History > 2015 > USA > Immigration > African-Americans (I)

Edward W. Brooke III

when he was elected to the Senate in 1966.

Photograph:

Frank C. Curtin/Associated Press

Edward W. Brooke III, 95, Senate Pioneer, Is Dead

NYT

3.1.2015

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/
us/edward-brooke-pioneering-us-senator-in-massachusetts-dies-at-95.html

University of Cincinnati Officer

Indicted in Fatal Shooting

of Samuel DuBose

JULY 29, 2015

The New York Times

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

A University of Cincinnati police officer was indicted on murder charges on Wednesday in the fatal shooting of a driver this month.

In the indictment handed up by a grand jury in Hamilton County, the officer, Ray Tensing, is accused of killing the driver, Samuel DuBose, during a traffic stop near the campus on July 19.

At a news conference, the county prosecutor, Joe Deters, said that Officer Tensing “purposely killed” Mr. DuBose after the officer lost his temper.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years. This is the most asinine act I’ve ever seen a police officer make, totally unwarranted,” Mr. Deters told reporters. A video of the episode was also released.

The death of Mr. DuBose, who was black, at the hands of Officer Tensing, who is white, joined a string of recent episodes — in Staten Island, Cleveland, North Charleston, S.C., and Ferguson, Mo., among others — that have raised hard questions about law enforcement use of force, and the role of race in policing. Video cameras have recorded many of the episodes and nonlethal encounters like the arrest of Sandra Bland, who died three days later in a Texas jail cell, offering disturbing evidence of the confrontations that often contradicts the accounts of people involved.

Mr. DuBose, 43, a father of 10, was just south of the university campus, driving a green 1998 Honda Accord without a front license plate, when Officer Tensing began following him, according to an account that Jason Goodrich, chief of the university police, gave on Monday. Moments later, the officer pulled Mr. Dubose over on a side street, a few blocks from the campus, Mr. Goodrich said.

He said that when Officer Tensing asked for a driver’s license, Mr. DuBose handed him a bottle of alcohol instead. But Mr. Goodrich gave no more insight into the confrontation that followed, in which the officer fired one shot that struck Mr. Dubose in the head.

Another university officer who arrived shortly after the shooting, Eric Weibel, wrote in his report that Officer Tensing told him that “he was being dragged by the vehicle and had to fire his weapon,” and that “Officer Tensing stated that he was almost run over.” A third officer, he wrote, said he had seen Officer Tensing being dragged.

“Looking at Officer Tensing’s uniform, I could see that the back of his pants and shirt looked as if it had been dragged over a rough surface,” Officer Weibel wrote.

On an audio recording of police radio communications, after Officer Tensing shouted “Shots fired! Shots fired,” a dispatcher asked who was injured. It is not clear if he replied “I am injured” or “I’m uninjured.”

“I almost got run over by the car,” the officer said. “He took off on me. I discharged one round. Shot the man in the head.”

Another officer can later be heard saying “It was Officer Tensing that was injured.”

At the news conference, Mr. Deters said dismissed the officer’s Tensing’s claim that he was dragged by the car.

University of Cincinnati Officer Indicted in Fatal Shooting of Samuel DuBose,
NYT, JULY 29, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/30/us/
university-of-cincinnati-officer-indicted-in-shooting-death-of-motorist.html

On the Death of Sandra Bland

and Our Vulnerable Bodies

JULY 24, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages

Contributing Op-Ed Writer

I AM tired of writing about slain black people, particularly when those responsible are police officers, the very people obligated to serve and protect them. I am exhausted. I experience this specific exhaustion with alarming frequency. I am all too aware that I have the luxury of such exhaustion.

One of the greatest lies perpetrated on our culture today is the notion that dash cameras on police cruisers and body cameras on police officers are tools of justice. Video evidence, no matter the source, can document injustice, but rarely does this incontrovertible evidence keep black people safe or prevent future injustices.

Sandra Bland, 28 years old, was pulled over earlier this month in Waller County, Tex., by a state trooper, Brian T. Encinia. She was pulled over for a routine traffic stop. She shouldn’t have been pulled over but she was driving while black, and the reality is that black women and men are pulled over every day for this infraction brought about by the color of their skin.

We know a lot about Ms. Bland now. She was in the prime of her life, about to start a new job at Prairie View A&M University. She had posted on Facebook earlier this year that she was experiencing depression. She was passionate about civil rights and advocacy. According to an autopsy report, she committed suicide in her jail cell after three days. What I find particularly painful is that her bail was $5,000. Certainly, that is a lot of money, but if the public had known, we could have helped her family raise the funds to get her out.

As a black woman, I feel this tragedy through the marrow of my bones. We all should, regardless of the identities we inhabit.

Recently, my brother and I were talking on the phone as he drove to work. He is the chief executive of a publicly traded company. He was dressed for work, driving a BMW. He was using a hands-free system. These particulars shouldn’t matter but they do in a world where we have to constantly mourn the loss of black lives and memorialize them with hashtags. In this same world, we remind politicians and those who believe otherwise that black lives matter while suffocated by evidence to the contrary.

During the course of our conversation, he was pulled over by an officer who said he looked like an escapee from Pelican Bay State Prison in California. It was a strange story for any number of reasons. My brother told me he would call me right back. In the minutes I waited, my chest tightened. I worried. I stared at my phone. When he called back, no more than seven or eight minutes had passed. He joked: “I thought it was my time. I thought ‘this is it.’ ” He went on with his day because this is a quotidian experience for black people who dare to drive.

Each time I get in my car, I make sure I have my license, registration and insurance cards. I make sure my seatbelt is fastened. I place my cellphone in the handless dock. I check and double check and triple check these details because when (not if) I get pulled over, I want there to be no doubt I am following the letter of the law. I do this knowing it doesn’t really matter if I am following the letter of the law or not. Law enforcement officers see only the color of my skin, and in the color of my skin they see criminality, deviance, a lack of humanity. There is nothing I can do to protect myself, but I am comforted by the illusion of safety.

As a larger, very tall woman, I am sometimes mistaken for a man. I don’t want to be “accidentally” killed for being a black man. I hate that such a thought even crosses my mind. This is the reality of living in this black body. This is my reality of black womanhood, living in a world where I am stripped of my femininity and humanity because of my unruly black body.

There is a code of conduct in emergency situations — women and children first. The most vulnerable among us should be rescued before all others. In reality, this code of conduct is white women and children first. Black women, black children, they are not afforded the luxury of vulnerability. We have been shown this time and again. We remember McKinney, Tex., and a police officer, David Casebolt, holding a young black girl to the ground. We say the names of the fallen. Tamir Rice. Renisha McBride. Natasha McKenna. Tanisha Anderson. Rekia Boyd. We say their names until our throats run dry and there are still more names to add to the list.

During the ill-fated traffic stop, most of which was caught on camera, Mr. Encinia asked Ms. Bland why she was irritated and she told him. She answered the question she was asked. Her voice was steady, confident. Mr. Encinia didn’t like her tone, as if she should be joyful about a traffic stop. He told Ms. Bland to put her cigarette out and she refused. The situation escalated. Mr. Encinia threatened to light her up with his Taser. Ms. Bland was forced to leave her car. She continued to protest. She was placed in handcuffs. She was treated horribly. She was treated as less than human. She protested her treatment. She knew and stated her rights but it did not matter. Her black life and her black body did not matter.

Because Sandra Bland was driving while black, because she was not subservient in the manner this trooper preferred, a routine traffic stop became a death sentence. Even if Ms. Bland did commit suicide, there is an entire system of injustice whose fingerprints left bruises on her throat.

In his impassioned new memoir, “Between the World and Me,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.” I would take this bold claim a step further. It is also traditional to try and destroy the black spirit. I don’t want to believe our spirits can be broken. Nonetheless, increasingly, as a black woman in America, I do not feel alive. I feel like I am not yet dead.
 

Roxane Gay is the author of “An Untamed State” and “Bad Feminist” and a contributing opinion writer.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 25, 2015, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: On the Death of Sandra Bland.

On the Death of Sandra Bland and Our Vulnerable Bodies,
NYT, JULY 24, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/25/opinion/
on-the-death-of-sandra-bland-and-our-vulnerable-bodies.html

Questions About the Sandra Bland Case

JULY 22, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

I have so many questions about the case in which Sandra Bland was arrested in a small Texas town and died in police custody. These are questions that ought to be easy to answer, questions that I suspect many others may share. Here are just some of my areas of inquiry.

1. On the video released by the Texas Department of Public Safety of Bland’s traffic stop, the arresting officer, Brian Encinia, tells her that the reason for her stop is that she “failed to signal a lane change.” The officer returns to his car, then approaches Bland’s vehicle a second time. He remarks to Bland, “You seem very irritated.” Bland responds, “I am. I really am.” She continues, “I was getting out of your way. You were speeding up, tailing me, so I move over, and you stop me. So, yeah, I am a little bit irritated.”

Was Bland simply trying to move out of the way of a police vehicle?

The video shows the officer’s car accelerating behind Bland’s and passing a sign indicating a speed limit of 20 miles per hour. How fast was the officer closing the distance on Bland before she changed lanes? Was it completely reasonable for her to attempt to move out of his way?

2. The officer, while standing at the closed driver’s side door, asks Bland to extinguish her cigarette. As soon as she refuses, he demands that she exit the vehicle. Was the demand to exit because of the refusal? If so, what statute in Texas — or anywhere in America! — stipulates that a citizen can’t smoke during a traffic stop?

3. According to Encinia’s signed affidavit, Bland was “removed from the car” and “placed in handcuffs for officer safety.” The reason for the arrest is unclear to me. At one point, Encinia says, “You were getting a warning until now you’re going to jail.” So, what was the arrest for at that point? Failure to comply? Later in the video, Encinia says, “You’re going to jail for resisting arrest.” If that was the reason, why wasn’t Bland charged with resisting arrest? The affidavit reads, “Bland was placed under arrest for Assault on Public Servant.”

Encinia’s instructions to Bland are a jumble of confusion. After she is handcuffed, he points for her to “come read” the “warning” ticket, then immediately pulls back on her arm, preventing her from moving in the direction that he pointed, now demanding that she “stay right here.” He then commands Bland to “stop moving,” although, as she points out, “You keep moving me!” What was she supposed to do?

4. According to Encinia’s affidavit, at some point after being handcuffed, “Bland began swinging her elbows at me and then kicked my right leg in the shin.” On the dashcam video, a commotion happens out of view of the camera, with Bland complaining that she is being hurt — “You’re about to break my wrist!” and “You knocked my head in the ground; I got epilepsy!” Encinia and another officer insist that Bland stop moving. Encinia can be heard to say, “You are yanking around! When you pull away from me, you are resisting arrest!” (Neither the dashcam video nor a video taken by a bystander shows a discernible kick.)

When Encinia re-enters the frame of the dashcam, he explains to a female officer: “She started yanking away, then kicked me, so I took her straight to the ground.” The female officer points to Encinia’s leg as she says: “Yeah, and there you got it right there.”

Encinia says, “One thing for sure, it’s on video.” Only, it isn’t. Why exactly was Bland walked out of the frame of view of the dashcam for the arrest procedure?

5. The initial video posted by Texas authorities also has a number of visual glitches — vanishing cars, looping sequences — but no apparent audio glitches.

