Charleston mass murderer Roof homegrown American Terrorist

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Dylan Roof is a terrorist...an American Terrorist... first and foremost ...and the people he killed/the lives he changed ....that is what this thread is about

This is America. This is now.

Charleston mass murderer Dylann Roof is a homegrown American terrorist
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Published: Thursday, June 18, 2015, 2:37 PM Updated: Thursday, June 18, 2015, 2:54 PM A A A

DAVID GOLDMAN/AP
Not from the history books
The massacre of nine black women and men in Charleston’s Emanuel AME church was an act of terrorism by a white, born-in-the-U.S.A. racist armed with a gun — and magazine after magazine after magazine of ammunition.

While racial hatred gives the mass shooting the feel of an abomination from the history books, the bloodshed was an expression of two virulent cultural strains: anti-black hatred and Second Amendment extremism.

DYLANN ROOF BRAGGED ABOUT PLANS TO KILL A BUNCH OF PEOPLE

This is the America of now, a nation where suspect Dylann Storm Roof is among the thousands of whites who passionately revile African Americans, the form of group loathing that remains the nation’s most common brand of bigotry.

Roof entered the church, asked for the pastor and spent an hour in a Bible study among a dozen or so parishioners, taking advantage of the open hearts of his hosts.


The unthinkable
According to witnesses, he then stood up, said he was there “to shoot black people” and fired his weapon, reloading five different times and stealing the lives of six women and three men, including the pastor, Rev. Clementa Pinckney.

REV. CLEMENTA PINCKNEY KILLED IN CHARLESTON CHURCH MASSACRE

A survivor quoted Roof as voicing a psychopathology that has haunted America from slavery through the Ku Klux Klan, that of the black man as a sexual predator.

“I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go,” said the gunman, recounted one survivor.

Roof’s Facebook page features at least one expression of white supremacism. In a photo, he wears a jacket with the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and white-ruled neighboring Rhodesia before it became Zimbabwe.

Those who took no action after hearing Roof say that he wanted to kill blacks to start a civil war, as a former roommate has admitted, are complicit members of a cancerous culture.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of active hate groups in America more than doubled to over 1,000 between 1999 and 2011, before falling to just under 800 since. While these groups are concentrated in the South, they plague states across America.

Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church re-opens for services after deadly shooting.Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church re-opens for services after deadly shooting.Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church re-opens for services after deadly shooting.Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church re-opens for services after deadly shooting.VIEW GALLERY
Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church re-opens for services
At the same time, blacks suffer the most hate crimes per capita, by far; in 2012, 50 out of every 1 million black citizens were victims of racially motivated crime, according to the FBI.

From its very birth, Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, one of the nation’s oldest black congregations, has had to fight to pray in peace.

Founded in 1816, after white congregations made clear, in increasingly odious ways, how unwelcome blacks were in their midst, the church saw its original structure burned to the ground by white supremacists.


Suspected S.C. Church Shooter Dylann Roof Captured According to Local Authorities
NY Daily News

It was rebuilt — but in 1834, all-black churches were banned in Charleston. The congregation met in secret for a generation.

During America’s great civil rights movement, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke there about voting rights, and Coretta Scott King led a march from its steps.

“This is a sacred place in the history of Charleston and in the history of America,” said President Obama, who knew the Rev. Pinckney and his wife.

For the 14th time delivering remarks about a mass shooting, Obama also said with accuracy and in seeming despair about the plague of guns: “At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency.”

June 17, 2015: Nine people murdered at prayer in a church dedicated to freedom and the Christian faith, nine people taken in a crime that evokes the racial warfare of the 19th and early 20th centuries and the church bombings of the 1960s.

This is America. This is now.

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The Nine South Carolina Victims: Who Were They?
BY MICHELE RICHINICK 6/18/15 AT 4:36 PM

Nine-year-old Liam Eller helps a police officer move flowers left behind outside of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church after the street was reopened a day after a mass shooting left nine dead during a Bible study. BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS

FILED UNDER: U.S., South Carolina, charleston shooting
The nine victims who died inside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) while attending a weekly Bible study group on Wednesday night led meaningful lives. They died nobly, President Barack Obama said Thursday during his address to the country.

"Their Christian faith compelled them to reach out not just to members of their congregation, or to members of their own communities, but to all in need," he said from the White House. "They opened their doors to strangers who might enter a church in search of healing or redemption."

Eight of the victims died at the scene, and one at the hospital, after the alleged gunman fatally shot them inside the church after sitting with them for an hour.

Clementa Pinckney was a longtime South Carolina state senator, and the chief reverend of AME Church. In 1996, he became the youngest African-American state legislator in South Carolina's history, at the age of 23. He was a husband and father of two children who had advocated for the use of body cameras by police.

Some of his peers issued remarks in his memory:


0618_CharlestonShooting10
In honor of Sen. Clementa Pinckney, his seat is draped in black cloth with a single rose and vase in an empty chamber prior to a Senate session. RAINIER EHRHARDT/AP

Cynthia Hurd​'s co-workers described her as a "tireless servant of the community" in her 31-year role as librarian in the Charleston County Public Library system. She served as manager of the John L. Dart Branch from 1990 to 2011, and then became manager of the St. Andrews Regional Library.

Hurd "spent her life helping residents, making sure they had every opportunity for an education and personal growth," according to a statement on the library's Facebook page. The establishment closed Thursday to honor Hurd and the other eight victims.

Sharonda Coleman-Singleton was a speech and language pathologist at South Carolina's Goose Creek High School, with more than 13 years of experience. She also was the head coach for the girls' track and field team, and a part-time pastor at AME Church, according to its website.

"She cared about her students and was an advocate for them, always willing to listen to and talk with them. She was always there with a smile and ready to help," Principal Jimmy Huskey wrote in a statement. "Mrs. Singleton will be deeply missed by the 'Gator Nation,' and we can never replace her as a member of our team." The school will hold a prayer vigil at 7 p.m. in gymnasium.


Tywanza Sanders was a 2014 graduate of the Division of Business Administration at Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina.

"He was a quiet, well-known student who was committed to his education. He presented a warm and helpful spirit as he interacted with his colleagues," Flavia Eldemire, vice president of institutional advancement at the university, wrote in a statement.

Ethel Lance worked at the church for more than 30 years. Her grandson, Jon Quil Lance, told The Post and Courier that he is lost without her.

"Granny was the heart of the family," he said, according to the local newspaper.

A relative identified Susie Jackson as Lance's cousin who also was a longtime church member, the Post and Courier reported.

Myra Thompson's daughter told ABC News that her mother had been killed. She declined to comment further.

