FACING A HERITAGE OF HATE: The Charleston Church Massacre and its Historical Implications

 

In response to Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine black Americans attending bible study during the night of June 17, 2015, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina commented, “I just think he was one of these whacked-out kids. I don’t think it’s anything broader than that.” In a similar vein, South Carolina Governor Niki Haley asserted that “we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another.”[1] These comments mistakenly suggest that Roof’s motivations are somehow inscrutable and unknowable. Yet, in several different instances, Roof explicitly expressed his reasons for committing such a heinous act of violence. During the actual massacre, for example, Roof exclaimed to his victims: “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”[2] As well, in the months leading up to the massacre, Roof posted on several social media outlets pictures of himself proudly displaying the Confederate battle flag in addition to a manifesto that outlined his desire to start a race war in the hopes of reclaiming what he believed to be the rightful domination of white Americans over black Americans.[3] 

The terror that Roof unleashed at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in Charleston, South Carolina was not an accident, or a fluke occurrence without any discernible historical context. Rather, it is part of a painful heritage of racism that began with the brutality of chattel slavery, continued into the post-Civil War campaign to uphold the mythology of white supremacy, and lasted through the de-segregation efforts of the post-World War II era. While the influence of this excruciating legacy exists in a more muted form today, its power to instill hate should not be forgotten.

The vicious history that forms the cornerstone of Roof’s terrorism began with the formation of chattel slavery in the Americas. White authorities built this system of oppression on a supposed racial hierarchy that justified their atrocious acts of brutality against black persons.[4] For instance, advocates of slavery often claimed that people of African descent were by nature more animalistic. Slavery apologists insisted that as a result black Americans would certainly slip back to a state of savagery without the order and restraint of enslavement.[5] Slave owners also reasoned that black laborers were better suited for the hash working conditions of the plantation slave societies because, they contended, people of African descent had higher pain tolerance and did not require as much food or rest. What’s more, slave owners argued that the “thick skin” of black persons permitted the dealing out of unrestrained physical punishments against enslaved persons to compel their labor. The technical definition of a slave, however, was not simply that of an unpaid worker; rather, it meant a person who was considered to be mere property. Thus, slavery was more than just difficult labor; it reflected a system that attempted to dehumanize black persons through subjugation, assault, violence, and terror.[6]

Even with this bleak reality, enslaved people and their descendents were able to create something greater than their oppression. In the words of historian Daryl Michael Scott, black Americans developed “local communities, nationwide institutions, culture, art, collective politics, and traditions.”[7] An artifact of this long history of black activism is the Emanuel A.M.E. Church of Charleston, South Carolina. In 1818, under the leadership of Morris Brown, black members of Charleston’s Methodist Episcopal church withdrew their membership to establish the independent black church that would become Emanuel A.M.E. in a city that had been at the heart of the mainland colonial trans-Atlantic slave trade. As one of the largest black Methodist congregations in the country at the time of its founding, Emanuel A.M.E. served as a symbol of black resistance to white supremacy.[8] Hence, the very founding of a separate black church in a city and region so deeply embedded in the slave system not only defied white authority; it also represented a rebellious act.[9]

Almost immediately after its establishment white officials began enacting measures to counteract the church’s influence. In June of 1818, for example, Charleston’s city guard arrested 140 church members and ministers, including Morris Brown, for violating the state’s prohibition on educating slaves.[10] In 1822, white authorities also investigated the church for its involvement with a planned slave revolt. The so-called Denmark Vesey conspiracy, named after one of the church’s founders who had supposedly been instrumental in the forming of the plot, resulted in the arrests of three hundred alleged participants. In the end, state officials executed thirty-five of the alleged participants including Vesey. Because of the Vesey controversy, white Southerners burned down the A.M.E. church. Worship services continued after the church was rebuilt in the years immediately following the Vesey plot, but the outlawing of all-black churches in 1834 forced the congregation to meet in secret until 1865.[11] All in all, when Roof opened fire at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church of Charleston, he was striking at a site that had long been the center of black activism in what had been the heart of the slave South.