The director of “Selma,” Ava DuVernay, tweeted: “I edit footage for a living. But anyone can see that this official video has been cut. Read/watch. Why?” She included a link to a post pointing out the discrepancies in the video.

According to NBC News:

“Tom Vinger, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety, blamed a ‘technical issue during posting.’ He said that the department was working to correct the video.”

What kinds of “technical difficulties” were these? Why wouldn’t the audio also have glitches? (Authorities have now released a new, slightly shorter video.)

6. Texas authorities say that, while in the Waller County jail cell, Bland used a trash bag from a trash can in the cell to hang herself. Is it standard procedure to have trash cans with trash bags in jail cells? Is the can secured to the floor? If not, couldn’t it be used by an inmate to hurt herself, or other inmates or jail staff?

According to a report on Wednesday by The Houston Chronicle:

“Bland disclosed on a form at the jail that she previously had attempted suicide over that past year, although she also indicated she was not feeling suicidal at the time of her arrest, according to officials who attended the Tuesday meeting with local and state leaders investigating the case.” Shouldn’t they have known it was a suicide risk?

The Bureau of Justice Statistics points out that suicide is the No. 1 cause of non-illness-related deaths in local jails (although blacks are least likely to commit those suicides), and between 2000 and 2011 about half of those suicides “occurred within the first week of admission.”

Why weren’t more precautions taken, like, oh, I don’t know, removing any suicide risks from the cell?

7. Houston’s Channel 2 aired “exclusive video from inside the Waller County jail cell where Sandra Bland was found dead.” In the video, a trash can — a very large one — is clearly visible. But, strangely, it appears to have a trash bag in it. If Bland used the trash bag to hang herself, where did the one in the can come from? Did they replace it? Why would the jail staff do that?

8. NBC News’ John Yang also toured the cell, and in his video he says that “things are really the same as it was that morning” when officers found Bland’s body, including food (“Dinner Untouched” was the language used in title of the video on NBCNews.com) and a Bible on the bed opened to Psalms. (That Bible appears to be closed in the Channel 2 video. Who opened it between the two videos?).

And what page is the Bible opened to in the NBC video? It is open to Psalm 119 and at the top of the page are verses 109-110: “Though I constantly take my life in my hands, I will not forget your law. The wicked have set a snare for me, but I have not strayed from your precepts.” Eerie. Or, convenient.

Also in the Channel 2 video, there are orange shoes on the floor by the bed. In the NBC video, they are gone. Who moved them? Why? Where are they?

Yang says of the trash bag in the can: “Around her neck, they say, was a trash bag, an extra trash bag from this receptacle.” So what gives here? “Extra trash bag”? Was there more than one trash bag in the cell or had that one been replaced?

(It is also worth noting that the video shows what appears to be a rope holding a shower curtain.)

Isn’t this an active investigation? Shouldn’t that cell be treated like a crime scene? Why are reporters allowed to wander through it? Who all has been in it?

Maybe there are innocent and convincing answers to all these questions, and others. I hope so. People need things to make sense. When there are lapses in logic in what people think would be reasonable explanations, suspicion spreads.

Questions About the Sandra Bland Case,
NYT, JULY 22, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/opinion/
charles-m-blow-some-questions-about-the-sandra-bland-case.html

President Obama

Takes On the Prison Crisis

 

JULY 16, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

On Thursday, for the first time in American history, a president walked into a federal prison. President Obama was there to see for himself a small piece of the damage that the nation’s decades-long binge of mass incarceration has wrought.

Mr. Obama’s visit to El Reno, a medium-security prison in Oklahoma, capped off a week in which he spoke powerfully about the failings of a criminal justice system that has damaged an entire generation of Americans, locking up millions — disproportionately men of color — at a crippling cost to them, their families and communities, as well as to the taxpayers and society as a whole.

Speaking to reporters after touring the cells, Mr. Obama reflected on the people he met there. “These are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes that I made, and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made. The difference is they did not have the kinds of support structures, the second chances, the resources that would allow them to survive those mistakes.”

This indisputable argument has been made by many others, most notably former Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., who was the administration’s most powerful advocate for sweeping justice reforms. But it is more significant coming from the president, not just in his words but in his actions. On Monday Mr. Obama commuted the sentences of 46 people, most serving 20 years or more, for nonviolent drug crimes. It was a tiny fraction of the more than 30,000 people seeking clemency, but the gesture recognized some of the injustices of America’s harsh justice system.

On Tuesday, in a wide-ranging speech to the N.A.A.C.P., Mr. Obama explained that people who commit violent crimes are not the reason for the exploding federal prison population over the last few decades. Most of the growth has come instead from nonviolent, low-level drug offenders caught up in absurdly harsh mandatory minimum sentences that bear no relation to the seriousness of their offense or to the maintenance of public safety.

“If you’re a low-level drug dealer, or you violate your parole, you owe some debt to society,” Mr. Obama said. “You have to be held accountable and make amends. But you don’t owe 20 years. You don’t owe a life sentence.”

Mandatory minimums like these should be reduced or eliminated completely, he said. Judges should have more discretion to shape sentences and to use alternatives to prison, like drug courts or community programs, that are cheaper and can be more effective at keeping people from returning to crime.

Mr. Obama also put a spotlight on intolerable conditions, like overuse of solitary confinement in which more than 80,000 inmates nationwide are held on any given day. Many are being punished for minor infractions or are suffering from mental illness. “Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for 23 hours a day, sometimes for months or even years at a time?” Mr. Obama asked. He said he asked the Justice Department to review this practice.

He talked about community investment, especially in early-childhood education and in lower-income minority communities, as the best way to stop crime before it starts. And he spoke of the importance of removing barriers to employment, housing and voting for former prisoners. “Justice is not only the absence of oppression,” Mr. Obama said, “it is the presence of opportunity.”

As Mr. Obama acknowledged, however, his powers are limited. Any comprehensive solution to this criminal justice catastrophe must come from Congress and the state legislatures which for decades enacted severe sentencing laws and countless other harmful measures. In recent years, the opposite trend has taken hold as lawmakers in both conservative and liberal states have reduced populations in state prisons — where the vast majority of inmates are held — as well as crime rates.

It’s time that Congress fixed the federal system. After failed efforts at reform, an ambitious new bill called the SAFE Justice Act is winning supporters, including, on Thursday, the House speaker, John Boehner, and may have enough bipartisan support to pass. It would, among several other helpful provisions, eliminate mandatory minimums for many low-level drug crimes and create educational and other programs in prison that have been shown to reduce recidivism.

One sign of how far the politics of criminal justice has shifted was a remark by former president Bill Clinton, who signed a 1994 law that played a key role in the soaring growth of America’s prison system. On Wednesday, Mr. Clinton said, “I signed a bill that made the problem worse. And I want to admit it.” It was a long overdue admission, and another notable moment in a week full of them.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this editorial appears in print on July 17, 2015, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Mr. Obama Takes On the Prison Crisis.

President Obama Takes On the Prison Crisis,
NYT, July 16, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/17/opinion/
president-obama-takes-on-the-prison-crisis.html

President Obama:

Talk to Black America, Not at Us

JULY 2, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By DONOVAN X. RAMSEY

Is President Obama the scold of black America or its empathetic prophet?

With his remarks at the funeral for the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney a week ago, Mr. Obama looked out onto a sea of mostly black faces — under the gaze of the nation — and addressed the topic of racism head-on.

“For too long, we’ve been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present. Perhaps we see that now,” he said without flinching.

It was a bittersweet moment. Sweet because, for the first time in years, the president exercised some of his trademark audacity on behalf of black Americans instead of chiding us. Bitter because of the ghastly events in Charleston, S.C., that led to the shift in rhetoric.

“Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty, or attend dilapidated schools, or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career,” he said.

It was a departure from the president’s usual comments to and about black Americans, ones in which he typically forgoes those “tough questions” in favor of a focus on personal accountability, with an emphasis on the importance of fathers within families.

The president has said it is because he grew up fatherless that he focuses on family values in his remarks to black Americans. He thinks the issue is important, and uniquely important for us. He must also think it’s a way to connect with me, or audiences like me. I’m a black man who grew up without a father. Yet, to me, Mr. Obama’s finger-wagging on fatherhood has been disappointing almost beyond words.

In a 2008 Father’s Day speech before a black congregation in Chicago, Mr. Obama, then a candidate for the White House, took black dads to task. “Any fool can have a child,” he said. “That doesn’t make you a father. It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.”

A few years later, when the president addressed the topic of gun violence before a group of students in Chicago, he said: “When a child opens fire on another child, there is a hole in that child’s heart that government can’t fill. Only community and parents and teachers and clergy can fill that hole.”

I graduated from Morehouse College before Mr. Obama gave a commencement address there in 2013. Despite what had by then become the president’s routine admonishment of black Americans, I held out hope for the powerful message he could deliver to graduates of the nation’s only institution dedicated to educating black men. I hoped that a black man who’d ascended to the presidency might offer brotherly career advice. I thought he might tackle policy — mass incarceration, student loans, economic inequality, funding for black colleges.

Or, I imagined, he would stand in front of 500 black men being conferred college degrees — young people on their way to graduate school or beginning careers despite tremendous odds — and say, This too is black America. Instead, that speech made headlines for its “no excuses” theme and its focus on fatherhood. “Be the best father you can be to your children,” President Obama told the new graduates, “Because nothing is more important.”

The president faced some criticism for the address at the time, including from Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic. At a panel discussion on poverty at Georgetown this May, Mr. Obama defended his message.

“It’s true that if I’m giving a commencement at Morehouse that I will have a conversation with young black men about taking responsibility as fathers that I probably will not have with the women of Barnard. And I make no apologies for that,” he said. “And the reason is, is because I am a black man who grew up without a father and I know the cost that I paid for that.”

The audience applauded. I was less enthusiastic.

Whether we’re confronting gun violence or graduating, the president’s message to black America has largely centered on absent black dads. At best, it has been armchair psychology delivered from the bully pulpit. At worst, a sleight of hand that diverts focus from policy questions and avoids a real discussion of discrimination. Either way, the reduction from citizen to statistic has been frustrating.

It is worthy of praise, of course, that the president of the United States cares about the status of American families, and black families in particular. Mr. Obama has, however, reserved his lectures on fatherhood for black Americans. And recent events suggest that, for that constituency in particular, the president should have more pressing concerns.

Trayvon Martin had an involved dad, as did Mike Brown. Both fathers fought for a conviction or indictment, respectively, in the killings of their sons and lost.

The absence of Barack Obama Sr. is a major theme of President Obama’s life story. It’s a thread that runs through his autobiography and is, in fact, the inspiration for that book’s title. Over the years, however, it has become increasingly clear that fatherlessness is a dominant lens through which Mr. Obama views not just himself but also the nation’s black men and boys at large.

As he assessed the legacy of Mr. Pinckney, the specter of derelict dads didn’t loom so large. In fact, black fatherlessness took another form, as the slain pastor’s daughters sat through their father’s funeral. Before them, the president was fully present as an advocate.

In eulogizing Mr. Pinckney, the president was forced — or allowed — to do something he rarely does: He acknowledged black America within the context of its undeniable struggle to exist in a nation at odds with our presence since its inception. He spoke for us, not just at us.

Donovan X. Ramsey is an Emerging Voices Fellow at Demos, a public policy organization.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 3, 2015, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: We Need Obama to Speak For Us, Not at Us.

