure to remove the flag from the statehouse grounds. On July 10, in a solemn ceremony, the flag was taken down for the last time.