After Roof’s bloodshed at Emanuel A.M.E. a debate arose over the continual displaying of the Confederate battle flag in public spaces. Because of Roof’s prominent use of the flag to justify his murderous rampage, several public figures, including President Barack Obama and Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush, called for the removal of the flag from the statehouse grounds.[12] But, other figures were quick to defend the flag. To this end, they claimed that the flag represented “heritage not hate.” South Carolina Governor Niki Haley, for instance, insisted that Roof had a “sick and twisted view of the flag,” and that his view did not reflect “the people in our state who respect it and in many ways revere it.” For Haley, and others, the flag merely serves as a commemoration of what had been a noble effort to resist the tyranny of the federal government.[13] But, as TA-Nehisi Coats so eloquently puts it, “The Confederate flag is directly tied to the Confederate cause, and the Confederate cause was one of white supremacy.”[14]

For years, academically trained historians have shown in pain-staking detail that slavery was indeed the central cause of the Civil War.[15] As the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James M. McPherson has argued, even if one entertains the contention that “states’ rights” played the driving force in brining about the Civil War such a concession immediately begs the question: states’ rights to do what exactly? And, of course, as McPherson explains, the answer to this question is “the right to own slaves, the right to take this property into the territories.”[16]

That the Confederate flag signifies not only an attachment to slavery, but also the hatred invested in the mythology of white supremacy is demonstrated by the very words of those who created the Confederacy. For instance, the leaders of South Carolina, the first state to secede two months after the election of Abraham Lincoln, justified the action by proclaiming that withdrawal from the Union was needed because “a geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.”[17] The political officials in Mississippi made their reason for seceding even clearer in their state’s declaration, which stated: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery…its labor supplies the products which constitutes by far the largest and most important positions of commerce on the earth…none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun.”[18] In a final example, Texas state authorities reasoned in their state’s justification that “the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator.”[19]

The last passage highlights one of the core beliefs that white Southerners clung to in their support for the institution of slavery. By the time of the Civil War, slaveholders had increasingly insisted that African slavery not only allowed for the right to hold another person in servitude, but that it also supplied the foundation for white equality. In 1858, for example, the soon-to-be President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis argued before the Mississippi Legislature that “among us white men have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist where white men fill the position here occupied by the servile race.”[20] For Southern slaveholders, African slavery was one of the great social institutions in history, and far more superior to the “free labor society” of the North. For instance, Senator James Henry Hammond (D-SC) in his famous “Cotton is King Speech” contended: “We do not think that whites should be slaves either by law or by necessity. Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race….Yours are white, of your own race…they are your equals in natural endowment of intellect, and they feel galled by their degradation.”[21] As these comments suggest, slave-owners maintained that African slavery permitted white men to develop their higher intellectual capabilities while black persons took care of the necessary day-to-day unskilled tasks of the world. Thus, Roof’s contention in his manifesto that black lives served no purpose beyond subjugation and servitude harkens back to the “sick and twisted” views of those who upheld the institution of chattel slavery and its Confederate flag.[22]

In the end, the Civil War toppled the slave South and gave way to the era of Reconstruction, a time that witnessed a brief unsettling of America’s racial hierarchy. For instance, sixteen black Americans served in the United States Congress during this time, including two in the Senate.[23] Some historians have even gone so far as to describe the period from 1865 to 1867 as a time of extraordinary progress in the South. These historians have pointed to the rebuilding of war-shattered public institutions, the establishment of the region’s first public school systems, and the effort to construct an interracial political democracy on the ashes of slavery as all being examples of the era’s commendable achievements.[24]

Yet, this moment in which black people were able to claim a measure of political and civil equality did not last long. As early as 1865, for instance, several Southern states began to pass so-called Black Codes in order to severely limit the rights of freed black people. These laws barred black Americans from testifying in court or sitting on juries, which guaranteed that they would have no legal recourse against white Americans who cheated, attacked, or murdered them. In short, these laws attempted to keep black Americans in a system as close to slavery as the Thirteenth Amendment would allow. To push back against these measures, the federal government created the Freedmen’s Bureau to help black Americans find homes and jobs.[25] As well, the United States Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to grant citizenship to all people born in the United States and, thus, granting black Americans the right to own property, sue, serve as witnesses, etc. Congress later passed the Fourteenth Amendment to enforce the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.[26]

As historian Heather Cox Richardson notes, it was during these developments that white Southerners began to argue that the Civil War had actually been about states’ rights, and not slavery. [27] This line of reasoning, which scholars have named after Edward Pollard’s immensely popular book The Lost Cause (1866), made slavery a side issue through its insistence that the war was actually fought by the South for states’ legitimate rights and by the North for political and economic power. This position is still popular among Southern commemorative organizations and Confederate re-enactors.[28] As the Lost Cause mythology gained ground in the Reconstruction-era South, angry white Southerners came to increasingly allege that radical Republicans were exaggerating the postwar violence against black Southerners to maintain control over the federal government. White Southerners claimed that because of these embellished stories bleeding-heart Northern voters would continue to keep the Republicans in power who were taking away the hard-earned money of white Americans for the purposes of pampering blacks Americans with schools, hospitals, and public works programs.[29]