President Obama: Talk to Black America, Not at Us,
NYT, JULY 2, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/03/opinion/
president-obama-talk-to-black-america-not-at-us.html

Charleston Families

Hope Words Endure Past Shooting

 

JUNE 24, 2015

The New York Times

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

CHARLESTON, S.C. — On the day that Dylann Roof peered into a camera and spoke his first words in court last week, Alana Simmons, whose grandfather was killed at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, was not prepared to stand up and talk. Her presence, she thought, would be enough.

But then she heard Nadine Collier, in a startling moment of anguish and grace, address Mr. Roof, the man accused of shooting nine church members to death. “I forgive you and have mercy on your soul,” said Ms. Collier, whose mother, Ethel Lance, was one of the victims.

At that moment, Ms. Simmons said, her own path became clear, and she joined other relatives of the dead in expressing both their pain and forgiveness to the man charged with causing such despair. “We are here to combat hate-filled actions with love-filled actions,” Ms. Simmons said. “And that is what we want to get out to the world.”

As the first of the funerals begin Thursday, the nine families are still pondering the effect their words — allowing love and forgiveness to crowd out hate and vengeance — have had on the nation.

This is not to say that the families do not feel moments of rage and heartbreak. Nor should their forgiveness be mistaken for acceptance.

“Are we hurting? Yes,” said Leon Alston, a steward at Emanuel. “Do we want justice done? Yes. Do we want hatred to stop? Yes. Do we want him to pay for his crime? Yes.”

Since the shooting, the debate over Confederate symbols has reached a tipping point around the country, while the families’ humanity in the face of calamity has transformed, at least for the moment, the nation’s usually polarized debates on race.

Their hope, they say, is that their message will stand in contrast to the anger and violence that has riven other communities, including Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, in the wake of police shootings.

“We have been taught forgiveness,” said Jamila Gadsden, 37.

Her uncle, the Rev. Anthony Thompson, lost his wife, Myra, at the church, but in court, he urged Mr. Roof to repent, confess and give his life to Christ.

“And we have our angry moments, but that is not what we focus on,” Ms. Gadsden said. “I just think that after everything that has happened in other communities across the country, that this gives people something to think about. If it doesn’t make you think, there is nothing we can do.”

Ms. Simmons said that in honor of her slain grandfather, the Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons Sr., she and her relatives have spearheaded a social media campaign called the Hate Won’t Win Challenge, which calls on people to “commit an act of love” and post it on Facebook or Instagram.

The families had not consulted on a course of action before the court hearing. In fact, they had scarcely exchanged words. The last time many of them had seen one another was the night of the shooting.

Instead, they spoke individually, from the heart. And their words reflected those that many of them were weaned on at Mother Emanuel, as the church is known. One motto there is, “We enter to worship, we depart to serve.”

Mrs. Thompson, 59, one of 14 siblings, including four sets of twins, was raised at Mother Emanuel. She lived within walking distance of the sanctuary on Calhoun Street and grew up in the church pews with her family, which is as tight-knit as it is sprawling.

Known for her “comforting spirit,” Mrs. Thompson, a mother of two, was the quiet one of the family, the one who would listen without judgment and hear without interruption, said her sister Eunice C. Guyton. Once a guidance counselor at a local middle school, Mrs. Thompson told her sister that God had called her to do his work and join the ministry at Emanuel.

On the night the gunman walked into Emanuel, Mrs. Thompson was leading the Bible study group. Turning anyone away from God’s house would have been unthinkable to her, Ms. Guyton said. The group discussed a verse from Mark 4 about the soil in which the word of God is sown; not all soil is rooted deeply enough to receive the word, the passage states.

Started when slavery was a way of life here, Emanuel has always brought sustenance and peace to its members.

“Emanuel does not harbor hate in her heart,” Ms. Guyton said. “That’s not the God we serve. It’s important for us to know that the young man is a mother’s son, a father’s son. If he can earnestly repent, God will hear him.”

Mr. Alston, the steward, said many of the relatives of the victims had been coming to Emanuel for years and had heard this message repeated again and again.

“These people were taught very well about right and wrong, about the loving and the teaching of the holy word,” Mr. Alston said. “For them to forgive in such a short period of time speaks volumes to who they are and who their loved ones were.”

Speaking from her parents’ home, Bethane Middleton Brown repeated, as she did in court, that she is “a work in progress,” acknowledging the anger she feels. Her sister and confidante, DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49, died at Emanuel. In the wake of the killing spree, Ms. Middleton Doctor’s four daughters are now motherless; the youngest is 11 and the oldest is a senior in college. Their mother was the center of their world, she said.

But sitting in court that day, Ms. Middleton Brown thought hard about her sister; not just her death, but how her sister led her life. Through hardships, and there were many, including bouts of unemployment and a recent difficult divorce, her sister made a point to be virtuous and not cast aspersions on others. She clung fiercely to her faith.

“She was the female Job,” Ms. Middleton Brown said of her sister, who was studying to be a minister at Emanuel. “She had been through so much. It was like you could touch her body, her flesh, but not her soul.”

In court, she told Mr. Roof that the Middletons were a family that “love built.” And in this, she stands firm: “Forgiveness is the only way. Others may not agree with me but that’s the way it has to be.”

As for the future, she agrees with Mr. Alston. If forgiveness among relatives has come so soon after the deaths, then their feelings will probably withstand the path through the criminal justice proceedings.

But Ms. Middleton Brown said she must also believe there is reason for all of this bloodshed, something larger down the road.

“I believe that our God is a god of purpose,” she said.

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on June 25, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Families Hope Words Endure Past Shooting.

Charleston Families Hope Words Endure Past Shooting,
NYT, JUNE 24, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/
charleston-families-hope-words-endure-past-shooting.html

Tearing Down the Confederate Flag

Is Just a Start

JUNE 24, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Nicholas Kristof

Suppose African-Americans marked their heritage with flags depicting Nat Turner’s rebellion of 1831, in which slaves massacred about 60 whites before the uprising was crushed? The flag wouldn’t be celebrating the murder of whites, of course, but would simply commemorate a factual milestone in black history!

Suppose Mexican-Americans waved a flag depicting the battle of the Alamo? The point would not be to celebrate the slaughter of Texans, but to express pride in Mexican heritage!

Suppose Canadian-Americans displayed a flag showing the burning of the White House in the War of 1812? Nothing against the Yanks, mind you — just a point of Canadian historical pride!

Suppose American women waved flags of Lorena Bobbitt, who reacted to domestic abuse in 1993 by severing her husband’s penis and throwing it into a field? The aim wouldn’t be to approve of sexual mutilation, of course — but Bobbitt’s subsequent acquittal was a landmark in the recognition of domestic violence!

Well, you get the point. That’s how the Confederate battle flag looked to many of us. And at least Nat Turner was fighting for his own freedom, while the Confederate battle flag was the banner of those who fought freedom, defended slavery, clubbed civil rights workers — and, most recently, murdered black churchgoers. And it’s exhilarating to see the same distaste expressed in the Southern mainstream.
Continue reading the main story

Let's celebrate the drawing down of the Confederate battle flag — and then let's pivot from symbolic moves to substantial ones.

“The Confederate battle flag 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,” noted Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention. “White Christians ought to think about what that flag says to our African-American brothers and sisters.”

The last year has brought a far-reaching conversation about race in America. But much of that conversation seemed polarizing more than clarifying, leaving each side more entrenched than ever — so it’s thrilling to see a wave of action now.

South Carolina may finally remove the flag from the State House grounds, Alabama has removed four Confederate flags from its state Capitol grounds, and Mississippi may also take a Confederate battle cross off the state flag. Virginia, Tennessee, Maryland and North Carolina seem poised to keep the Confederate flag off license plates. A bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general and early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, is expected to be evicted from the Tennessee State House. Walmart, Sears, Amazon, e-Bay and other retailers will no longer sell Confederate merchandise.

So we’re finally seeing not just conversation but movement.

But the movement is in some ways chimerical. It’s about a symbol — and now the progress on the symbol needs to be matched by progress on racial inequality in daily life.

America’s greatest shame in 2015 is not a piece of cloth. It’s that a black boy has a life expectancy five years shorter than a white boy. It’s that the net worth of the average black household in 2011 was $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to census data.

It’s that almost two-thirds of black children grow up in low-income families. It’s that more than one-third of inner-city black kids suffer lead poisoning (and thus often lifelong brain impairment), mostly from old lead paint in substandard housing.

More consequential than that flag is our flawed system of school finance that perpetuates inequity. Black students in America are much less likely than whites to attend schools offering advanced science and math courses.

The one public system in which America goes out of its way to provide services to African-Americans is prison. Partly because of our disastrous experiment in mass incarceration, black men in their 20s without a high school diploma are more likely to be incarcerated than employed, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

So I’m all for celebrating the drawing down of the Confederate battle flag, but now let’s pivot from symbolic moves to substantial ones.

That means, for example, early childhood programs, which offer the most cost-effective interventions to create a more even starting line. These include home visitation, high-quality preschool and literacy programs.

A Stanford University randomized trial examined a simple, inexpensive program called Ready4K!, which simply sent three text messages a week to parents to encourage them to read to their preschoolers — and it was astonishingly successful. Parents read more to children, who then experienced learning gains — and this was particularly true of black and Hispanic children. And because this was text messaging, the cost was less than $1 a family for the whole school year.

So, sure, good riddance to Confederate flags across the country! And then let’s swivel to address the larger national disgrace: In 2015, so many children still don’t have an equal shot at life because of the color of their skin.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 25, 2015, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Tearing Down the Confederate Flag Is Just a Start.

Tearing Down the Confederate Flag Is Just a Start,
NYT, JUNE 24, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/opinion/
tearing-down-the-confederate-flag-is-just-a-start.html

Tally of Attacks in U.S.

Challenges Perceptions

of Top Terror Threat

JUNE 24, 2015

The New York Times

By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — In the 14 years since Al Qaeda carried out attacks on New York and the Pentagon, extremists have regularly executed smaller lethal assaults in the United States, explaining their motives in online manifestoes or social media rants.

But the breakdown of extremist ideologies behind those attacks may come as a surprise. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center.

The slaying of nine African-Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church last week, with an avowed white supremacist charged with their murders, was a particularly savage case. But it is only the latest in a string of lethal attacks by people espousing racial hatred, hostility to government and theories such as those of the “sovereign citizen” movement, which denies the legitimacy of most statutory law. The assaults have taken the lives of police officers, members of racial or religious minorities and random civilians.

Non-Muslim extremists have carried out 19 such attacks since Sept. 11, according to the latest count, compiled by David Sterman, a New America program associate, and overseen by Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert. By comparison, seven lethal attacks by Islamic militants have taken place in the same period.

If such numbers are new to the public, they are familiar to police officers. A survey to be published this week asked 382 police and sheriff’s departments nationwide to rank the three biggest threats from violent extremism in their jurisdiction. About 74 percent listed antigovernment violence, while 39 percent listed “Al Qaeda-inspired” violence, according to the researchers, Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina and David Schanzer of Duke University.

“Law enforcement agencies around the country have told us the threat from Muslim extremists is not as great as the threat from right-wing extremists,” said Dr. Kurzman, whose study is to be published by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security and the Police Executive Research Forum.

John G. Horgan, who studies terrorism at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, said the mismatch between public perceptions and actual cases has become steadily more obvious to scholars.