Daniel L. Simmons Sr. was a retired pastor from another church in Charleston. He attended Emanuel AME Church every Sunday for services, and each Wednesday for Bible study, his daughter-in-law, Arcelia Simmons, told ABC. He is listed under the church's ministerial staff.

Depayne Middleton retired in 2005 as Charleston County director of the Community Development Block Grant Program, according to the Post and Courier.

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Walmart Is Pulling All Confederate Flag Merchandise From Shelves

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SC governor: Removing Confederate flag will defy race hatred
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South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley speaks during a news conference in the South Carolina State House, Monday, June 22, 2015, in Columbia, S.C. Haley said that the Confederate flag should come down from the grounds of the state capitol, reversing her position on the divisive symbol amid growing calls for it to be removed. Also pictured are U.S. Congressman James Clyburn, left, and U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, right. (Tim Dominick/The State via AP) (Associated Press)
By Seanna Adcox, Jeffrey Collins and Meg Kinnard | AP June 22 at 8:54 PM
CHARLESTON, S.C. — South Carolina’s governor declared Monday that the Confederate flag should be removed from the Statehouse grounds as she acknowledged that its use as a symbol of hatred by the man accused of killing nine black church members has made it too divisive to display in such a public space.

Gov. Nikki Haley’s about-face comes just days after authorities charged Dylann Storm Roof, 21, with murder. The white man appeared in photos waving Confederate flags and burning or desecrating U.S. flags, and purportedly wrote of fomenting racial violence. Survivors told police he hurled racial insults during the attack.

“The murderer now locked up in Charleston said he hoped his actions would start a race war. We have an opportunity to show that not only was he wrong, but that just the opposite is happening,” Haley said, flanked by Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites who joined her call.


“My hope is that by removing a symbol that divides us, we can move our state forward in harmony, and we can honor the nine blessed souls who are now in Heaven,” Haley said.

The massacre inside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church has suddenly made removing the flag — long thought politically impossible in South Carolina — the go-to position, even for conservative Republican politicians.

Haley was flanked by Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, now running for president, as well as South Carolina’s junior Republican senator, Tim Scott, and Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn, both of whom are black. Within moments, her call was echoed by the Republican Party chairman and the top GOP lawmaker, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Haley urged the state’s GOP-led House and Senate to debate the issue no later than this summer. If not, she said she will call a special session and force them to resolve it. “I will use that authority for the purpose of the legislature removing the flag from the Statehouse grounds,” she said.

South Carolina House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford says he’s confident after talking to members of both parties that the Confederate flag will be taken down within the next two months.

“A lot of people understand this is a moment we have to respond to,” said Rep. Rick Quinn, a Republican and former House majority leader who said he will vote to take it down.

Lawmakers have proposed moving it to the state-run Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum.

Making any changes to the banner requires a two-thirds supermajority in both houses under the terms of a 15-year-old deal that moved it from atop the Statehouse to a position next to a monument to Confederate soldiers out front.


The last governor who called for the flag’s removal, Republican David Beasley, was hounded out of office in 1998 by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The group’s influence also doomed his front-running Senate campaign for the seat won by Republican Jim DeMint.

“Do not associate the cowardly actions of a racist to our Confederate Banner,” the group’s South Carolina commander, Leland Summers, said in a statement. “There is absolutely no link between The Charleston Massacre and The Confederate Memorial Banner. Don’t try to create one.”

As recently as November 2014, a poll of 852 people by Winthrop University found 42 percent of South Carolina residents strongly believed the flag should stay, while only 26 percent strongly believed it should be removed.

But South Carolina’s population is slowly becoming more diverse, more educated, wealthier and more exposed to people from outside the state. And the pollster, Scott Huffman, predicts that his August 2015 survey will show that people who didn’t have strong feelings before “will have flipped and now prefer it to come down.”

Haley acknowledged there are very different views about what it symbolizes.

“For many people in our state, the flag stands for traditions that are noble,” she said. “The hate-filled murderer who massacred our brothers and sisters in Charleston has a sick and twisted view of the flag. In no way does he reflect the people in our state who respect, and in many ways, revere it.”

For many others, “the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past,” she said.

South Carolina can survive and thrive “while still being home to both of those viewpoints.”

“We do not need to declare a winner and a loser,” she said. “This is a moment in which we can say that the flag, while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state.”

Only a few months have passed since Haley, an Indian-American, described an opponent’s rally to bring down the flag as a campaign stunt. She claimed last year that businesses weren’t bothered despite continuing boycott demands by black groups.

“We really fixed all that,” she said, with her election as the state’s first female and first minority governor, and the election of Scott as the South’s first black U.S. senator since Reconstruction.

The day after the shooting, Haley’s posture had changed.

“We woke up today and the heart and soul of South Carolina was broken,” she said.

The governor’s announcement came as civil rights groups planned days of marches and protests against the Confederate flag that Roof embraced.

“The flag got appropriated by hate groups. We can’t put it in a public place where it can give any oxygen to hate-filled people,” said Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., a Democrat.

The Confederate battle flag was placed atop the Statehouse dome in the 1960s as an official protest of the civil rights movement. After mass protests, it was moved to the grounds in 2000, as part of a compromise between a group of black lawmakers and the Republicans who have controlled South Carolina for a quarter-century.

That deal kept it flying high since the shooting, even as state and U.S. flags were lowered to honor the victims. It also means that when thousands of mourners honor Emanuel’s slain senior pastor, state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, they will likely see the Confederate flag before or after filing past his coffin in the statehouse.

The White House said President Barack Obama respects the state of South Carolina’s authority to decide the issue, but believes the flag belongs in a museum. Obama knew Pinckney personally, and plans to deliver his eulogy in Charleston on Friday.

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The Confederate battle flag was placed atop the Statehouse dome in the 1960s as an official protest of the civil rights movement

domestic racial terrorism

JUNE 22, 2015

History Matters
The Charleston Massacre and the Confederate Flag
by ROBERT CHASE
To begin his Charleston Massacre, the confessed murderer Dylann Storm Roof coldly told his victims the cause that animated his deadly violence. “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country,” Roof exclaimed, “and you have to go.” Each of these frightful exclamations – the fear of miscegenation (interracial sex), the fear of Black empowerment, and the threat of racial genocide – are punctuated with an abiding sense of history that does not exist solely in our past but instead ruptures our present with a visceral lineage of White domestic terrorism.

