A website with a white supremacist manifesto features dozens of photos of Dylann Storm Roof, the man accused of killing nine people at a church in Charleston, S.C., posing with weapons, burning an American flag and visiting Southern historic sites and Confederate soldiers’ graves.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/us/dylann-storm-roof-photos-website-charleston-church-shooting.html
“evaluated” because it is part of legislation and there are steps that need to be followed to enact new legislation. Not evaluated for the appropriateness ."
Yes, someone has to sponsor a bill (which I believe it already is) and it has to be voted on and passed with a super majority. It could be voted on this afternoon if they wanted it to.
And as an aside, the confederate flag is not our state flag . Our state flag is a navy blue flag with palmetto tree and moon."
Yes, that illustrious honor goes to Mississippi - which has the Confederate Flag within their state flag. South Carolina’s motto could be, “better than Mississippi.”
@carolinamom-
Hatred isn’t limited to any one state or region, there is hate all over, hate crimes can happen anywhere, and my cynicism is not just aimed at any one place, when it comes to matters of good will often people who otherwise are on the right side answer by doing nothing, that’s all, and leave the floor to the haters. If people in this country actually voted, if more than 40% voted in elections, if like 80% voted, it would be a very changed landscape, we would probably have legislatures and congress and the presidency that actually could do something, but the reality is that those who are a minority these days control a lot of the discussion everywhere. As far as not knowing about South Carolina, since I don’t live there, that is partially true, but based on the attitude of the government there, based on who gets elected, and in attitudes towards people like LGBT people, either a large portion of the state is of good will and does nothing, or a large majority does support things like flying the Confederate flag. South Carolina did not just ban same sex marriage (and from what I have been reading, is now attempting to find ways to disobey the law if SCOTUS legalizes same sex marriage), but their law basically disallowed any rights of marriage to same sex partners, including legal contracts and such. Hopefully attitudes towards LGBT people will change, and people of good faith will realize that being friendly and hospitable (which people in South Carolina are, might not live there, but I have been there on business and travel) also means understanding that others deserve the same kindness and respect they give to people like themselves (which is a lesson, I might add, people all over need to learn, including where i live).
As far as NJ politics goes, the best way to describe it is the way Studs Terkel described Chicago politics, he said Chicago wasn’t the most corrupt place around, but it was the most theatrically corrupt. To paraphrase his words, NJ politics aren’t the most corrupt around, but they are the most cheerfully corrupt:)
@musicprnt. I can appreciate your frustration and appreciate that you feel very strongly on all of your issues. And I wholeheartedly agree that until people , all over this country , make an effort to respect each other’s beliefs, opinions and backgrounds there will be no progress. It takes effort and unfortunately will not happen overnight. And until everyone takes ownership , change eludes us.
@carolinamom2boys -
That last line says it all. As Edmund Burke said, in order for evil to triumph, all good men have to do is nothing:)
One other thing to note, that the police and law enforcement went after the perpetrator and got him, which is a far cry from the Jim Crow days when something like this would happen, and the perpetrator would not only be arrested, probably would be celebrated. It says a lot in how far we have come on 50+ years, back then something like this would happen, the perps would get away with it, and the rest of the country would read about it on page 45 of their local paper and shake their head and say “how sad”.Hopefully the outrage over this will wake people up that we can’t pretend that issues like racism and hate are things of the past, the FBI is still saying that the threat of domestic hate groups is growing more rapidly then the threat of being attacked by terrorists from outside the country, hopefully this terrible tragedy will wake people up, including the politicians who have said some very stupid things, both Lindsay Graham and Rick Perry have really put their foot in it, to say the least.
Haven’t seen this posted yet, so I wanted give a shout out to the NC woman who spotted Roof in his car, called her boss who called the police, and then followed him for 35 miles until she saw the patrol cars come up. Huzzah and well done! =D>
@hayden ,
I also noted the Rev. Pinckney’s family name. I noticed it when I read the stories and remembered the prominence of the Pinckney name when we drove through SC from Florida to NC on a college tour circuit. The name dates back to the founding of the colony.
@carolinamom2boys - I’ve been really impressed with how your state has behaved over the last 5 days. Really really impressed. Law enforcement acted swiftly and effectively, your local elected officials have been eloquent, and your citizens have been magnificent. Your mayor, I don’t have words for how great your mayor has been. Every photo, montage, and video that I’ve seen shows S. Carolinians of all races coming together to support each other and to grieve peacefully.
The one exception that I unfortunately have to mention is your higher-level elected officials, who can’t for the life of them understand why the shooter did this (even though he explicitly told people before the shooting, posted his reasons on social media, and reportedly told law enforcement after his arrest). Although they do seem awfully certain it had nothing whatsoever to do with A) guns or B) race. Until this is looked squarely in the eye and until those officials have the courage to stand up to the retrograde element in the state, it will never change. But it seems to me that taking that d*mn flag down would be a an excellent good-faith gesture.