“There’s an acceptance now of the idea that the threat from jihadi terrorism in the United States has been overblown,” Dr. Horgan said. “And there’s a belief that the threat of right-wing, antigovernment violence has been underestimated.”

Counting terrorism cases is a notoriously subjective enterprise, relying on shifting definitions and judgment calls.

If terrorism is defined as ideological violence, for instance, should an attacker who has merely ranted about religion, politics or race be considered a terrorist? A man in Chapel Hill, N.C., who was charged with fatally shooting three young Muslim neighbors had posted angry critiques of religion, but he also had a history of outbursts over parking issues. (New America does not include this attack in its count.)

Likewise, what about mass killings in which no ideological motive is evident, such as those at a Colorado movie theater and a Connecticut elementary school in 2012? The criteria used by New America and most other research organizations exclude such attacks, which have cost more lives than those clearly tied to ideology.

Some killings by non-Muslims that most experts would categorize as terrorism have drawn only fleeting news media coverage, never jelling in the public memory. But to revisit some of the episodes is to wonder why.

In 2012, a neo-Nazi named Wade Michael Page entered a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and opened fire, killing six people and seriously wounding three others. Mr. Page, who died at the scene, was a member of a white supremacist group called the Northern Hammerskins.

In another case, in June 2014, Jerad and Amanda Miller, a married couple with radical antigovernment and neo-Nazi views, entered a Las Vegas pizza restaurant and fatally shot two police officers who were eating lunch. On the bodies, they left a swastika, a flag inscribed with the slogan “Don’t tread on me” and a note saying, “This is the start of the revolution.” Then they killed a third person in a nearby Walmart.

And, as in the case of jihadist plots, there have been sobering close calls. In November 2014 in Austin, Tex., a man named Larry McQuilliams fired more than 100 rounds at government buildings that included the Police Headquarters and the Mexican Consulate. Remarkably, his shooting spree hit no one, and he was killed by an officer before he could try to detonate propane cylinders he had driven to the scene.

Some Muslim advocates complain that when the perpetrator of an attack is not Muslim, media commentators quickly focus on the question of mental illness.

“With non-Muslims, the media bends over backward to identify some psychological traits that may have pushed them over the edge,” said Abdul Cader Asmal, a retired physician and a longtime spokesman for Boston’s Muslim community. “Whereas if it’s a Muslim, the assumption is that they must have done it because of their religion.”

On several occasions since President Obama took office, efforts by government agencies to conduct research on right-wing extremism have run into resistance from Republicans, who suspected an attempt to smear conservatives.

A 2009 report by the Department of Homeland Security, which warned that an ailing economy and the election of the first black president might prompt a violent reaction from white supremacists, was withdrawn in the face of conservative criticism. Its main author, Daryl Johnson, later accused the department of “gutting” its staffing for such research.

William Braniff, the executive director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, said the outsize fear of jihadist violence reflects memories of Sept. 11, the daunting scale of sectarian conflict overseas and wariness of a strain of Islam that seems alien to many Americans.

“We understand white supremacists,” he said. “We don’t really feel like we understand Al Qaeda, which seems too complex and foreign to grasp.”

The contentious question of biased perceptions of terrorist threats dates back at least two decades, to the truck bombing that tore apart the federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. Some early media speculation about the attack assumed that it had been carried out by Muslim militants. The arrest of Timothy McVeigh, an antigovernment extremist, quickly put an end to such theories.

The bombing, which killed 168 people, including 19 children, remains the second-deadliest terrorist attack in American history, though its toll was dwarfed by the roughly 3,000 killed on Sept 11.

“If there’s one lesson we seem to have forgotten 20 years after Oklahoma City, it’s that extremist violence comes in all shapes and sizes,” said Dr. Horgan, the University of Massachusetts scholar. “And very often it comes from someplace you’re least suspecting.”

Tally of Attacks in U.S. Challenges Perceptions of Top Terror Threat,
NYT, JUNE 24, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/
tally-of-attacks-in-us-challenges-perceptions-of-top-terror-threat.html

Why I Can’t Forgive Dylann Roof

JUNE 23, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages

Contributing Op-Ed Writer

Roxane Gay

I DO NOT forgive Dylann Roof, a racist terrorist whose name I hate saying or knowing. I have no immediate connection to what happened in Charleston, S.C., last week beyond my humanity and my blackness, but I do not foresee ever forgiving his crimes, and I am wholly at ease with that choice.

My unwillingness to forgive this man does not give him any kind of power. I am not filled with hate for this man because he is beneath my contempt. I do not believe in the death penalty so I don’t wish to see him dead. My lack of forgiveness serves as a reminder that there are some acts that are so terrible that we should recognize them as such. We should recognize them as beyond forgiving.

I struggle with faith but I was raised Catholic. I believe God is a God of love but cannot understand how that love is not powerful enough to save us from ourselves. As a child, I learned that forgiveness requires reconciliation by way of confession and penance. We must admit our sins. We must atone for our sins. When I went to confession each week, I told the priest my childish sins — fighting with my brothers, saying a curse word, the rather minor infractions of a sheltered Nebraska girl. When I didn’t have a sin to confess, I made something up, which was also a sin. After confession, I knelt at a pew and did my penance, and thought about the wrong I had done and then I tried to be better. I’m not sure I succeeded all that often.

Ever the daydreamer, I spent most of my time in Sunday Mass lost in my imagination. The one prayer that stayed with me was “Our Father” and the line “and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” I always got stuck on that part. It’s a nice idea that we could forgive those who might commit the same sins we are apt to commit but surely, there must be a line. Surely there are some trespasses most of us would not commit. What then?

Forgiveness does not come easily to me. I am fine with this failing. I am particularly unwilling to forgive those who show no remorse, who don’t demonstrate any interest in reconciliation. I do not believe there has been enough time since this terrorist attack for anyone to forgive. The bodies of the dead are still being buried. We are still memorizing their names: Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, DePayne Middleton Doctor, Clementa C. Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel L. Simmons Sr., Sharonda Coleman-Singleton and Myra Thompson.

We are still memorizing these names but the families who loved the people who carried these names have forgiven Dylann Roof. They offered up testimony in court, less than 48 hours after the trauma of losing their loved ones in so brutal a manner. Alana Simmons, who lost her grandfather, said, “Although my grandfather and the other victims died at the hands of hate, everyone’s plea for your soul is proof that they lived in love, and their legacies will live in love.” Nadine Collier, who lost her mother, said: “You took something very precious away from me. I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you and have mercy on your soul.”

I deeply respect the families of the nine slain who are able to forgive this terrorist and his murderous racism. I cannot fathom how they are capable of such eloquent mercy, such grace under such duress.

Nine people are dead. Nine black people are dead. They were murdered in a terrorist attack.

Over the weekend, newspapers across the country shared headlines of forgiveness from the families of the nine slain. The dominant media narrative vigorously embraced that notion of forgiveness, seeming to believe that if we forgive we have somehow found a way to make sense of the incomprehensible.

We are reminded of the power of whiteness. Predictably, alongside the forgiveness story, the media has tried to humanize this terrorist. They have tried to understand Dylann Roof’s hatred because surely, there must be an explanation for so heinous an act. At the gunman’s bond hearing, the judge, who was once reprimanded for using the N-word from the bench, talked about how not only were the nine slain and their families victims, but so were the relatives of the terrorist. There are no limits to the power of whiteness when it comes to calls for mercy.

The call for forgiveness is a painfully familiar refrain when black people suffer. White people embrace narratives about forgiveness so they can pretend the world is a fairer place than it actually is, and that racism is merely a vestige of a painful past instead of this indelible part of our present.

Black people forgive because we need to survive. We have to forgive time and time again while racism or white silence in the face of racism continues to thrive. We have had to forgive slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynching, inequity in every realm, mass incarceration, voter disenfranchisement, inadequate representation in popular culture, microaggressions and more. We forgive and forgive and forgive and those who trespass against us continue to trespass against us.

Mr. Roof’s racism was blunt and raggedly formed. It was bred by a culture in which we constantly have to shout “Black lives matter!” because there is so much evidence to the contrary. This terrorist was raised in this culture. He made racist jokes with his friends. He shared his plans with his roommate. It’s much easier to introduce forgiveness into the conversation than to sit with that reality and consider all who are complicit.

What white people are really asking for when they demand forgiveness from a traumatized community is absolution. They want absolution from the racism that infects us all even though forgiveness cannot reconcile America’s racist sins. They want absolution from their silence in the face of all manner of racism, great and small. They want to believe it is possible to heal from such profound and malingering trauma because to face the openness of the wounds racism has created in our society is too much. I, for one, am done forgiving.

Roxane Gay is the author of “An Untamed State” and “Bad Feminist” and a contributing opinion writer.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 24, 2015, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Why I Can’t Forgive the Killer in Charleston.

Why I Can’t Forgive Dylann Roof,
NYT, JUNE 23, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/opinion/why-i-cant-forgive-dylann-roof.html

Slavery’s Long Shadow

JUNE 22, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Paul Krugman

America is a much less racist nation than it used to be, and I’m not just talking about the still remarkable fact that an African-American occupies the White House. The raw institutional racism that prevailed before the civil rights movement ended Jim Crow is gone, although subtler discrimination persists. Individual attitudes have changed, too, dramatically in some cases. For example, as recently as the 1980s half of Americans opposed interracial marriage, a position now held by only a tiny minority.

Yet racial hatred is still a potent force in our society, as we’ve just been reminded to our horror. And I’m sorry to say this, but the racial divide is still a defining feature of our political economy, the reason America is unique among advanced nations in its harsh treatment of the less fortunate and its willingness to tolerate unnecessary suffering among its citizens.

Of course, saying this brings angry denials from many conservatives, so let me try to be cool and careful here, and cite some of the overwhelming evidence for the continuing centrality of race in our national politics.

My own understanding of the role of race in U.S. exceptionalism was largely shaped by two academic papers.

The first, by the political scientist Larry Bartels, analyzed the move of the white working class away from Democrats, a move made famous in Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Mr. Frank argued that working-class whites were being induced to vote against their own interests by the right’s exploitation of cultural issues. But Mr. Bartels showed that the working-class turn against Democrats wasn’t a national phenomenon — it was entirely restricted to the South, where whites turned overwhelmingly Republican after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Richard Nixon’s adoption of the so-called Southern strategy.

And this party-switching, in turn, was what drove the rightward swing of American politics after 1980. Race made Reaganism possible. And to this day Southern whites overwhelmingly vote Republican, to the tune of 85 or even 90 percent in the deep South.

The second paper, by the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, was titled “Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-style Welfare State?” Its authors — who are not, by the way, especially liberal — explored a number of hypotheses, but eventually concluded that race is central, because in America programs that help the needy are all too often seen as programs that help Those People: “Within the United States, race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare. America’s troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state.”

Now, that paper was published in 2001, and you might wonder if things have changed since then. Unfortunately, the answer is that they haven’t, as you can see by looking at how states are implementing — or refusing to implement — Obamacare.

For those who haven’t been following this issue, in 2012 the Supreme Court gave individual states the option, if they so chose, of blocking the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, a key part of the plan to provide health insurance to lower-income Americans. But why would any state choose to exercise that option? After all, states were being offered a federally-funded program that would provide major benefits to millions of their citizens, pour billions into their economies, and help support their health-care providers. Who would turn down such an offer?