By drawing on the fear of miscegenation and concocted fears of dangerous Black male sexuality, the murderer reenacted the very same cultural paranoia that animated nearly a century of lynching in the United States. Indeed, Roof had a perverse fascination with a mythologized version of American history. In his manifesto, Roof confessed that he chose Charleston because of its connection with history: “I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country.” Stating that “segregation is not a bad thing,” Roof’s blog photographs are littered with historic symbols of racial oppression (both domestic and global): a photograph of Roof standing next to wax slaves, the South African flag during Apartheid, Nazi-era symbols, the Rhodesian flag, the burning of the American flag, and, most prominently, the Confederate flag.

Although lacking a mature and complex understanding of American history and race, Roof’s manifesto giving the reasons for his murderous rampage connect the past with the present by simultaneously drawing upon the historical ideology of the “Lost Cause of the Confederacy,” a Reconstruction-era ideological tradition that seeks to renew a mythological sense of the old South’s “White nobility” while simultaneously conducting racial violence to erect the Jim Crow-era “New South.” Roof hoped to draw on the historical tradition of the “Lost Cause” as a violent response to the modern-day Black Lives Matters movement. Roof’s perverse historic sensibility reminds us that our nation’s history of racial violence continues to matter and is not merely a reflection on the past but an ongoing struggle over our present and future.

In the aftermath of the Charleston massacre, we must, as a nation, have the kind of historical reevaluation and cultural reckoning that Germany countenanced following the horrors of the Nazi regime when they enacted national hate crime laws and made the display of the swastika illegal. As this year marks the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, it is time that we honestly reckon with our troubled history of racial violence while we cast the symbols of such violence out of our public space and into our national historical memory as symbols that continue to evoke modern-day racist violence. The first step in this process must be the removal of the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s state capitol. A second might be to change the name of the street where the Emanuel AME Church sits from Calhoun street, named for the staunch proponent of slavery John C. Calhoun, to Emanuel street.

Three inter-related ironies of history speak to how we might, as a nation, reckon with this moment of domestic racial terrorism.

First, the day after the shooting in Charleston, the flags at the State Capitol in Columbia stood at half mast, while the confederate flag, maintained at the State Capitol’s civil war and Confederate memorial as part of a political “compromise,” stood at full mast. As a symbol of this living legacy, Glenn McConnell, former State Senator and now current President of the College of Charleston, insisted that the removal of the Confederate flag was analogous to “cultural genocide” so he brokered the political “compromise” that allowed the Confederate flag to continue to fly at the State Capitol with the promise that he would never allow “symbolically burying the Confederate banner” because “encasement represents entombment.” Yet this is the same flag that the murderer Dylann Roof had on his license plate and the symbol that animated his racial violence (and that of the Ku Klux Klan and a century and a half of racial violence since the Civil War).

A second irony is that while the city of Charleston’s largest newspaper, the Post and Courier, ran a front page story on the massacre at the AME Church, a front page insert ran a gun ad promising: “$30 gets you everything!…Eye/Ear Protection, a Pistol or Revolver, 50 Rounds of Ammo, an Instructor, a Range Pass and a Souvenir T-Shirt.”

Such a stark symbolic contrast in the Post and Courier is more than irony. It reminds us that our nation’s long-standing cultural embrace that equates guns with liberty ignores the degree to which gun violence has historically also meant the suppression of liberty and freedom for African Americans. From the assassinations of Medger Evers in 1963, to South Carolina’s Orangeburg Massacre of 1968 where three Black students were fired upon and killed by police for protesting segregation, to Martin Luther King in 1968, to the assassination of Reverend Pinckney, the resounding noise of fired shots has silenced voices of religiosity, civil rights, and social justice. The connection between this revered church and civil rights is an integral, but underreported, part of this story. In 1909, Booker T. Washington spoke at the “Mother” Emanuel AME, in 1962 the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King took the civil rights movement to that church, and in 1969 his widow, Coretta Scott King, spoke there to connect the struggle for civil rights with economic justice as she marched in Charleston’s Hospital Workers Strike. The assassination of Pickeney at the Emanuel AME Church must be understood in the context of this history of both Black spirituality and its connection to civil rights and social justice.

The third historical irony is that the day that confessed murderer Dylann Roof killed nine people in prayer also marked the 193rd anniversary of what would have been the Denmark Vesey slave insurrection had it not been foiled by an informant who told Charleston planters of the slaves’ plans to achieve their liberation. When Charleston planters discovered the Denmark Vessey conspiracy in 1822, the AME Church was investigated for having a role in the plot, and even though its pastor, Reverend Brown, was exonerated, he was drummed out of South Carolina and the Church itself was summarily burned down. The Church was then forced to close its doors altogether after South Carolina passed a law in 1835 prohibiting any Black person – free or enslaved – to worship without the oversight of whites. The church was not resurrected until after the Civil War.

While the nation celebrates the resiliency of Black spirituality in the aftermath of the Charleston massacre, the historical suppression of Black-controlled churches and religion was a response to Black resistance. When the civil rights movement demanded an end to the Jim Crow South, the response from White terrorists was to bomb over 300 Black churches during 1960s-the most famous of which was the nightmare bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four young girls only three weeks after Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Perhaps it was these historic examples of racial violence against Black churches during moments of resistance to racial oppression that guided Roof’s fateful and terrible act.

These historic episodes of both racial oppression and resistance tread a terrible path directly to the door of the AME “Mother” Emanuel Church. Following this path shows both the resiliency of African American spirituality, religiousity, and a sustained commitment to social justice as well as the historical effort to silence Black religion and stifle civil rights through gun violence. These three moments are not just fleeting ironies of history, but they serve as a stark reminder that unearths the link between a nation full of guns and the ever-persistent history of racial violence and its attendant symbols.

Only a few weeks ago, the Blacks Lives Matter movement in Charleston interrupted Sunday brunches at euphemistically named restaurants such as High Cotton when they defiantely read the names of African Americans killed by police gun violence. They reminded tourist and local diners alike that Black Lives Matter. As we reconcile this act of domestic terrororism, we must also acknowledge that History Matters and in light of this history of violence we must cast aside the display of the Confederate flag as a symbol not only of the past but the danger that it presents to people in the present.

Robert Chase is an Assistant Professor of History at Stony Brook University, SUNY.

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HUNG OUT TO DRY
06.22.1510:11 AM ET
White House Won’t Back FBI Chief on Charleston ‘Terror’
The head of the FBI became of the object of anger and ridicule when he said the Charleston massacre wasn’t political terror. The White House isn’t exactly coming to his defense.
FBI Director James Comey may have claimed that the Charleston massacre wasn’t an act of terrorism, sparking howls of protest and outrage.

The White House, notably, isn’t backing him up.