Roofs manifesto
@LasMa Thank you. It’s my understanding that there is legislature being introduced to remove it. There’s a lot of love in Charleston and in this state. I am not a native South Carolinian . I’ve been here since 1991 when I moved to marry my husband who was serving in the Air Force. That being said, we have our faults as any state does. Hopefully , we can work on some issues that need to be addressed. I really believe in my heart that we can. If I didn’t , I wouldn’t choose to live here.
Mitt Romney, the Republican Party’s nominee for president in 2012, demanded that South Carolina remove the Confederate flag flying above the grounds of its state Capitol on Saturday, calling it a “symbol of racial hatred.”
I am going to post here partly as mod and partly as member, if that is possible. Tough line we straddle sometimes.
Some of the posts were edging on the political, and we certainly don’t want it devolving into that. Try to talk more in terms of history and with respect to your opinion regarding the morality of the symbolism as opposed to the generalities of how “South Carolina” must feel if they still have the flag. I don’t think I am going too far out on a limb when I say there are times when a legislature does not act in concert with the overall opinion of the population. Is that the case here? Who knows. But I can see where some of these posts are pretty harsh towards many, maybe even most of the citizens of South Carolina when it is in fact very difficult to know how most feel. And before someone says something like “Well, if they really didn’t like it they would vote in legislators that would change it”, most people are not single issue voters.
Now in my personal opinion, I do definitely see how the issue of the flag relates to this discussion. I too think it belongs solely in museums, that its time in representing some sort of state identity has long passed. But at the same time, I think it is being overly focused on relative to this particular incident. It is one of many factors that no doubt contributed to this nutcase’s issues, but it is hard to see how it could be a primary one. But I post that as simply a personal opinion. In any case, I think the flag issue has been wrung out, but (and I cannot emphasize this enough) that is a personal stance, not a moderator one.
The Confederate flag seemed pretty central to Roof’s thought process and motivation. A symbol, you might say.
His “manifesto” makes a clear connection between the hate group talk he engaged in on the internet and his decision to take action.
I guess what I am thinking, @jazzymom is that he is so screwed up that he would focus on any symbol out there that was convenient. In other words, if the Confederate flag had been completely absent from SC (or anywhere) his entire life, I don’t think anything he actually did would likely be different. It is a powerful symbol, no doubt, especially in his warped mind. But obviously the huge majority of people in that part of the country are exposed to it all the time and don’t go around being like him. I am not defending the continued public promotion of the flag, but at the same time I think some here might be giving it too much weight as to its role in contributing to this incident. And if they agree that they don’t really think it directly contributed in any significant way to making Roof do what he did but are using this opportunity to express their extreme dislike of the symbol and its continued use (completely understandable IMO), then it really deserves a separate thread, much like the gun control aspect. Both touch on this incident, but I think are not at the heart of it. In other words, it would most likely have happened anyway, flag or no flag, gun control or no gun control. This guy is pretty far gone, it seems to me, in his warped hatreds.
In Roof’s manifesto he notes a phrase from his favorite movie, which I’m guessing would be the Japanese film ‘Himizu.’ The lead character in the film is a 15-year-old who suffers from the violence that his father inflicted onto him. I’m going to skip over all the race motivation for the church shooting by Roof and guess the real driver for Roof shooting is him getting back at an abusive father.
@fallenchemist-
I agree with you, that whether the flag was there or not, the kid likely would have acted. That said, that flag is sending a message to anyone, whether it was this kid or others, that racism is somehow a part of being from South Carolina, and I think that is why people are commenting on it. The claims that the flag is about history, that it isn’t about racism, fails, because the confederate flag, from any histories I have read, was pretty much a museum relic until the civil rights era, and it was then that you saw it on cars, on t shirts, and you started seeing the flag flown over statehouses and such, it was used as a symbol to the resistance to ending Jim Crow, and there is no other way to interpret it (if it was so historically important, why was the flag a museum item until the 1950’s?). While I don’t think it had anything directly to do with what this kid did, I think in a sense it has relevance, that it is time that people of good faith realize what that flag stands for, and maybe, just maybe, remove something that sends the notion that racism somehow is a cherished value of the state and that Strom Thurmond and his ilk were heroes. I don’t think this discussion can be just about the shooting, because it touches directly upon issues of hate and specifically race, that is such a big thing in society, and also is one of the things most people would rather not talk about.
“Roofs manifesto”
Pure evil, cold and calculated.
I watched The Butler last night and I enjoyed it very much. Yes, we’ve passed through the Jim Crow era. Now we must continue to improve and fight for what is right.
Quoted for emphasis. I saw a Twitter post that essentially encompassed this and it’d be funnier if it weren’t true.
Can someone explain to me what the attachment to this Confederate flag is about? I’ve never understood it. Clinging to a flag that has been used to terrorize a race in the past hundred years. Romanticizing an era of slavery and plantations. Take it down.
Jerry Richardson, owner of the Carolina Panthers, donates 100k to the victims’ families (10k per family and another 10k for the memorial).