The answer is, 22 states at this point, although some may eventually change their minds. And what do these states have in common? Mainly, a history of slaveholding: Only one former member of the Confederacy has expanded Medicaid, and while a few Northern states are also part of the movement, more than 80 percent of the population in Medicaid-refusing America lives in states that practiced slavery before the Civil War.

And it’s not just health reform: a history of slavery is a strong predictor of everything from gun control (or rather its absence), to low minimum wages and hostility to unions, to tax policy.

So will it always be thus? Is America doomed to live forever politically in the shadow of slavery?

I’d like to think not. For one thing, our country is growing more ethnically diverse, and the old black-white polarity is slowly becoming outdated. For another, as I said, we really have become much less racist, and in general a much more tolerant society on many fronts. Over time, we should expect to see the influence of dog-whistle politics decline.

But that hasn’t happened yet. Every once in a while you hear a chorus of voices declaring that race is no longer a problem in America. That’s wishful thinking; we are still haunted by our nation’s original sin.
 

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 22, 2015, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Slavery’s Long Shadow.

Slavery’s Long Shadow, NYT, JUNE 22, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/opinion/
paul-krugman-slaverys-long-shadow.html

White Supremacists Without Borders

JUNE 22, 2015

The New York Times

MORRIS DEES and J. RICHARD COHEN

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — A VARIETY of clues to the motives of Dylann Storm Roof, the suspect in last week’s mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., have emerged. First, we saw the patches he wore on his jacket in a Facebook photo: the flags of regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia that brutally enforced white minority rule.

Then, a further cache of photos of Mr. Roof — seen in several bearing a Confederate flag — was discovered on a website, Last Rhodesian, registered in his name, together with a manifesto, a hodgepodge of white supremacist ideas. The author (most likely Mr. Roof) calls on whites to take “drastic action” to regain dominance in America and Europe.

These themes, popular among white supremacists in the United States, are also signs of the growing globalization of white nationalism. When we think of the Islamist terrorism of groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, we recognize their international dimension. When it comes to far-right domestic terrorism, we don’t.

Americans tend to view attacks like the mass murder in Charleston as isolated hate crimes, the work of a deranged racist or group of zealots lashing out in anger, unconnected to a broader movement. This view we can no longer afford to indulge.

When, according to survivors, Mr. Roof told the victims at the prayer meeting that black people were “taking over the country,” he was expressing sentiments that unite white nationalists from the United States and Canada to Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Unlike those of the civil rights era, whose main goal was to maintain Jim Crow in the American South, today’s white supremacists don’t see borders; they see a white tribe under attack by people of color across the globe.

The end of white rule in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa, they believe, foreshadowed an apocalyptic future for all white people: a “white genocide” that must be stopped before it’s too late. To support this view, they cite the murders of white farmers in South Africa since the end of apartheid.

In recent years, extremists have distilled the notion of white genocide to “the mantra,” parts of which show up on billboards throughout the South, as well as in Internet chat rooms. It proclaims “Diversity = White Genocide” and “Diversity Means Chasing Down the Last White Person,” blaming multiculturalism for undermining the “white race.” The white nationalist American Freedom Party has made the mantra’s author, a segregationist from South Carolina named Robert Whitaker, its vice-presidential candidate in 2016.

White supremacists across the country, some displaying the apartheid South African flag, have participated in “White Man Marches” to raise awareness of the so-called white genocide. A neo-Confederate group, the League of the South, also uses the white genocide argument to call for laws against interracial marriage.

White nationalist leaders are traveling abroad to strengthen their international networks. At the Southern Poverty Law Center, we have documented more than 30 instances in the past two years. In 2013, Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, a group that publishes pseudo-academic articles purporting to show the inferiority of black people, addressed groups of white nationalists in Britain and France on their common cause. “The fight in Europe is exactly the same as ours,” he said.

The movement is bound to produce more violence, not necessarily from organized groups but from lone wolves like Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who killed more than 70 people in his country in 2011 because he wanted “to save Europe from Islam.” Mr. Breivik had ties to American white nationalists as a registered user of Stormfront, a web forum founded by a former Ku Klux Klan leader that has more than 300,000 members (about two-thirds are American).

Europe has also seen the rise of a powerful, far-right political movement that rejects multiculturalism. The anti-Semitic Jobbik Party in Hungary and the neo-fascist Golden Dawn in Greece are prime examples. In Germany, there has been a series of murders by neo-Nazis. Britain, too, is experiencing an upswing of nationalist, anti-immigrant politics.

This month, S.P.L.C. staffers will join activists from the United States and Europe at a conference in Budapest about this transnational white supremacism that is emerging as the world grows more connected by technology. The message of white genocide is spreading. White nationalists look beyond borders for confirmation that their race is under attack, and they share their ideas in the echo chamber of racist websites.

The days of thinking of domestic terrorism as the work of a few Klansmen or belligerent skinheads are over. We know Islamic terrorists are thinking globally, and we confront that threat. We’ve been too slow to realize that white supremacists are doing the same.
 

Morris Dees is the founder, and J. Richard Cohen the president, of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 22, 2015, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Racists Without Borders.

White Supremacists Without Borders,
NYT, JUNE 22, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/opinion/
white-supremacists-without-borders.html

Dylann Roof Photos

and a Manifesto Are Posted

on Website

 

JUNE 20, 2015

The New York Times

By FRANCES ROBLES

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Dylann Roof spat on and burned the American flag, but waved the Confederate.

He posed for pictures wearing a No. 88 T-shirt, had 88 Facebook friends and wrote that number — white supremacist code for “Heil Hitler”— in the South Carolina sand.

A website discovered Saturday appears to offer the first serious look at Mr. Roof’s thinking, including how the case of Trayvon Martin, the black Florida teenager shot to death in 2012 by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, triggered his racist rage. The site shows a stash of 60 photographs, many of them of Mr. Roof at Confederate heritage sites or slavery museums, and includes a nearly 2,500-word manifesto in which the author criticized blacks as being inferior while lamenting the cowardice of white flight.

“I have no choice,” it reads. “I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. 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. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

The website was first registered on Feb. 9 in the name of Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old man charged with entering the historically black Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston on Wednesday night, attending a prayer meeting for an hour and then murdering nine parishioners. The day after the site was registered, the registration information was intentionally masked.

It is not clear whether the manifesto was written by Mr. Roof or if he had control of it. Nor is it clear whether he took the pictures with a timer, or if someone else took them. In a joint statement Saturday night, the Charleston Police Department and the F.B.I. said they were aware of the website and were “taking steps to verify the authenticity of these postings.”

If it is genuine, as his friends seem to think, the tourist sites he visited, the pictures that were posted and the hate-filled words on the site offered a chilling glimpse into the interests of an unemployed former landscaper said to have a fixation on race.

“This whole racist thing came into him within the past five years,” said Caleb Brown, a childhood friend of Mr. Roof’s who is half black. “He was never really popular; he accepted that. He wasn’t like: ‘When I grow up I am going to show all these kids.’ He accepted who he was, and who he was changed, obviously.”

Mr. Roof has been charged with nine counts of murder in the killings. Victims included the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, who was both the church pastor and a state senator.

Mr. Roof’s friends say that he only spoke of his murderous plans once — when he recently warned that he planned to do something crazy with the gun he had purchased with the money he got from his parents for his 21st birthday. But they say his sense of racial grievance began with the Trayvon Martin case.

The website, the lastrhodesian.com, which was not working by Saturday afternoon, featured a photo of a bloodied dead white man on the floor. The picture appears to be an image from “Romper Stomper,” an Australian movie about neo-Nazis. The domain name is a reference to the white minority of what is now Zimbabwe, where whites fought blacks for 15 years and enlisted white supremacists as mercenaries.

The site was first discovered by a blogger who goes by the pen name Emma Quangel, who paid $49 for a reverse domain search that turned up the site.

According to web server logs, the manifesto was last modified at 4:44 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, the day of the Charleston shootings, and the essay notes, “at the time of writing I am in a great hurry.”

In the manifesto, Mr. Roof writes: “The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words ‘black on White crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day.”

The manifesto also says he learned from the website of the far-right Council of Conservative Citizens. The council is an offshoot of a 1950s-era organization that fought school desegregation. A message on its website says the group is “deeply saddened by the Charleston killing spree.”

The killing of nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., is among a long list of attacks targeting predominantly black churches in the United States.

A friend of Mr. Roof’s, Jacob Meek, 15, said the references to the Trayvon Martin case made it clear that Mr. Roof had written the essay. “That’s his website,” he said. “He wrote it, and I just can tell.”

Watchdog groups that track right-wing extremism say the manifesto reflects the language found in white supremacist forums online and dovetails with what has been said about Mr. Roof thus far — that he had self-radicalized, and that he did not belong to a particular hate group. “It’s clear that he was extremely receptive to those ideas,” said Mark Pitcavage, the director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “At the same time, he does not have a sophisticated knowledge of white supremacy.”

The icon for the browser tab on Mr. Roof’s website is an Othala rune, an ancient symbol appropriated by the Nazis that remains common among neo-Nazi groups.

Mr. Roof was the latest in what watchdog groups say is a growing group of lone-wolf extremists. According to a study released in February by the Southern Poverty Law Center, about 70 percent of the 60 recent domestic terrorism attacks reviewed were conducted by people acting alone.

The writings on Mr. Roof’s website show a fixation with black-on-white crime, which is common on white supremacy sites, said Heidi Beirich, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.

“They demonize blacks to position themselves as victims, and offer that as proof of why they need their own state,” she said.

In one photograph posted on the website, Mr. Roof is shown posing with wax figures of slaves. In others, he posed with a handgun that appears to be a .45-caliber Glock. He had a .45-caliber Glock in his car when he was arrested Thursday, the police said.

The website’s links contain several passages of long racist rants, in which he said Hispanics are enemies, and “Negroes” have lower I.Q.s and low impulse control. The manifesto praises segregation and says the author’s reading of “hundreds” of slave narratives indicates that almost all slaves gave positive accounts of their lives. The manifesto uses defamatory terms for blacks, whom he accused of being “stupid and violent” with “the capacity to be very slick.” It laments white flight, and suggested that the whites should instead stay behind in cities and fight.

Criticisms are also levied at Jews, but Asians are praised for being racists and potential allies. Mr. Brown said his friend’s transformation appeared to have occurred after he left Columbia, S.C., for nearby Lexington. Records show he switched schools in 2007. “He wasn’t putting on Facebook ‘I hate black people. I am going to shoot up a church,’ ” Mr. Brown said.

Correction: June 20, 2015

An earlier version of this article described David Lane incorrectly. He was serving a 190-year sentence when he died in 2007; he is not currently serving the sentence.

Ashley Southall and Ken Schwencke contributed reporting from New York. Alan Blinder contributed from Charleston, Michael Schmidt from Washington and Kate Zernike from New Jersey.

A version of this article appears in print on June 21, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Roof’s Photos Appear on Site With Manifesto.

Dylann Roof Photos and a Manifesto Are Posted on Website,
NYT, JUNE 20, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/us/
dylann-storm-roof-photos-website-charleston-church-shooting.html

Love and Terror in the Black Church

JUNE 20, 2015

The New York Times

SundayReview | Contributing Op-Ed Writer

Michael Eric Dyson

AT the sprawling Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas one day last spring, I was met by five men with earpieces who escorted me to the pastor’s office. As I prepared to preach that morning, a rolling phalanx of bodyguards shadowed my every move — when I greeted parishioners in the church’s spacious narthex and even as I made a stop at the men’s room. We walked from the church study into the 4,200-seat sanctuary, the security team whispering into their wrists.