Speaking on Friday about the murder of nine African Americans by a self-avowed white supremacist, Comey said, “Terrorism is act of violence…to try to influence a public body or citizenry, so it’s more of a political act. And again based on what I know so far I don’t see it as a political act.”

Asked whether the White House agreed with Comey’s assessment, a spokesman referred The Daily Beast to an earlier statement from the Justice Department, which isn’t foreclosing any avenues of prosecution at this point.

“The department’s investigation of the shooting incident in Charleston, South Carolina, is ongoing,” spokeswoman Emily Pierce said in a statement on Friday, one day before Comey spoke. “This heartbreaking episode was undoubtedly designed to strike fear and terror into this community, and the department is looking at this crime from all angles, including as a hate crime and as an act of domestic terrorism.”

An FBI spokesman, while not retracting Comey’s remarks, told The Daily Beast that the director’s “comments were made while events were still fluid and based on the best information he had at the time.”
Since Comey spoke, the FBI has had more time to look into the manifesto that the shooter had posted online to explain his actions.
“We’re going to continue to follow the facts and learn more about the incident itself and what was behind it,” said spokesman Paul Bresson “In no way do [Comey’s] comments detract from our ability to conduct a thorough investigation.”
Comey, a former U.S. deputy attorney general, has a reputation as a thoughtful and assiduous lawyer, so his views on whether the Charleston massacre is a terrorist attack carried special resonance, aside from the fact that the FBI’s investigation will help determine whether the U.S. government brings terrorism charges. Comey was also the lead prosecutor on the 1996 terrorist bombing of the Khobar Towers facility in Saudi Arabia, which at the time was being used as a temporary barracks for U.S. Air Force personnel.
Under U.S. law, domestic terrorism is defined as “activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that…appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping…” The activities must also take place “primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.”

"This heartbreaking episode was undoubtedly designed to strike fear and terror, and the department is looking at this crime from all angles, including as a hate crime and as an act of domestic terrorism.”
Based on the known facts, Dylann Roof’s murders inside the Emanuel AME church last week arguably fit the bill. In a manifesto written before the shootings, Roof makes clear his particular animus toward African Americans and says that legally enforced segregation “existed to protect us from them.” According to witnesses, Roof justified his shootings by accusing black people of “taking over our country” and said, “You have to go.” He also let some churchgoers live so they could tell others what he’d done and said.

Roof had also photographed himself with pro-Nazi paraphernalia, symbols associated with Apartheid, and in front of Confederate landmarks, acts that seem to illustrate his hatred of African Americans and that could help explain his decision to attack the church.

“As a former trial lawyer, I can say it appears that Roof’s conduct warrants charging him with domestic terrorism under this federal statute,” radio show host Dean Obeidallah wrote for The Daily Beast. Obeidallah and others have noted that Roof seems to have chosen his target, the Emanuel AME Church, because of its storied African-American history going back to the early 19th century, and that attacking his victims there was arguably meant to intimidate black people generally.

Comey’s remarks were met with biting response on social media and reflected a broader debate among lawmakers and experts about whether the term terrorism should be applied to Roof’s actions. Numerous commentators have pointed to an apparent double standard, in which a radical Muslim who attacks innocent people is called a terrorist, but a radical white supremacist who does the same thing is called mentally ill or deranged.

For instance, Republican presidential candidate and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham has called Roof “one of these wacked out kids” and chalked up his motivations to a mental problem. But in 2013, Graham used “terrorist” to describe Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two men who bombed the Boston Marathon, motivated by what law enforcement officials said was a radical view of Islam.

“This man, in my view, should be designated as a potential enemy combatant and we should be allowed to question him for intelligence-gathering purposes to find out about future attacks and terrorist organizations that may exist that he has knowledge of,” Graham said.

The reference to intelligence-gathering is notable in the current debate over Roof’s alleged acts and his possible connections to right-wing extremist groups. In a survey conducted with the Police Executive Research Forum, university professors Charles Kurzman and David Schanzer found the vast majority of law enforcement agencies in the United States think that domestic right-wing extremist groups pose a greater terrorist threat than al Qaeda and other foreign groups.

On Sunday, the chorus of lawmakers and public officials calling the Charleston massacre terrorism grew and became at least a nascent issue in the Republican presidential contest.

“I don’t think there’s any question when someone comes into a church for the reasons of racism and hate that they’re trying to terrorize people,” GOP presidential candidate and former U.S. senator Rick Santorum said on ABC’s This Week.

“I mean, I don’t think there’s any question that this is an act of terrorism. And it’s as purely evil as we’ve seen in this country in a long, long time,” Santorum said.

Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, echoed that sentiment, telling CBS’s Face the Nation that while it was up to prosecutors to determine if the killings meet the legal definition of terrorism, in his lay opinion, “I think you easily call it domestic terrorism.”

That was a view shared by civil rights leaders, as well.

“I think we need leadership, leadership not only in Congress, leadership in law enforcement, to call this what it is, domestic terrorism,” Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, told Face the Nation.
That said, legal experts noted that there’s a difference between how a crime can be defined and the best way to prosecute it. Should authorities decide to charge Roof with terrorism, they would have to prove his motive. And that could be a much taller order than convicting Roof for murder, for which there seems to be abundant evidence already, experts said.

Michael Moore ✔@MMFlint
One proud White American, in less than 2 minutes, has killed TWICE as many Americans as ISIS has in 2 years. White Terrorists. #WISIS.
10:46 AM - 19 Jun 2015
8,800 8,800 Retweets 5,267 5,267 favorites

JUNE 22, 2015

Jim Crow and White Privilege are Alive and Thriving
White Terrorism in South Carolina
by QUIANA FULTON
Let’s be honest, we do not live in a post racial society.

It was Wednesday, June 17 when Dylann Roof drove over 200 miles in South Carolina to attend church service at the historic Emanuel A.M.E. black church in Charleston. Within an hour of worshiping with them, he opened fired and killed nine churchgoers. Witnesses alleged Dylann said his motive for killing the members of the congregation was due to black people raping white women and taking over society.

Dylann’s act of murder was unlawfulness, yet the media cannot help themselves but to deflect that his actions were not just a hate crime, but also was terrorism. Instead members in the media hint around the verbiage of domestic terrorism.

Never mind that Dylann’s actions were despicable, murderous, deliberate, well-throughout, a planned crime performed by a culprit of white supremacy, and perpetrated by hate. Never mind Dylann is a cold-blooded killer with an empty soul.

