http://www.economist.com/news/united-sta...g|25-06-2015|APWHEN a mass shooting happens in America, the motivation of the killer is usually unfathomable. In the case of Dylann Roof, who was arrested on June 18th for murdering nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in Charleston, South Carolina, it was all too clear. “I chose the city of Charleston because it is the most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to whites in the country,” wrote Mr Roof in a message posted online before the massacre. “We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet.” A friend said that Mr Roof intended to ignite a race war. Instead he started something else. By wrapping himself in a Confederate flag, along with those of Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa, he has transformed a symbol that a week ago flew on the grounds of state capitols into a pictogram of hatred.
That Mr Roof’s crime has had the opposite effect to the one he intended is largely owing to the extraordinary response from Emanuel AME church, whose pastor was among the dead. The church already had too much meaning for one building to bear. It is one of the oldest black churches in the South and its congregation, like early Christians, once met in secret because of a ban on black services. The ancestor of the whitewashed Gothic church where the congregation now meets was burned to the ground after a slave revolt. To this repository has now been added a racist massacre and, more powerfully, the generosity of the church’s surviving worshippers in offering forgiveness to their assailant.
In the days after the shooting Charleston followed this lead, with people gathering in the streets for vigils rather than protests. At one of these a few thousand people gathered in a small basketball stadium, each holding a rose. Robert Guglielmone, a Catholic bishop, read Psalm 27—“For in the day of trouble/He will keep me safe in this dwelling”—which ought to be an affirmation but sounded more like a plea. The city’s many churches kept their doors open for prayer meetings.
Beyond Charleston, Mr Roof’s shooting started heated arguments about guns, race and flags. That a man who had been arrested twice and posted pictures of himself with white supremacist symbols should have access to a semi-automatic pistol is no surprise. Getting hold of guns is already easy, and the South Carolina legislature has worked hard to make it easier: in April its House of Representatives passed a bill to introduce “permitless carry”, which would exempt anyone who is allowed to own a gun from having to get a permit. In the 1970s the state passed the nation’s first law limiting firearms purchases to one a month, a measure designed to stop gun trafficking. It was repealed in 2004.
Nor was it a surprise when a board member of the National Rifle Association in effect blamed the dead pastor, Clementa Pinckney, who was also a Democratic member of the South Carolina Senate, for what happened at Emanuel AME, on the ground that he had voted against allowing guns into churches in 2011. As the motivation for owning guns has changed over the past two decades, the need for citizens to be armed for self-defence has become a frequent refrain among fans of the Second Amendment (see next story), though most are more sensitive about when they make it. Charleston’s mayor, Joseph Riley, who fervently opposes guns, hit back: “We don’t want to live in a country where you need a security guard for Bible study.”
Take it down
What was different about the reaction to this shooting, compared with so many others, is that something tangible has already changed as a result of it. On June 22nd South Carolina’s governor, Nikki Haley, said that it was time to take down the Confederate flag from its position on the grounds of the state capitol. In Mississippi the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives said it was also time to take it off the Mississippi state flag. The governor of Alabama had a Confederate flag removed from the grounds of the state capitol. The governors of Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina said they wanted the flag removed from car licence-plates in their states. A clutch of prominent businesses made the same decision. Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Sears and Google announced they would no longer sell the flag or goods branded with it.
The swiftness of this change has been extraordinary. The Confederate flag has at different times been used to honour the war dead of southern states, to signal a disregard for authority and to decorate belt buckles. It was waved by George Wallace, who offered Alabama “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation for ever” in 1963, and then made the same pitch to the country in the 1968 presidential election. And it was painted on the roof of the orange car driven in “The Dukes of Hazzard”, a television series adored by children who grew up in the 1980s, many of whom thought the blue cross with the white stars was just a nice paint job.
The debate over the meaning of the Confederate flag is 150 years old this year, the anniversary of the end of the civil war. Almost as soon as the Stars and Stripes were raised over Fort Sumter, just across the water from Charleston, in 1865, a concerted effort to rewrite the causes of the war began. In this telling, the conflict had little to do with slavery and everything to do with states’ rights, as if the two were unrelated. Northerners were quick to accept a version of events according to which both sides in the war had been right, if it helped to mend the country in the aftermath. Charleston’s Hampton Park, named after a Confederate major-general and once the site of a prisoner-of-war camp, is a small reminder of this forgetting. Its tree-lined avenues and fountain make a popular backdrop for wedding photographs, the brides standing on ground that served as a mass grave for more than 200 Union soldiers.
But when used in politics the meaning of the Confederate flag has been all too clear. Mississippi adopted its current state flag, which has the Confederate cross in its top left corner, in 1894, when the state was pushing back hard against Reconstruction and only eight years after ten blacks were murdered in one of the state’s courthouses. Georgia incorporated the Confederate cross into its state flag in 1956, while the state’s politicians were fighting against attempts to end Jim Crow laws, and just two years after the Supreme Court ruled that schools must be desegregated in Brown v Board of Education. Georgia redesigned its state flag in 2003.
The Confederate flag, wrote Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention on his blog on June 19th, “was the emblem of Jim Crow defiance to the civil-rights movement, of the Dixiecrat opposition to integration, and of the domestic terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Councils of our all too recent, all too awful history [...]That sort of symbolism is out of step with the Justice of Jesus Christ.”
Mr Moore expected a flood of complaint, but has received only a trickle. The noisiest protestations have come from the professionally outraged, such as Rush Limbaugh, a radio host. Mr Limbaugh told listeners to his show that the same people who are out to confiscate the Confederate flag would one day come for the American one. He ought to read Mr Roof’s manifesto. “I hate the sight of the American flag,” wrote the shooter, making its stars and stripes appear instantly brighter.
In his statement about the shooting, Barack Obama expressed frustration that he had been obliged to make statements about gun massacres too many times. “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,” he said. “It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency.” He spoke of his anger and of Emanuel AME’s prominent place in the civil-rights movement, and quoted Martin Luther King. Like most presidents reaching the end of their second term, Mr Obama is hardly popular at the moment. But at times when decades-old questions about race, history, hatred and violence resurface, his calming, thoughtful presence is an asset. He will give the eulogy at Mr Pinckney’s funeral on June 26th.
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tl:dr = There seems to be a consensus now amongst the political class of the Dixie states, as a consequence of the shootings and the global outrage the full-mast flag provoked, that the flag is a racist emblem and is being removed from state buildings.
I see that this thread has expanded to five pages and that G-man has put his trademark open-minded spin on the front page of the site, and I'll respond to all of that when I have time and inclination. Which might be a while as I'm getting my chops smacked at work.