I was entering a sanctuary, a sacred space to speak the word of the Lord and to lift the spirits of God’s people. But I was also entering a black church, a site of particular power in this country, and a site of unspeakable terror.

That is what the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., became on Wednesday, when a young white male wielding a .45-caliber handgun unloaded his rage on nine souls, and that is why for the foreseeable future we will enter our houses of worship wary of violence.

Sites and spaces of black life have come under attack from racist forces before, but the black church is a unique target. It is not just where black people gather.

In too many other places, black self-worth is bludgeoned by bigotry or hijacked by self-hatred: that our culture is too dumb, our lives too worthless, to warrant the effort to combat our enemies. The black sanctuary breathes in black humanity while the pulpit exhales unapologetic black love.

For decades, these sites of love have been magnets for hate.

In June 1958, a dynamite bomb rocked the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., led by the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, a civil rights luminary. It would take more than two decades to bring the white supremacist perpetrator to justice. In 1963, four girls were killed when the 16th Street Baptist Church in the same city was bombed. As the drive to register black voters heated up during Freedom Summer in 1964, nearly three dozen black churches in Mississippi were bombed or burned.

The hatred of black sacred space didn’t end in the 1960s. In July 1993, the F.B.I. uncovered a plot to bomb the First A.M.E. Church in Los Angeles, wipe out its congregation with machine guns, and then assassinate Rodney G. King in hopes of provoking a race war. In 1995, several men took sledgehammers to the pews and kitchens of black churches in Sumter County, Ala. A year later, the Inner City Church in Knoxville, Tenn., was bombarded with as many as 18 Molotov cocktails as its back door was splashed with racist epithets.

President Clinton appointed a task force in 1996 to investigate church fires, which by 1998 had singed the holy legacies of 225 black churches. In November, 2008, three white men set the Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Springfield, Mass., ablaze hours after Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first black president.

And this wasn’t the first time Emanuel A.M.E. Church, founded in 1816, faced racist violence. After Denmark Vesey, one of the church’s founding members, plotted a slave rebellion but was foiled in the effort by a slave who betrayed his plans, Emanuel was burned to the ground by an angry white mob.

Despite this history, black churches are open and affirming of whoever seeks to join their ranks — unlike white churches, which have often rigidly divided along racial lines. The A.M.E. church was born when the founder Richard Allen spurned segregation in the white Methodist church and sought to worship God free of crippling prejudice. Early church leaders took seriously the scripture in Acts 17:26, which claims of God: “From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth,” even as they embraced the admonition in Hebrews 13:2: “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.”

That is how it is possible that the doors of Emanuel were open to a young white participant who, after an hour of prayer, raised a weapon and took nine lives. Sylvia Johnson, a cousin of the murdered pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, said one of the survivors told her that the gunman argued: “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.” The vortex of racist mythology spun into a plan of racial carnage.

The black church is a breeding ground for leaders and movements to quell the siege of white racist terror. From the start, black churches sought to amplify black grievance against racial injustice and to forge bonds with believers to resist oppression from the broader society. The church’s spiritual and political mission were always intertwined: to win the freedom of its people so that they could prove their devotion to God.

Some critics see black church leaders as curators of moral quiet in the face of withering assault. Religious people are accused of being passive in the wake of social injustice — of seeking heavenly reward rather than earthly action. In truth, the church at its best has nurtured theological and political resistance to white supremacy and the forces of black hatred. The church has supplied leaders and blueprints for emancipation — whether in the preaching of Frederick Douglass or Prathia Hall or in the heroic activism of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

But the church is also the place where black people are most vulnerable. Oddly, stereotypes of the sort the killer nursed are unmasked in such a setting. It is not murderous venom that courses in black veins but loving tolerance for the stranger, which is the central moral imperative of the Gospel.

I recall an instance of such generosity when I led a dialogue for a black men’s group at another Dallas church a few years ago. A white man entered the church and joined our group. We introduced ourselves, and welcomed him. He sought to counter my message of affirmation for gay men and lesbians. After he had his say, I asked him if the tables were turned could such a thing occur: Could I, as a black man, show up at his white church and be received with open arms and permitted to publicly denounce the teachings of the white male lecturer? He at least had the honesty to admit it could never happen. Yet no black man asked him to leave our ranks.

Adherence to the moral imperative to treat strangers kindly may have led to the black parishioners’ death in Charleston. The shooter exploited the very kindness and humanity he found before him. The black folk gathered in that church were the proof that he was wrong; they were the living, breathing antithesis of bigoted creeds cooked up in the racist fog he lived in. It is not their barbarity, but the moral beauty of black people that let an angel of death hide in their religious womb.

Its openness and magnanimity are what make the black church vital in the quest for black self-regard. When I stand in the house of God to deliver the word I embrace the redemption of black belief — a belief in self and community.

In a country where black death is normal, even fiendishly familiar, black love is an unavoidably political gesture. And that is what happens in our churches: The act of black love, which seems to make our houses of worship a target of hate. It is a political act in this culture that must remind the nation, once again, as hate and terror level our community, that black lives matter.

Michael Eric Dyson is a professor of sociology at Georgetown, an ordained Baptist minister and a contributing opinion writer.

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 21, 2015, on page SR5 of the New York edition with the headline: Love and Terror in the Black Church.

Love and Terror in the Black Church,
NYT, JUNE 20, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/
michael-eric-dyson-love-and-terror-in-the-black-church.html

A Hectic Day at Church,

and Then a Hellish Visitor

 

JUNE 20, 2015

The New York Times

By RICHARD FAUSSET,

JOHN ELIGON, JASON HOROWITZ

and FRANCES ROBLES

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Wednesday was a busy day at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church.

The pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, a tall, rangy man with a deep voice, would normally have stayed in Columbia, the capital, for his job as a state senator. But he had returned to his congregation here for an important meeting with the presiding elder of the district. There was the matter of the church elevator, long under construction. The budget needed review. And three congregants were officially received as new preachers. One by one, they stepped before the group to receive a certificate and applause.

The meeting in the church basement ended around 8 p.m., and the crowd of about 50 dwindled to 12 of the congregation’s most devout members, who would remain for the Wednesday night Bible study.

That was when the visitor, a young white man, came to the door, asking for the minister. It was unusual for a stranger, much less a white one, to come to the Wednesday night session, but Bible study was open to all, and Mr. Pinckney welcomed him. They sat together around a green table, prayed, sang and then opened to the Gospel of Mark, 4:16-20, which likens the word of God to a seed that must fall on good soil to bear fruit.

At about 9, gunfire and terrified cries shattered the evening calm. In the pastor’s office, Mr. Pinckney’s wife, who had been waiting patiently with their younger daughter, turned off the lights, locked the door, hugged her child close and called 911.

When the shooting was over, nine congregants were dead, including Mr. Pinckney and two of the newly ordained ministers, each shot multiple times with a .45-caliber handgun. The stranger — identified by the police as Dylann Roof, 21, a high school dropout and sometime landscaper — has been charged with nine counts of murder.

“You are raping our women and taking over our country,” Mr. Roof said to the victims, all of them black, before killing them, witnesses told the police.

In a matter of unforeseen moments, the future of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and its 350 active members would be changed forever. Church leaders were lost, along with worshipers young and middle-aged. Children were left motherless. A girls’ track team lost its coach; a university its admissions coordinator. And residents of all races in Charleston, a city that places such value on its houses of worship that it calls itself the Holy City, recoiled in horror as one of its most storied buildings was desecrated by intolerant rage and transformed, if briefly, into a charnel house.

A parishioner, Elizabeth Alston, said Saturday that the church would be open for Sunday school and services the next morning.

The massacre has reverberated far beyond Charleston, prompting fierce new debate about race relations in a nation already grappling with protests over police conduct toward African-Americans.

President Obama spoke Thursday of “the heartache and the sadness and the anger” the shootings had elicited. The Justice Department opened a hate crimes investigation. And in Columbia, where Mr. Pinckney’s empty desk in the Legislature has been adorned with a black cloak and flowers, lawmakers were once again grappling with the question of whether the Confederate battle flag should fly on the grounds of the statehouse.

But the deepest pain was at the handsome, whitewashed old church in Charleston, now cordoned off with yellow police tape, and along the intimate tendrils that connected its members to friends and family.

The ‘Itinerant Pastor’

Mr. Pinckney, 41, was a busy man. But when he was talking to you, said Sylvia Johnson, 56, his cousin, he locked eyes intently and listened carefully. He was especially tender toward Ms. Johnson’s blind daughter. His voice could move into a more stern, but still loving, register when he addressed his own daughters, Eliana and Malana.

With his flock in Charleston; his home in Jasper County, at South Carolina’s southernmost tip; and his job up in Columbia, Mr. Pinckney had to work to spread his love around. He called himself the “itinerant pastor.” He had recently run an old car dry and bought a new SUV.

On Wednesday morning in Columbia, he was dressed, sharp as always, in a dark suit and sitting in his office with his back to a view of the capitol dome, preparing for a Senate Finance Committee meeting. He was surrounded by framed newspaper spreads (“Leading From the Pulpit”; “Under 30 and on the Move”), recognitions of achievement (Prestigious Jaguar Award, Jasper County High School, 1991), volumes of Bibles and a poster of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Next to a refrigerator bearing a “Yes! I Love My Library” sticker given to him by his wife, Jennifer, a librarian, he had rolled up a bunch of posters depicting African-American life in the South Carolina Lowcountry. He planned to take them home that day.

But first, another day of work. Mr. Pinckney, elected to the South Carolina House at age 23, had always had a sense of purpose. In seventh grade, the skinny student endured the taunts of his classmates in Jasper County, a depressed angle of what Senate colleagues called the Forgotten Triangle, for wearing a starched shirt and tie and for carrying a briefcase instead of a backpack. He thought you needed to dress like someone to be someone.

He quickly became someone. He had begun preaching sermons in his teens. An ambitious intern unafraid to ask his bosses to look at the county budget, he became a page in the State House of Representatives and ultimately a member, and then a senator.

Now, 12 hours before he was killed, he took the elevator down to Room 105 for another meeting on the budget, where he again pushed, in the face of an overwhelming Republican majority, for funding to fix the roads in his deprived district.

Later, he rode an escalator up from the parking lot to the statehouse. He walked between marble columns and up a mahogany staircase lined with paintings of the Revolutionary War, and greeted friends in a lobby presided over by a statue of John C. Calhoun. In the stately Senate chamber, he greeted more friends on the floor and took a seat next to Senator Vincent A. Sheheen, a fellow Democrat.

It was here that Mr. Pinckney made his mark that day.

When Mr. Sheheen nervously prepared to voice his opposition to a compromise reached with Republicans on their effort to introduce a voter ID bill, he was shocked to hear Mr. Pinckney’s booming voice call out, “No.”

“When I heard him voting no, loud and clear, I knew I was doing the right thing,” Mr. Sheheen said. They were the only two to vote in dissent.

Mr. Pinckney left another meeting early, telling colleagues that he had an appointment at his church back in Charleston.

A Wild-Talking Suspect

It is not clear where or how Mr. Roof spent his Wednesday morning. Even to his friends, there were unexplained gaps.

He had dropped out of many of his oldest friends’ lives some years ago. But then, about a month ago, he resurfaced, telling them that he had gone to a public library in Columbia to open a Facebook account for the express purpose of finding them.