Like all white supremacy members he has divined his very self and the white race as victims of integration that must protect themselves from the seeds of dark skin, whom dare to live and breathe beyond second class citizenship. In his sick mind, he had no choice but to shoot and kill nine black innocent people that were in the mist of worshiping God.

Unfortunately the media has given Dylann, a self-described racist, the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it was the medication that he was on, they question. Maybe it’s a case of mental illness, they ponder? Or maybe the media is divined by deflection from personal responsibility and truism because the mass murder is white and not a brown skin radical Muslim.

Why is it that members of the media have such difficulty reporting the truth: White people are just as vulnerable to committing acts of terror? As Anthea Butler of The Washington Post writes, “Shooters of color are called ‘terrorists’ and ‘thugs.’ Why are white shooters called ‘mentally ill’?”

Peter Bergan of CNN reminds us of the domestic terrorism committed by white people that the media never once defined as such, although the facts bear witness. Frazier Glenn Cross shot multiple people in the Jewish Community. Jarad and Amanda killed two police officers before committing suicide.

Let’s not forget James Holmes the Colorado shooter who killed 12 people in a movie theater and injured 58 others. Also, the Chapel Hill killings of 3 Muslims by Craig Stephen Hicks and the Wisconsin Sikh Temple massacre where Frank Silva Roque murdered people he thought were Muslim.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported lone wolf domestic terrorism is on the rise in this country, and mostly from white supremacy groups. Why is this not reported in the news on a regular basis or at least on the same rate as neoconservative pundits that are constantly in the news inciting fear of radical Islamists?

Ignoring and making excuses for white people that are terrorists justifies their action.

This is the white privilege black people have been complaining about. This is the white privilege that nonwhite Muslims have been frustrated about. In American media, the rules are not the same; it’s dependent on one’s race and religion on what the spin will be.

Republicans Senator Lindsey Graham, former Governor Rick Perry, former Senator Rick Santorum, and Senator Rand Paul attributed the Charleston shooting as Christians being under attack in America. There is no evidence to support this, but plenty to support black churches being bombed and mass shootings in them that are almost exclusively involve white supremacy groups — whom are often associated with the political right.

For Republicans to exclude the possibility of terrorism is predicable, because they always participate in this false narrative that involves far-right radicalism. All this does is remind people of color that their communities do not matter and will never be safe, much less protected. And the GOP wonders why black people, Hispanics, and Muslims continue to overwhelming support the political left, because unlike the right, the left does not deflect from the ills in society that affect vulnerable communities.

More frustratingly than the GOP is Fox News desperate tactic to immediately whitewash the entire despicable affair to mental illness, and that he acted out because he was a reported introvert with few friends. So that’s the excuse for nine people’s death? Wow. How about acknowledging that his action were indicative of a hate crime and was terrorism? It’s really not that hard to define based on the facts. Regretfully, Fox News prefers playing the white villain is the real victim narrative.

The definition of terrorism is clear; it’s the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims. It’s violent behavior against an innocent bystander (s) due to a religious radical belief. Terrorism has no identity of race, religion, or culture. To ignore this is criminal and dangerous to moving past our divisive culture. All races and the media need to do a better job at reporting truthfully and correctly — even when reporting about white vigilantes.

There should be no dismissing the impact of what the pictures of Dylann wearing pro-apartheid flags on his clothing means. We must not disregard Dylann’s white supremacy labels on his vehicle and what that infers. No, let’s not all join in the chorus that Dylann has a mental illness debate. Absolutely let’s not enter that he almost didn’t go through with it, because he did.

Treating white terrorist as victims must end. Dyalnn is not a victim, and the victims are not criminals. If this is your worldview, than you have no right to dismiss the remnants that Jim Crow and white privilege is alive and thriving.

a domestic terrorist

SAT JUN 20, 2015 AT 07:33 AM PDT
Racist manifesto and selfie collection confirms what we knew; Dylann Roof a racist terrorist
byShaun King

On Saturday morning it was discovered that Dylann Roof, the domestic terrorist who shot and killed nine women and men at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, left behind a collection of racist selfies and a racist manifesto explaining his actions.
The photos have been authenticated and from WHOIS records it appears he registered the website they were found on, LastRhodesian.com. The manifesto has not yet been authenticated, and may never be. Ultimately, the manifesto, shared below, with some of the photos, should be shared for three reasons.

1. It proves that Dylann Roof was purely and completely driven by racism. We knew this, but this doubles down the evidence.

2. It proves that Dylann was inspired by other racist hate groups and philosophies.

3. It proves that Dylann was clear-headed, articulate, and knew full well who he was and what he wanted to do.

At this point, calling him anything other than a domestic terrorist is irrational. He was begging to be known as such.

[Searcher08]

Random thoughts:
I was reminded of the part in (IIRC) 'The Century of The Self' were Adam Curtis described an attempt (in the 70s) at cross-fertilisation between the human potential movement and black activists, in the form of using Encounter Group / Gestalt approaches to help breakdown barriers.
After much effort, it was declared a failure. It seemed to be like a layer cake of submerged, undealt-with hatred, fears, longings and that as soon as one layer was dealt with, another soon revealed itself.

The issue of the guy's mental health and consumption of brain-melting pharma seems to be being turned into a two way fight with huge quantities of (basically racist) cloud-word deflectionary and transparently tortuous commentary from the Right; an avalanche of handwringing, condemnation and Othering from both mainstream liberals and screeching sanctimonious self-styled "anarchists" and the SPLC is no doubt making hay while the sun shines. To me, the media coverage itself deserves a very beady eye. It stinks of stage-managed media conflict (I'm NOT saying it is an FBI-driven event).

I think symbols are a very tricky area - I grew up in a town where they have enormous resonance regarding their display or not - right down to Israeli flags at one end of the road, Palestinian ones at the other. Removing the flag cloth doesn't deal with the forces behind it and suppression can be a force that keeps symbols alive and growing.

How much air time is given to the Yemeni villagers, cluster bombed by Saudis, with American-made munitions from American-made jets flying from American-company built bases?

[seemslikeadream]

The confederate flag is being removed from Virgina license plates...governor says

Dylann Roof's Cousin: Being Spurned by a Girl for a Black Guy Sent Roof 'Over the Edge'
It would hardly be the first time rage at rejection set a mass killer off.
By Terrell Jermaine Starr / AlterNet June 22, 2015

Dylann Storm Roof, the white supremacist who is charged with shooting and killing nine black people at a black church in Charleston, S.C., last week, took offense to the fact that a love interest preferred a black guy over him, The Intercept reports.

