Cuba USA

Political Roots of the Massacre in Charleston

By Barry Sheppard

source Green Left

The mass murder of nine African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina by a white racist has been widely denounced. To understand this hate crime it has to be put into the broader political context.

The killer, Dylann Roof, deliberately spared the life of one woman, telling her he wanted her to report on what he had done. Among other things he told her, was that he decided to kill Black people because they “are taking over the country.”

In short, his motives were political. And they occurred in the political context of the rise of the new Black Lives Matter movement with its mass mobilizations since Ferguson last August, and the racist counter-movement spearheaded by the police in reaction to it.

Roof’s action should be seen as part of that broader racist reaction, and inspired by it, even if it is an extreme example. We may see more violent racist actions in opposition to the new Black movement, as we saw in the 1960s with murders, bombings and arsons against the civil rights and Black liberation movements of that time.

His choice of the Emanuel African Methodist Church as the scene of his terrorist attack was also political. It is one of the oldest Black churches in the South, having been established as a refuge for slaves in the early 1800s, and ever since has played an important role in the fight for Black rights, including up to the present.

One of the founders of the church was a former slave, Denmark Vesey, who had been able to buy his freedom from his owner. Vesey was the main leader of a planned armed slave revolt which was to have taken place in May, 1822. The conspiracy was hatched in the church, where Blacks could meet out of the sight of whites, but was betrayed by a house slave. As a result, 130 Blacks were rounded up, charged and convicted of various crimes, and 36, including Vesey, were hanged. Four whites were arrested and jailed for supporting the planned rebellion. The church was burned down, but the congregation survived and the church later rebuilt.

The present church has a shrine dedicated to Vesey. During the Civil War, one of the first Black regiments in the Union army to fight the slavocracy was named for him.

All this history is well known in Charleston, so the church, affectionately known as the “Mother Church” among Blacks, is a symbol for the Black struggle – supported by anti-racist whites as well as Blacks, and hated by racist whites.

Roof entered the church ostensibly to join a bible study class (whites are welcomed in the church). A survivor reports that he asked to have the pastor, Clemens Pinckney, pointed out to him. Roof then sat down next to Pinckney, his central target.

Pinckney was well known in Charleston as an advocate for the Black community. He was also an elected member of the South Carolina state legislature. Roof singled him out for political assassination because of his record.

The police shooting of Walter Scott in nearby North Charleston on April 4, sparked one of the Black Lives Matter protests. Pinckney and the Emanuel A.M.E. church were involved in them, and Pinckney got through the state legislature a law to require cops to wear body cameras.

Scott, who was unarmed as in so many of these cases, was gunned down by a cop, shot in the back as he tried to flee. This was all caught on video by a bystander, so the cops couldn’t cover it up, but they tried. The video was so damning that the cop has been charged with murder, unlike in so many of the other cases.

The fact that charges were brought at all infuriated racists, who were especially angry at Pinckney.

The racists’ paranoia about Blacks “taking over the country” was also demonstrated in another recent case in Cleveland, Ohio. This stemmed from an earlier police shooting in November, 2012. In that incident, two unarmed Blacks, Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, led police on a high speed chase after police tried to stop Russell for a wrong turn. Sixty police cars joined the chase, which ended in a hail of 137 shots, killing both. Officer Michael Brelo fired 49 of those bullets. When other cops stopped firing, Brelo jumped up on the hood of the stopped car, and fired 15 bullets through the windshield at the pair.

A report from the Ohio Attorney General called the chase and the shooting “a systematic failure” of the Cleveland police. More than 60 cops were suspended, but Brelo was the only one criminally charged. His trial was held before a judge, who made public his finding of “not guilty” on May 26, and there were mass protests that night.

After the ridiculous verdict, one of Brelo’s lawyers told the press: “We stood toe to toe with an oppressive government” and defeated it.

Where do the beliefs of the racist far right that they are the victims of an “oppressive government” or that “Blacks are taking over the country” come from?

While whites in the defeated South felt this way after the Civil War, such beliefs again came to the fore after the victory of the civil rights movement in overturning the system of legal segregation in the Jim Crow South in the 1960s, and of other gains won by the broader Black liberation movement. The federal government was forced by these struggles to reluctantly codify these victories, and racist whites came to blame the government itself.

As a result of these victories, more Blacks have been elected to office, like Clemens Pinckney. A Black was even elected president! “They’re taking over!”

This is at the heart of the mantra of the right wing against “big government.” They are not against the bloated “big military,” but against government programs they see as aiding Blacks and the most exploited workers generally.

With the rise of Blacks Lives Matter the federal government has conducted investigations into many police departments, and found indeed gross racism and violence against Blacks, Latinos and others. One of these reports was about the Cleveland police, so the racist cop’s racist lawyer is proud that they won against the “oppressive government.”

The whole history of capitalism in the United States has been intertwined with the oppression and economic exploitation of Blacks, from the institution of Black slavery up through the institutionalized national oppression of Blacks today. Victories have been won, from the Civil War itself, to the defeat of Jim Crow. But as Black Lives Matter has demonstrated, de facto segregation and oppression still exist. This is so engrained that even well-meaning people talk about “the Black community” without even questioning why there is such a category at all, accepting segregation as almost a natural phenomenon.

Racism as an idea is not the cause of the oppression and exploitation of Blacks, so that the problem can be solved if we can only change people’s minds. Racism is the result, is the ideological justification of Black oppression, not its cause. Racism is a useful tool for the capitalist ruling class because it divides and weakens the working class. While the government maintains the system of national oppression evident in the police, courts and jails enforcement of it, at the same time it has to pretend that the U.S. is no longer a racist society. The result is apparently contradictory government stances.

It is this system that spawns the racism that is in the minds of the Dylann Roofs of this world.

- ‘the Perpetrator Has Been Arrested, But The Killer Is Still At Large’
by Amy Goodmansource truthdig The massacre of nine African-American worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., has sent shock waves through the nation and could well blow the roof off the Confederacy. Dylann Storm...

- The Incubus Of Racism - Charleston And The American Soul
by Mumia Abu-Jamal source Counterpunch A young white man, barely at the age of his majority, walks into Charleston’s most storied Black church and, before he leaves, a new history is written. Attending the Wednesday night Bible study, he sits...

- The Us System Isn't Broken, It's Racist By Design
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylorsource socialistworker LESS THAN a month before Mike Brown became an international symbol of police violence and racism in American law enforcement, Eric Garner was choked to death in broad daylight on a sidewalk on Staten...

- The Ghost Of Dred Scott Haunts The Streets Of Ferguson
By Amy GoodmanSource democracynow Thousands have been protesting the police killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. He was due to start college just days after he was shot dead in broad...

- Night Of Pain — Night Of Rage By Mumia Abu Jamal
Source: workers worldOunce again, a Black unarmend youth has been killed by a cop And while the facts surrounding the shooting are presently unclear, what is clear is that a cop shot 18-year-old Michael Brown eight times. According to at least...

Cuba USA