As a younger man, Mr. Roof had a rocky academic career, attending ninth grade twice at two schools, but possibly not making it any further. Friends recalled him as being painfully shy.

But recently, he had been showing a new side, his friends said: spouting racist comments, praising segregation and talking wildly of setting off a race war. He had also been arrested twice: once in February for possession of Suboxone, a drug used to treat opiate addiction, and a second time in April for trespassing at a mall where he had been banned for a year after the first arrest.

On the day Mr. Roof contacted his old friends through Facebook, he went to the family trailer home of one of them, Joseph C. Meek Jr., in Red Bank, in suburban Lexington County. Soon, he was sleeping there as often as four times a week, sometimes on the floor. He had a cellphone, his friends said, but no phone service. To communicate, he used Wi-Fi to send messages via Facebook, or he showed up in person.

Mr. Roof told his friends that he had quit a landscaping job because he could not bear working in the Southern heat. He spent his days loafing around the place, watching television and sometimes calling his father, pretending to be at work, said Jacob Meek, 15, Joseph’s brother. “He said his parents kept pressuring him to get a job,” Jacob said.

He was fond of vodka and usually kept a stash around. He went to the Platinum Plus strip club recently, Jacob said, and threw dollar bills at the dancers.

But amid his aimlessness, Joseph Meek, 20, and other friends said, Mr. Roof talked wildly about hurting African-Americans, about doing something “crazy.” Joseph, worried, hid the .45-caliber handgun Mr. Roof had bought with money his parents gave him for his 21st birthday. But Joseph eventually returned the gun because he was on probation and feared having it around.

At one point, Jacob said, Mr. Roof’s parents took the gun, too. “I guess he stole it back,” he said.

On Tuesday, Mr. Roof agreed to drive his friends to Lake Murray. He said he was pressed for time, because he wanted to make the 2 p.m. showing of “Jurassic World” at the AMC theater. He showed Jacob the movie coupon he had in his car. He carried a $7 pack of American Spirit cigarettes and wore a long-sleeve gray shirt with a Border Patrol logo on one side and a sleeve stained with battery acid. He wore that shirt all the time, Jacob said.

He was not acting jumpy or out of the ordinary, his friends recalled. He was acting like a guy who had a movie to catch.

“He did seem like he was in a rush,” Jacob said. “He was like, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ ”

The Massacre

The Bible study group was wrapping up when the first gunshots sounded.

The killing of nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., is among a long list of attacks targeting predominantly black churches in the United States.

Felicia Sanders, who was in the room, heard the gunfire before seeing who the gunman was, she later told a friend, Ms. Johnson, Mr. Pinckney’s cousin.

Ms. Sanders dropped to the ground with her 5-year-old granddaughter. She saw blood everywhere. The white visitor was doing the shooting, and he reloaded his weapon five times.

Ms. Sanders’s son, Tywanza Sanders, tried unsuccessfully to shield his aunt, Susie Jackson, 87, and talk sense to the gunman.

“That’s when the gunman said: ‘Y’all are raping our women and taking over the country. This must be done,’ ” Ms. Johnson recalled Ms. Sanders telling her.

Then he shot Tywanza. At one point, he asked a woman if she had been shot yet. When she said no, he said: “Good. Someone has to live to tell the story, because I’m going to kill myself, too.” Ms. Sanders survived only by playing dead, Ms. Johnson said.

Soon, the gunman was gone, fleeing in his Hyundai Elantra and leaving nine churchgoers dead or dying behind.

Mr. Sanders, 26, who recently graduated from college, had been cutting hair and hoping to get a better job. In his final Instagram post, he quoted Jackie Robinson: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”
Photo
Worshipers gathered to pray across the street from the church after the shooting. Credit David Goldman/Associated Press

Then there was Ethel Lance, 70, a mother of five. She was a sexton at the church and had worked as a custodian at Charleston’s Gaillard Center for 35 years until her retirement.

A fan of gospel music, Ms. Lance was in charge of the backstage area there, including the dressing rooms, a job she loved because of the procession of performers who filed in and out. “She got a kick of that,” said Cam Patterson, a former co-worker.

Cynthia Graham Hurd, a Charleston County librarian, had spent much of her last day in meetings at work before going to church. One of the presentations had been about civility, said her colleague Cynthia Bledsoe.

“She was so vocal and excited and happy about what was going on,” said Darlene P. Jackson, the manager of the main county library. “She was happy about how we were going to set policies to help people.”

In a 2003 feature in the local newspaper, The Post and Courier, Ms. Hurd said marrying her husband, Steve, had been one of the greatest joys of her life. Mr. Hurd, a merchant seaman, was making his way back from Saudi Arabia, when Ms. Hurd was killed. Sunday would have been her 55th birthday, and Mr. Hurd had arranged a surprise, a delivery of pizza and cake, another co-worker of Ms. Hurd’s said.

For another victim, the Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons Sr., 74, the church had been a second home. He was a war veteran who rarely missed Wednesday Bible study, which he usually led.

On this Wednesday, as the business meeting broke up and congregants began gathering for the study group, Mr. Simmons urged Leon Alston, a steward at the church, to join. He did that almost every week. And almost every week, Mr. Alston declined.

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“You need to start coming to Bible study a lot more,” Mr. Simmons said.

“Maybe the next meeting,” Mr. Alston replied.

A Suspicion Confirmed

Up in Red Bank on Wednesday night, the Meek brothers heard the news about a mass killing in Charleston. Mr. Roof immediately came to mind, Jacob said. They waited until they saw the surveillance photos to be sure.

There was a familiar figure, wearing a recognizable Border Patrol shirt stained in black.

They called the F.B.I. The authorities quickly arrived at the trailer and went through Mr. Roof’s things, taking his vodka and two shirts, one that said “Myrtle Beach” and another with a picture of the Hulk, Joseph Meek said.

The Charleston police say Mr. Roof’s father also called the authorities that night when he saw photographs of the suspect. He told them his son owned a .45-caliber handgun. Law enforcement officials had found .45-caliber casings at the scene.

At home in Summerville, half an hour northwest of Charleston, Ms. Johnson received a call Wednesday evening from Mr. Pinckney’s wife, who told her that there had been a shooting.

“I said, ‘Where’s Clementa?’ ” Ms. Johnson recalled.

Her cousin’s wife, distraught, replied: “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
 

Richard Fausset and John Eligon reported from Charleston, and Jason Horowitz and Frances Robles from Columbia, S.C. Lizette Alvarez contributed reporting from Miami. Susan Beachy contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on June 21, 2015,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
A Hectic Day at Church, and Then a Hellish Visitor.

A Hectic Day at Church, and Then a Hellish Visitor,
NYT, JUNE 20, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/us/
a-day-at-the-statehouse-and-a-night-of-slaughter.html

N.R.A. Board Member

Deletes Criticism of Victim

in Church Massacre

June 19, 2015

5:38 pm ET

The New York Times

By Robert Mackey


Faced with an online backlash, a member of the National Rifle Association’s board deleted comments Friday criticizing the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, a South Carolina lawmaker who was one of the nine people shot and killed in the attack on his church in Charleston on Wednesday night.

The N.R.A. official, Charles L. Cotton, argued in an online discussion that Mr. Pinckney, a state senator, bore some responsibility for the other deaths because he had opposed a change to South Carolina’s gun laws that would have made it legal to carry a concealed weapon into a church.

Writing on a forum that he administers for supporters of concealed handgun licensing, Mr. Cotton, a lawyer in Houston, observed that Mr. Pinckney had “voted against concealed-carry.”

“Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead,” Mr. Cotton wrote.

Although Mr. Cotton did not explain why he deleted the comments or reply to an interview request, Andrew Arulanandam, an N.R.A. spokesman, said in an email that “board members do not speak for the N.R.A.”

Mr. Cotton’s comments attracted attention outside the forum after they were copied and shared by Shannon Watts, who founded the Facebook advocacy group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America the day after a gunman killed 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.

Ms. Watts said in a telephone interview that Mr. Cotton had “a habit of posting these incendiary comments and then removing them.”

She added that her group’s South Carolina chapter had worked with Mr. Pinckney on legislation to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers.

In his remarks, Mr. Cotton appeared to be referring to a bill, supported by the N.R.A., that would have removed bans on carrying concealed handguns into churches, preschools and hospitals in South Carolina and that failed to make it through the State Senate last month. It appears, however, that Mr. Pinckney did not have the chance to vote against the measure, which was approved overwhelmingly by the lower house of the South Carolina Legislature but was held up in a Senate committee.

On his firm’s website, Mr. Cotton takes credit for having written a bill passed by the Texas Legislature in 2011 that brought “sweeping protection against frivolous lawsuits and unnecessary, politically motivated regulation targeting sport shooting ranges.”
 

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N.R.A. Board Member Deletes Criticism of Victim in Church Massacre,
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n-r-a-board-member-deletes-criticism-of-victim-in-church-massacre/

Apologize for Slavery

JUNE 19, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Contributing Op-Ed Writer

A WEEK of absurdity around a confused racial con artist, and a massacre in a black church brings us to this: Today is the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth, when the last of the American slaves were told they were free. Now, to put it to good use, at a time when a post-racial era seems very much out of reach.

The first black man to live in the White House, long hesitant about doing anything bold on the color divide, could make one of the most simple and dramatic moves of his presidency: apologize for the land of the free being, at one time, the largest slaveholding nation on earth.

The Confederate flag that still flies on the grounds of the Statehouse in South Carolina, cradle of the Civil War, is a reminder that the hatred behind the proclaimed right to own another human being has never left our shores.

An apology would not kill that hatred, but it would ripple, positively, in ways that may be felt for years.

As the son of a Kenyan father and a white mother who died more than a century after slavery ended, Barack Obama has little ancestral baggage on this issue. Yet no man could make a stronger statement about America’s original sin than the first African-American president.

Conservatives would caw — they always do — and say, get over it, don’t play the race card. Liberals would complain that a simple apology did not go far enough, unless it entailed reparations for the descendants of slaves. But words of contrition — a formal acknowledgment of a grievous wrong by a great nation — have a power all their own.

The British, the Vatican, the Germans and the South Africans have all issued formal apologies for their official cruelties, and each case has had a cleansing, even liberating effect. The United States Congress apologized to African-Americans for slavery in 2009, though it came with a caveat that the mea culpa could not be used as legal rationale for reparations.

And President Bill Clinton, while in Africa in 1998, apologized for the slave trade, but not for a government that institutionalized white supremacy during its first four score and change.

For this year’s Juneteenth — commemorating the day in 1865, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, when a Union general landed in Galveston, Tex., and told the last of the dead-enders in Texas that “all slaves are free” — President Obama could close a loop in a terrible history. He could also elevate the current discussion on race, which swirled earlier this week around the serial liar Rachel Dolezal, and the race-baiting billionaire vanity blimp of Donald Trump.

The slaughter of worshipers in a church with long ties to fighting slavery and Jim Crow “raises questions about a dark part of our history,” President Obama said Thursday. Questions about why South Carolina can still fly the flag of a traitor nation, a flag apparently embraced by the shooter. Questions rooted in a history that calls for a formal apology.

From the time the first Africans arrived as slaves in Jamestown in 1619 through the codification of blacks as three-fifths of a person in the Constitution and up to the eve of the Civil War, when four million people were held in bondage, slavery has been the most incongruent element of a people proclaiming to be enlightened.