Roof’s cousin, Scott Roof, told The Intercept in a phone interview that the 21-year-old man was “normal” until “he started listening to that white power music stuff.” Scott added that Dylann “kind of went over the edge when a girl he liked starting dating a black guy two years back.”

It’s not the first time a white mass killer got pissed because white women he liked preferred black guys. Before Elliot Rodger killed six people in California on May 23 of last year, he wrote in his manifesto: “How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me,” Rodger wrote. “I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves. I deserve it more.”

Scott told Intercept’s Juan Thompson that “Dylann liked her. The black guy got her. He changed. I don’t know if we would be here if not …”

Scott hung up.

The cousin’s description of Dylann’s hate for interracial relationships are consistent with reports that he told the victims he killed that they were “raping our women” and “taking over our country.”

Keep in mind that, as Slate’s Jamelle Bouie wrote, racists have a long history of using the myth of black sexual predation to justify violence:

This fear took its most violent form in the years after the Civil War—when blacks won their freedom—but it’s been with us for centuries. Throughout the antebellum period, whites lived in terror of a challenge to the racial order and believed that black freedom would lead to a world of “Negro domination” where they lived as slaves, or worse. Likewise, during the 1864 election, Northern Democrats attacked Abraham Lincoln as a “black Republican” who sought to debase the white race with miscegenation. Similar accusations were used during the civil rights movement, and in the North, urban whites justified residential segregation—in patterns that still exist—as necessary protection from the violent, sexually aggressive black criminal.

So, Dylann Storm Roof would just be one of many thin-skinned racists who used the fear of interracial relationships between black men and white women to justify his white supremacist violence.

He has been charged with nine counts of first-degree murder.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Just How Many Mainstream Conservatives Got Cash From The Head Of The Council Of Conservative Citizens?

By Steve M.
6/22/15 6:00am



It appears that the head of the group that helped make Dylann Roof a murderous racist has given lots of money to prominent Republicans, as The Guardian notes:
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The leader of a rightwing group that Dylann Roof allegedly credits with helping to radicalise him against black people before the Charleston church massacre has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republicans such as presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Rick Santorum.

Earl Holt has given $65,000 to Republican campaign funds in recent years while inflammatory remarks -- including that black people were “the laziest, stupidest and most criminally-inclined race in the history of the world” -- were posted online in his name....

Holt, 62, is the president of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC)....

The Guardian story tells us that Holt has given $8500 to Cruz and his super PAC -- Cruz has now said the money will be returned -- as well as $1750 to RandPAC and $1500 to Rick Santorum's campaign. Holt also gave $2000 to Mitt Romney's campaign in 2012.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Keep reading -- below I'll give you a longer list of Republicans who've taken Holt's money.
ADVERTISING

Holt is a piece of work. As the Guardian story notes, a man with his name (Earl P. Holt III) and hometown (Longview, Texas) has posted many racist comments at Glenn Beck's Blaze:

One comment said of black people: “One can extricate them from the jungle, but one CANNOT purge the jungle from THEM”, while another said: “I do wish they’d keep their violence and savagery within their own communities”.

The commenter using Holt’s name also complained under a story about white privilege about his taxes being distributed “to every baby-daddy, baby-momma, welfare cheat, drug-dealer, Oprah-watcher, felon, alcoholic, drug-addict and deadbeat in America.”

Want more? You can read Holt's comments at various sites that use the Disqus comment platform here and here. A few samples:

* "Metal-Detectors and Security Guards are essential at any gathering of nigro teens these days, even pool parties..." (Source.)
* "Looks like every spook in the country wants to incite some kind of incident, so they can become the latest "civil rights" hero like Rosa Parks or Trayvon Martin or Tawana Brawley..." (Source.)
* "I don't see the Corrupt Leftist Jews' Media holding Obama's FEMA to the same standards as Bush & Co. were held..." (Source.)

The first two of those were posted to the white supremacist site American Renaissance, where Holt has also published a couple of articles.

Holt is also notorious for a letter he wrote to a blogger in 2004, when he was a radio host:

"Dear Commie," Holt began as he responded to an Internet blogger who had accused Holt and three others, who also won election to the St. Louis school board on an anti-busing platform in the late 1980s, of being white supremacists.

"Being the shallow nigger-loving dilettante that you are, you probably DO consider niggers to be your equal (who am I to question this?)," Holt wrote. "Yet, unlike you and your allies, I have an IQ in excess of 130, which grants me the ability to objectively evaluate the Great American Nigro (Africanus Criminalis)."

Holt then reeled off a series of questionable statistics to back his assertion that the "nigro is still as criminal, surly, lazy, violent, and stupid as he/she ever was," despite years of government aid....

"I honestly pray to God that some nigger fucks, kills and eats you and everyone you claim to love!" Holt concluded, daring the blogger to print his E-mail on the blogger's Web site

So how many Republicans has Holt given money to? Oh, quite a few.

In 2004, he gave to Bush/Cheney '04.

He skipped '06 and '08, but in 2010 the recipients of his donations included Sharron Angle, Ken Buck, Rob Portman, and Ron Johnson.

In 2012, recipients included Romney, Cruz, Santorum, and Paul as well as Steve King, Louie Gohmert, Michele Bachmann, Dean Heller, Linda McMahon, George Allen, Richard Mourdock, Todd Akin, and Pete Hoekstra. Oh, and, oddly, two African-American candidates, Allen West and Mia Love.

In 2014, recipients included Gohmert, King, Love, Bachmann, West, Johnson, and Cruz again, as well as Joni Ernst, Tom Cotton, Thom Tillis, Ben Sasse, Tom Emmer, Mark Sanford, and Paul Broun.

Let's see how many give the money back. (My guess is that Steve King and Louie Gohmert won't.)

[seemslikeadream]

He is a terrorist, but he is not an extremist.

Settler Colonialism and American White Supremacy as Settler Colonial Nostalgia

Dylann Roof Is Not an Extremist
Tuesday, 23 June 2015 00:00
By Zoé Samudzi, openDemocracy | Op-Ed

A demonstrator wears the Confederate flag outside a Democratic presidential debate in Greenville, S.C., Jan. 29, 2004. (Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)
A demonstrator wears the Confederate flag outside a Democratic presidential debate in Greenville, South Carolina, January 29, 2004. (Photo: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)

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I am the daughter of two Zimbabwean immigrants. My parents were born in what was then Rhodesia, an apartheid state ruled by a white minority government.

My parents have not told me much about life in Rhodesia outside of my mother's time spent in an internment camp and my father's brush with political activism in his youth. They are now both naturalized American citizens, and I am sure they would prefer to not resurrect memories of growing up under apartheid.