In 1866, several white Southerners in Tennessee took their anger a step further by creating the Ku Klux Klan. Carrying the Confederate battle flag as its beacon, this terrorist organization soon spread its operations throughout the Reconstruction-era South. As a whole, the Klan sought to intimidate and brutalize economically ambitious and politically assertive black Americans and their white allies. In the period immediately leading up to the 1868 election, for example, the Klan murdered at least a thousand Republicans, white as well as black. The Klan was able to gain support from significant segments of the white southern populace because it played upon a long history of white Americans imagining black people as fearsome, criminal, and bent on political and sexual domination. To this end, Klan leaders claimed that they were acting as forces of law and order against a multitude of black criminals intent on causing chaos and defiling women. The myth of the predatory black male that the Klan helped to spread continued to haunt white Americans for decades, as is evidenced by Roof’s claim that his killings were partly motivated to protect white women from black rapists.[30] To curtail Klan violence, Congress passed the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, which made political intimidation a federal offense. This act allowed President U.S. Grant to place nine counties in South Carolina that were deeply suffused with Klan influence under martial law.[31]

The period of Reconstruction started to end fifteen years after the battle of Fort Sumter, as ordinary citizens in the North and their political leaders began to look for an exit strategy from the still occupied South. They did not have to wait long. The outcome of the disputed 1876 presidential election resulted in a bargain that historian C. Vann Woodward famously condemned as the disgraceful start of the Jim Crow segregation era, which lasted until the middle of the 20th century.[32] With this bargain, the South agreed to allow the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes to take office in return for the withdrawal of the last occupation troops from the region. Altogether, this compromise allowed the Southern state governments to pass any laws that did not overtly challenge the authority of the federal government. As long as white Southerners did not attempt to break away from the Union or reestablish slavery, they were free to erect monuments to Confederate soldiers, glorify the Confederate battle flag, idealize the Lost Cause, and withhold the rights of citizenship to anyone with an ounce of African DNA.[33]

After world War II, the fantasies of white supremacists rose to even more prominence after black Americans intensified their movement for social justice and equality. For instance, the federal government’s acknowledgement of the inherent flaws in the separate but equal doctrine with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) incited a massive movement amongst white reactionaries to resist any attempt to de-segregate the South. White Southerners’ outcries against the federal government increased when President Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock Central High School in 1957; the first time since Reconstruction that troops had been sent into the South to enforce federal policy. Guided by James Kilpatrick of the National Review, white reactionaries resurrected the old language of Reconstruction, as they insisted that the federal government was seizing legitimate authority from the states in order to redistribute tax dollars from hard-working white taxpayers to lazy and undeserving black Americans.[34] White reactionaries’ scare campaigns against the Civil Rights Movement also claimed that racial equality would unchain black men’s natural sexual desires for white women and, once again, upset a well-established racial hierarchy.[35] During all of this time, the Confederate battle flag became ever more popular as white reactionaries adopted it as their symbol of resistance against the federal government’s de-segregation efforts. Consequently, in 1962, South Carolina legislators voted to raise the battle flag over the statehouse grounds where it continued to fly until Roof’s deadly rampage forced Americans to face the heritage of hate that was deeply embedded in the flag’s history.[36]

By 1980, as Heather Cox Richardson has shown, the popularity of the Confederate battle flag grew to become a powerful emblem for people in the North and South alike who were opposed to the idea of a strong federal government that actively worked to improve the lives of those who had been left behind in American society. In Richardson’s words, it was this evolution of white supremacy that would later give us “Ronald Regan’s ‘welfare queen,’ George Bush’s ‘Willie Horton,’ and Mitt Romney’s ‘47 percent.” The mythology of white supremacy, then, had evolved into a more subtle ideology that became the means through which the strong federal government, created by New Deal and the Great Society to work for the good of all Americans, was replaced by a weak entity that operated for the good of only a few (mostly white) people.[37] In the end, the explosion of violence that Dylan Roof unleashed this past June should not be understood as a random act. Rather, it is the product of a long legacy of racism that continues to affect not only the South, but the United States as a whole.

[1] Jelani Cobb, “Terrorism in Charleston,” New Yorker, 29 June 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/29/terrorism-in-charleston.

[2] Jeremy Borden, Sari Horwitz, and Jerry Markon, “From the Victims’ Families, forgiveness for accused Charleston gunman Dylan Roof,” Washington Post, 19 June 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/south-carolina-governor-urges-death-penalty-charges-in-church-slayings/2015/06/19/3c039722-1678-11e5-9ddc-e3353542100c_story.html.

[3] Brendan O’Connor, “Here is What Appears to be Dylann Roof’s Racist Manifesto,” Gawker, 20 June 2015, http://gawker.com/here-is-what-appears-to-be-dylann-roofs-racist-manifest-1712767241.

[4] Stephen Kantrowitz, “America’s Long History of Racial Fear,” We’re History, 24 June 2015, http://werehistory.org/racial-fear/.

[5] Joshua D. Rothman, “The Charleston Massacre and the Rape Myth of Reconstruction,” We’re History, 22 June 2015, http://werehistory.org/charleston-rape-myth/.

[6] Margaret Biser, “I Used to Lead Tours at a Plantation. You Won’t Believe the Questions I got about Slavery,” Vox, 29 June 2015, http://www.vox.com/2015/6/29/8847385/what-i-learned-from-leading-tours-about-slavery-at-a-plantation.

[7] Daryl Michael Scott, “The Problem is Ethnicity, Not Race,” AHA Today, 14 June 2015, http://blog.historians.org/2015/07/problem-ethnicity-not-race/.

[8] Rothman, “The Charleston Massacre.”

[9] John Garrison Marks, “A Rebellious Act: The Founding of Charleston’s African Church,” We’re History, 23 June 2015, http://werehistory.org/african-church/.

[10] Ibid.

[11] “Emanuel A.M.E. Church,” Charleston’s Historic Religious & Community Buildings, http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/charleston/ema.htm (accessed 2 August 2015).

[12] Michael Barbaro, “Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and Ted Cruz Weigh In on Confederate Flag at South Carolina Capitol,” New York Times, 20 June 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/06/20/mitt-romney-calls-for-removal-of-confederate-flag-at-south-carolina-capitol/?_r=0.

[13] TA-Nehisi Coates, “What This Cruel War was Over,” Atlantic, 22 June 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/what-this-cruel-war-was-over/396482/. See also TA-Nehisi Coates, “Take Down the Flag—Now,” Atlantic, 18 June 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/take-down-the-confederate-flag-now/396290/.

[14] Coates, “What This Cruel War was Over.”

[15] See Eric Foner Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Part Before the Civil War (New York, 1970); William L. Barney, The Road to Secession: A New Perspective on the Old South (New York, 1972); Richard H. Sewell, A House Divided: Sectionalism and the Civil War, 1848-1865 (Baltimore, 1988); and James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988).

[16] McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 241. See also Christopher Clausen, “America’s Changeable Civil War,” Wilson Quarterly (Spring 2010): 30-35.

[17] South Carolina State Legislature, “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,” 24 December 1860, The Civil War Trust, http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/primarysources/declarationofcauses.html (accessed 2 August 2015).

[18] Mississippi State Legislature, “A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union,” 9 January 1861, The Civil War Trust, http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/primarysources/declarationofcauses.html (accessed 2 August 2015).

[19] Texas State Legislature, “A Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union,” 2 February 1861, The Civil War Trust, http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/primarysources/declarationofcauses.html (accessed 2 August 2015).

[20] “Speech of Jefferson Davis before the Mississippi Legislature,” 16 November 1858, Confederate Truths: Documents of the Confederate & Neo-Confederate Tradition from 1787 to the Present, http://confederatepastpresent.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=117:speech-of-jefferson-davis-before-the-mississippi-legislature-nov-16-1858q-where-he-advocates-secession-if-an-abolitionist-is-elected-president-&catid=41:the-gathering-storm (accessed 2 August 2015).

[21] James Henry Hammond, “Cotton is King,” 4 March 1858, Teaching American History, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/cotton-is-king/ (accessed 2 August).

[22] Coates, “What This Cruel War was Over.”

[23] See Stanley Turkel, Heroes of the American Reconstruction: Profiles of Sixteen Educators, Politicians, and Activists (McFarland, 2005).

[24] See Eric Foner, ed. The New American History (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1997), 95-98.

[25] Heather Cox Richardson, “White Southern Hate, Stripped Bare for All to See,” Salon, 5 July 2015, http://www.salon.com/2015/07/05/white_southern_hate_stripped_bare_for_all_to_see/.

[26] Edward Ayers, Lewis Gould, David Oshinsky, Jean Soderlund, American Passages: A History of the United States (Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2010), 405.

[27] Richardson, “White Southern Hate, Stripped Bare for All to See.”

[28] Clausen, “America’s Changeable Civil War,” 32-33.

[29] Richardson, “White Southern Hate, Stripped Bare for All to See.”

[30] Rothman, “The Charleston Massacre.”

[31] Cobb, “Terrorism in Charleston.”

[32] See C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1951).

[33] Clausen, “America’s Changeable Civil War,” 35.

[34] Richardson, “White Southern Hate, Stripped Bare for All to See.”

[35] Kantrowitz, “America’s Long History of Racial Fear.”

[36] Richardson, “White Southern Hate, Stripped Bare for All to See.”

[37] Ibid.

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