When I saw Dylann Roof wearing a jacket with a patch of the flag of the Union of South Africa (a South African apartheid flag), I was shocked and disgusted. But when someone pointed out that the other flag was that of Rhodesia, one I had never seen until Thursday (and one that my mother did not initially recognize), I was sick to my stomach - even more so when I learnt his blog was called "the last Rhodesian".

This past Wednesday evening, Roof entered Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church - a church in Charleston, South Carolina with historical importance to the Black community - and opened fire, killing nine churchgoers.

American white supremacy had, in a way, come full circle.

We're missing something when we debate the nature of Roof's actions and whether they constitute a hate crime or terrorism. Why would he emblazon his jacket with apartheid South African and Rhodesian flags and have an affinity for southern Confederate iconography and beliefs if a common thread did not link all three things together?

The common thread is settler colonialism, and American white supremacy as settler colonial nostalgia. Roof wearing those apartheid patches on his jacket while simultaneously embracing the white supremacist narratives of the American Confederate South is nostalgia for this projected past.

Settler colonialism is a process in which foreign families move into a region claimed by those foreigners as their own, or on behalf of an imperial power: the United States and Rhodesia were colonized by the British, and South Africa by the Dutch. This colonization is often characterized by the displacement and/or forced assimilation, genocide of indigenous populations, and the imposition of power dynamics of settler (i.e. white) supremacy.

While settler colonial processes are unending, colonialism in its golden era was a time of global white leadership and dominance, where indigenous people were raped and enslaved and resources were plundered. The antebellum south was a slave economy in which white owners had unfettered access to Black bodies.

The legacy of the Confederate States of America was the preservation of this racist ownership and use of enslaved Blacks as a labor force. Nostalgia for this era of Black servitude represents a longing to return to a time of uncontested white male leadership and dominance, a return to the America "that used to be."

While the media may try to construct Roof as some kind of lone anomalous monster or extremist who committed an horrific hate crime in a vacuum, he is not an extremist. He is a terrorist, but he is not an extremist.

As a first generation American of Zimbabwean origin, my interactions with whiteness include both American and Rhodesian settler colonial forms, though in a new and jarring way. The similarities between these structures became more apparent when I learnt about the role that Rhodesia plays in American white supremacist militia and paramilitary culture.

Rhodesia is viewed as the land "lost" by the white savior-colonizers, spurring on "macho adventure fantasies as well as terror fantasies of black hordes wiping out virtuous white minorities."

I see little difference between the Transatlantic slave trade, state-sanctioned segregation and American apartheid, the entitled land theft of Manifest Destiny, the slaughter of indigenous people, medical experimentation on Black bodies, the state's infiltration and assassination of resistance groups and leaders of color, and Dylann Roof's slaughter of nine innocent Black people in that church.

The conversation that white America is having is incomplete. Beyond many people's failure to admit his act was one of terrorist violence (indicting the state as a perpetrator of terrorism as a result), there is a failure to recognize that his actions are consistent with the violence and racism that has characterized America since its creation.

Roof's whole-hearted embrace of Confederate ideologies, his hatred of Blacks and Latinos, his naming of the "Jewish problem," and his perception of East Asians as a "model minority" and the group in most active collusion with white supremacy may all be considered fringe and extremist views, but they are all political understandings that exist within mainstream conservatism and within mainstream whiteness more broadly.

President Obama called racism "a blight that we have to combat together." We do not need a continued insistence on moving forward in solidarity when we still do not have a proper understanding of the past.

We need white Americans to be jolted from their racialized ignorance and fragility and to begin to be honest about what America historically has been and continues to be: honesty that the shining "city upon a hill" is ideologically and functionally similar to other racist settler colonial projects around the world.

While Dylann Roof's manifesto was unspeakably racist and admittedly painful to read, white self-identified liberals or progressives should read it. The description of white supremacist racial processes is surprisingly astute (though his understanding unfortunately led him to violence rather than an active challenge of their legitimacy and function). In particular he takes to task white liberals who move to areas to attend better schools. His criticism of "white flight" to suburbia points out that many white liberals are not vastly different from him in their internalizations of white supremacy (though their expression differs drastically).

While all non-Black people of color must address anti-Blackness in their own communities, white liberals should very carefully analyze their own politics and the ways in which their white privilege ultimately maintains structures of racial oppression.

There are some very tangible things that white liberal and progressive allies can do to challenge white supremacy in the spaces they occupy. They can stop allowing casual racist jokes and comments to go unchallenged. They can share anti-racist narratives from Black people and people of color rather than simply similar comments made by white liberals. They can be mindful of the demands that they as "allies" make from Black people (e.g. demanding support and information, which takes away a person's time and energy).

But the most crucial thing white people can do is to engage mindfully with people of color in discussions of racism: to recognize the assumptions they carry as a result of socialization are likely steeped in white supremacy to some degree, and to really listen to and trust what people of color tell them about racism. Only through honest discussions about white supremacy and actively taking responsibility for identity-privileging structures can white Americans play their role in upending and ultimately dismantling still existing settler colonial structures.

[82_28]

http://www.theonion.com/article/south-c ... -cap-50725

COLUMBIA, SC—Shooing away protesters from the brown, debris-covered lawn, state lawmakers reportedly refused Monday to remove the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s Capitol Trailer. “Go on, git!” said shirtless South Carolina state representative Jeff Duncan, who sources confirmed tossed an empty 40-ounce bottle of Colt 45 at a group of demonstrators while reclining in a battered, dirt-caked plastic kiddie pool. “Y’all quit messing with our capitol trailer. You ain’t never gonna see this flag come down, you hear? Now, get on outta here unless you wanna get real well acquainted with my shotgun.” At press time, a two-thirds majority of South Carolina state legislators had reportedly passed out amongst the rusted washing machine and a sink on the grass in front of the state’s double-wide trailer.

Edited to add that there is nothing to laugh about. But that was good and hit every note of ridicule possible in several sentences.

[seemslikeadream]

Alarming Statue of a Racist and Horse Perfectly Honors The Confederacy

Sam Biddle
Filed to: THE SOUTH 6/23/15 3:23pm
Alarming Statue of a Racist and Horse Perfectly Honors The Confederacy

An allegory of the American South: In 1998, a fierce racist (who also happened to be the former attorney of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin) named Jack Kershaw created a monument for another bad man, Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. The resulting statue is so hilariously stupid that we should keep it forever.

Only a century or so too late, Americans have begun to form a consensus that the Confederate Flag—the war banner of loser secessionists— is a hideous symbol of slavery. Not only should the flag be taken down from wherever it flies, so too should all “monuments” to the Confederate military be razed, because we don’t need public artistic celebrations of those who tried to destroy the Union in the name of human chattel. Southern “culture,” “pride,” and “heritage” are more often than not codewords for the bygone era of white supremacy. The South has a lot of things to be proud of: hot jazz, warm weather, beautiful native flora. Its population’s failed attempt to form The Confederate States of America is not one of them, and so does not deserve to be memorialized in our nation’s parks and pedestrian walkways.


The "Southern Belle" Is a Racist Fiction
Sometime between Reconstruction, this episode of MTV: True Life, and the hundred-thousandth wedding …
Read more
With one exception. The Nathan Bedford Forrest monument, poignantly located next to a barren strip of land by I-65 in Nashville, is the dumbest looking statue I’ve ever seen in my life, including statues of cartoon characters located inside cartoon shows:

Alarming Statue of a Racist and Horse Perfectly Honors The Confederacy

Look at his face! That’s supposed to be a human being. For reference, Forrest was not some sort of puppet gremlin, but a normal-looking man:

Alarming Statue of a Racist and Horse Perfectly Honors The Confederacy

And yet:

Alarming Statue of a Racist and Horse Perfectly Honors The Confederacy

It is extremely unlikely that Forrest ever screamed out the phrase “Snap into a Slim Jim!” and yet, somehow, it’s impossible to imagine the bar-toothed, wild-eyed man depicted in this alarming effigy uttering any other series of words.

Even the steed looks like it was crafted out of chocolate by the hand of a dumb child:

Alarming Statue of a Racist and Horse Perfectly Honors The Confederacy

You did a bad job, Jack Kershaw, you dumbass. You’re a bad sculptor, and now Nashville is embarrassed by your shoddy statue.

Between post-Charleston Confederate backlash (Kershaw’s statue is, after all, a 25-foot fiberglass monument to American racism) and the thing generally being an eyesore, residents want this thing outta here.

Tough shit. Tear down every statue of every other general, father, son, and daughter of the Confederacy, but leave up the insane goofy hell-rictus of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the most fitting monument to the ugly idiocy of southern history.

Blockage sought of I-65 Nathan Bedford Forrest statue

Joey Garrison, jgarrison@tennessean.com 12:13 p.m. CDT June 23, 2015

Two Metro council members, including mayoral candidate Megan Barry, are seeking to block this statute of Nathan Bedford Forest from sight on Interstate 65.
(Photo: File / Tennessean)Buy Photo
TAGS
Bill HaslamCharleston church shootingKu Klux Klan

Tennessee Democrats have already called on the removal of a Nathan Bedford Forrest bust from the Tennessee state Capitol building.

Now, a Nashville Democrat — one who is running for mayor of Nashville — says she is seeking to block a long-criticized privately owned Nathan Bedford Forrest statue on land near Interstate 65 so that it can no longer be seen from the highway.

Metro At-large Councilwoman and mayoral candidate Megan Barry said in a media release Monday that she has spoken to Republican Gov. Bill Haslam about restoring trees and brush along Interstate 65 via private funds to block views of the statue from the interstate.

Meanwhile, Metro Councilman Jerry Maynard, who is a paid adviser of mayoral candidate Bill Freeman, told The Tennessean he is drafting a council resolution that would request the state to block visibility of the statue.

Their separate pushes follow a recent mass shooting in a black church in Charleston, S.C., that has led to calls for that state to remove a Confederate battle flag from outside its state Capitol building.

Forrest, born in Middle Tennessee, was a lieutenant general for the Confederate Army during the Civil War and first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

A 25-foot fiberglass Forrest statue, designed by the late sculptor and attorney Jack Kershaw, was erected on private land in 1998 near Crieve Hall. Kershaw was among a series of attorneys hired by James Earl Ray after being convicted of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

The statue has been a source of controversy in Nashville and occasional vandalism ever since it was built. The statue, surrounded by Confederate state battle flags, sits on a 3.5-acre property owned by Bill Dorris, a Nashville businessman.


THE TENNESSEAN
Forrest statue land owner fires back at blocking efforts

"We have witnessed the deadly effects of racism in Charleston and throughout our history," Barry said in a prepared statement.

"In Nashville along I-65, there is a large monument of Nathan Bedford Forrest on private land, which serves as nothing more than a symbol of division. It was created by notorious racist Jack Kershaw, who at the time was reported to have said, 'Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery.' This is an offensive display of hatred that should not be a symbol for a progressive and welcoming city such as Nashville.

"While we cannot remove this monument from private land, I had a good conversation with Gov. Haslam and I look forward to working with him and with TDOT to restore the trees and brush along the stretch of I-65," Barry said Monday. "I am optimistic that we may be able to see action taken on this issue. I will happily work with the governor to raise the private funds necessary to make this happen in a way that does not detract from other road projects."

The Joseph E. Johnston Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans organized the kickoff event that dedicated the Forrest statue in 1998. Also participating were 40 other SCV camps, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and 10 re-enactment groups in period dress

According to a Tennessean story published in 1998, former state Sen. Douglas Henry, D-Nashville, had led the effort to get the state to clear trees from the interstate view of the statue.

[Twyla LaSarc]

Alarming Statue of a Racist and Horse Perfectly Honors The Confederacy

Sam Biddle
Filed to: THE SOUTH 6/23/15 3:23pm
Alarming Statue of a Racist and Horse Perfectly Honors The Confederacy

That statue sorta reminds me of 70's Nugent covers, Molly Hatchett and all that.

It would only be perfect had the subject be clad in a Zardoz suede banana sling, eyes raised to the sky.

[82_28]

What's funny with that statue is how retarded it makes "the confederacy" look. Some wild eyed dick astride a horse and holding a pistol. Sure, let's fund the project and put it up. The tourists will love it. There are actually a few states I've told myself I will never set foot going way back as a kid. Here they are: Sorry my beloved Texans but Texas (you could though sway me), Florida and South Carolina.

[Searcher08]

Alarming Statue of a Racist and Horse Perfectly Honors The Confederacy

Sam Biddle
Filed to: THE SOUTH 6/23/15 3:23pm
Alarming Statue of a Racist and Horse Perfectly Honors The Confederacy

That statue sorta reminds me of 70's Nugent covers, Molly Hatchett and all that.

It would only be perfect had the subject be clad in a Zardoz suede banana sling, eyes raised to the sky.

Hadn't heard of Molly Hatchett. Great sound that reminded me of the Belfast band Light, an off-shoot of Van Morrison's Them.


The statue should be donated to the Museum of Bad Art.
http://www.museumofbadart.org/