Lincoln said he hated “the monstrous injustice of slavery,” in part because it allowed “enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.”

Countries, religions and corporations sometimes do awful things in their names. It doesn’t diminish them to note their failures, their injustices, their crimes against humanity. It elevates them.

When Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain apologized to the Irish in 1997 for England’s role in a famine that killed more than a million people, it opened the door to reconciliation, and a burst of new scholarship and awareness about a genocidal episode long mired in shame.

The British government also tried to make good for prosecuting a World War II hero and Nazi code breaker, Alan Turing, for the crime of being gay.

It took the Vatican 350 years to apologize for the persecution of the Italian astronomer Galileo. But now the church speaks with authority, backed by science, on climate change — leaving Republicans in the United States in the dungeon of ignorance.

Pope John Paul II apologized to Jews for the Vatican’s inaction on the Holocaust and to Muslims killed by crusaders. Last year, Pope Francis reached out to victims of clerical sex abuse and said he was sorry on behalf of the church he leads.

President Ronald Reagan signed legislation that provided payments and apologies for the internment, during World War II, of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans — most of them United States citizens.

It’s harder to be contrite than to conquer. Obama had nothing to do with slavery. Most Americans, descendants of immigrants shunned in their homelands, have very little connection to the slaveholders of the American South. So why apologize? Because we own this past. As such, we have to condemn it.

Gail Collins and Joe Nocera are off today.

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 20, 2015, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Apology for Slavery.

Apologize for Slavery,
NYT, JUNE 19, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/opinion/an-apology-for-slavery.html

Outrage vs. Tradition,

Wrapped in a High-Flying Flag of Dixie

JUNE 19, 2015

The New York Times

By ALAN BLINDER

and MANNY FERNANDEZ

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Stunned by the massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, South Carolina has been abruptly forced to confront an issue that has bedeviled it for decades: the Confederate battle flag that flies above the grounds of the State House.

The tension was on display Friday, while the American and South Carolina flags flew at half-staff and the Confederate battle flag remained at the peak of its pole outside the State House in Columbia and the N.A.A.C.P. renewed its demand that the Civil War standard be permanently removed.

“That symbol has to come down,” Cornell William Brooks, the national president of the N.A.A.C.P., said at a news conference here, calling it an emblem of hate. “That symbol must be removed from our state capital.”

Lawmakers in both parties said that despite public frustration and anger, a provision of state law prevents officials from lowering the Confederate flag to half-staff. That anger unspooled on social media, where pictures of the flag were repeatedly posted and denounced.

Some lawmakers said the discussion could lead to a reconsideration of the flag’s placement.

“I think it’s a conversation that we’re going to have,” said State Senator Tom Davis, a Republican who represents Beaufort County in the Legislature. But he added: “Nothing is going to happen simply within the walls of that chamber without the people making their voice heard. There’s a sense in the institution itself that this issue was resolved.”

For years, the flag flew above the State House dome. In 2000, state officials, pressured by a business boycott led by the N.A.A.C.P. and large protests in Columbia, decided that only the American and South Carolina flags would fly above the State House, while the Confederate battle flag would be placed in front of the building.

This week, after the killings of nine people at a Bible study class at the Emanuel church, Gov. Nikki R. Haley ordered the American and South Carolina flags lowered for nine days — one day for each of the victims — but could do nothing about the height of the Confederate standard.

South Carolina law gives only the Legislature power to make changes to the Confederate battle flag display, and they must be approved by supermajorities in both the House and the Senate.

After years of being thwarted, opponents of flying the Confederate battle flag said this time there may be enough public outcry and rage to compel legislative action.

“I think that what we’ve seen in South Carolina is another act of terrorism, and this act of terrorism reminds us of a history of terrorism enacted against African-American people, particularly in the South,” said Russell Moore, a descendant of Confederate veterans who heads the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. “I think there’s momentum now to say we’re going to do everything we can to love each other and to work together, and that means getting rid of images of division. I do think the flag will come down.”

But even as Mr. Moore expressed confidence and lawmakers discussed plans to file legislation seeking to remove the flag from the State House’s grounds, many others cautioned that any shift in policy faced difficult odds in the Legislature.

“It’s a total lose-lose issue,” said David Woodard, a political science professor at Clemson University and a longtime Republican consultant. “You’re not going to make any friends by doing it, so you just leave it be.”

He added: “That’s a sad thing, but that’s the way it will have to be because I don’t see anyone who’s willing to take it on. There’s no politician who’s powerful enough to take it on.”

That included, he said, Ms. Haley, who told CBS on Friday that she expected a new round of debate in Columbia, the capital.

“I think that conversation will probably come back up again,” the governor said. “What we hope is that we do things the way South Carolinians do, which is have the conversation, allow some thoughtful words to be exchanged, be kind about it, come together on what we’re trying to achieve and how we’re trying to do it. I think the state will start talking about that again, and we’ll see where it goes.”

Senator Lindsey Graham told CNN that he would support a move to “revisit” the flag’s status, but he added that the flag was part of the state’s identity.

A Winthrop University poll last fall found that 62 percent of South Carolina residents had positive or neutral feelings toward the flag. But the poll’s director, Scott H. Huffmon, said Friday that he expected to see the results change in the future.

“Most people, based on past numbers, just want to put it behind them,” Dr. Huffmon said. “But given what has happened this week, I think people that are completely O.K. with the flag would likely — and I have no data to prove this — be O.K. with taking it down given the impact it has on others.”

Supporters of the Confederate battle flag display signaled Friday that their position had not changed. In a commentary on Friday, Michael Hill, the president of the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has listed as a hate group, said that the Confederate battle flag should remain at the State House but that the American flag should be removed.

The American flag, Mr. Hill wrote, “now stands for multiculturalism, tolerance and diversity — the left’s unholy trinity.” In “sharp contrast,” he wrote, the Confederate battle flag “stands for the heroic effort our people made 150 years ago to avoid the fate” of contemporary America.

Other supporters of the flag said they view the two issues — the mass shooting and the flag — as unrelated. Dan Coleman, a spokesman for the Georgia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said the attack had more to do with “one very troubled young man” than the flag.

“It’s a shame that those people were killed, and we all greatly regret that incident, and we were upset that anybody would try to tie people who are proud of their heritage to an act like that,” he said.

Still, in Charleston, much of the talk was about change, even if it was unclear whether the conversations would bring it about.

“Surely, this is the time that that discussion needs to be had and had at a much higher octave than it’s been done in many years,” Dot Scott, the president of the Charleston chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. said before Mr. Brooks spoke here. “There’s been a renewed time and an opportunity to have that discussion. I don’t have to guess about it because of the number of calls I’ve already gotten about it.”
 

Alan Blinder reported from Charleston, and Manny Fernandez from Houston. Richard Pérez-Peña contributed reporting from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on June 20, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Outrage vs. Tradition, Wrapped in a High-Flying Flag of Dixie.

Outrage vs. Tradition, Wrapped in a High-Flying Flag of Dixie,
NYT, JUNE 19, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/20/us/
outrage-vs-tradition-wrapped-in-a-confederate-flag.html

Beyond Mourning for Charleston

 

JUNE 19, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The horrific church shooting in Charleston, S.C., leaves the nation at an all too familiar juncture — uncertain whether to do something positive to repair society’s vulnerabilities or to once again absorb an intolerable wound by going through what has become a woeful ritual of deep grief followed by shallow resolve to move on toward … what? Toward the inevitable carnage next time.

The factors emerging in the mass murder of the nine churchgoers, who took the shooter into their prayerful midst, are a confluence of some of the nation’s most glaring problems: the empowerment of a steady stream of enraged people exercising their easy right to bear arms; the odious racism that haunts society’s darkest corners; and the public’s general sense of impotence, as needed solutions are left up to a political system undermined by retrograde and timorous officials more interested in their own survival than in the broader welfare.

The details emerging on how the suspected shooter might have been inspired by the white supremacy movement are another warning that the nation’s long history of racial brutality is far from healed. How much black lives matter was the question posed during the recent police shootings of African-Americans. This question is posed anew, in most grotesque fashion, in Charleston. Honest and creative answers are possible, but only if the American people — white and black — are galvanized to force politicians to make tangible improvements that go beyond vigils and speeches.

Anyone who has been to modern, progressive Charleston would be struck by a visit to its old slave market. This museum, which recounts historic abuses from a time when black people were chained as chattel, rings with the truth of how elusive full racial accord remains in America. The state’s nostalgic but poisonous flaunting of Confederate flags from a war that was waged over the issue of human bondage adds insult to the historic injuries still felt.

Perversely but tellingly, while other flags at the state Capitol in Columbia were lowered to half-staff in mourning for the shooting victims, the Confederate flag remained at full staff, reportedly under the sole control of state legislators. Many of them, of course, make a staunch defense of that flag part of their election campaigns.

Of all the factors at the heart of the church massacre, the issue of easy access to guns should be the most amenable to reform. President Obama pointed out how our nation remains shamefully exceptional among modern nations, racking up tens of thousands of gun deaths a year. “Once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” he said.

The laws of the land enable this continuing national tragedy. Congress issued a bitter lesson to the president when it rejected his proposals for greater gun safety after the 2012 massacre of 20 schoolchildren in Connecticut. Mr. Obama should marshal full political force in reviving the demand for action by Congress — a point the public strongly supports, even though Congress continues to be enslaved to the desires of the gun lobby.

In this moment of grief, there’s a measure of practical comfort to be taken from the warning of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” It’s increasingly clear that King understood and embodied the sufferings of not just African-Americans but an entire nation still haunted by racism and mindless violence.

Beyond this latest grief, however, he epitomized unyielding dedication to political progress. “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability,” he cautioned, “but comes through continuous struggle.” This remains the nation’s only course after the horrendous murders in Charleston.

A version of this editorial appears in print on June 20, 2015, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Beyond Mourning for Charleston.

Beyond Mourning for Charleston,
NYT, JUNE 19, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/20/opinion/
the-nation-needs-more-than-mourning-after-charleston.html

In Charleston,

Raw Emotion at Hearing for Suspect

in Church Shooting

 

JUNE 19, 2015

The New York Times

By NIKITA STEWART

and RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

CHARLESTON, S.C. — One by one, they looked to the screen in a corner of the courtroom on Friday, into the expressionless face of the young man charged with making them motherless, snuffing out the life of a promising son, taking away a loving wife for good, bringing a grandmother’s life to a horrific end. And they answered him with forgiveness.

“You took something very precious away from me,” said Nadine Collier, daughter of 70-year-old Ethel Lance, her voice rising in anguish. “I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul.”

The occasion was a bond hearing, the first court appearance of the suspect, Dylann Roof, for the murders, thought to be racially motivated, of nine black men and women during Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Wednesday night.

It was as if the Bible study had never ended as one after another, victims’ family members offered lessons in forgiveness, testaments to a faith that is not compromised by violence or grief. They urged him to repent, confess his sins and turn to God.

“We welcomed you Wednesday night in our Bible study with open arms,” said Felicia Sanders, the mother of 26-year old Tywanza Sanders, a poet who died after trying to save his aunt, who was also killed.

“You have killed some of the most beautifulest people that I know,” she said in a quavering voice. “Every fiber in my body hurts, and I will never be the same. Tywanza Sanders is my son, but Tywanza was my hero. Tywanza was my hero. But as we say in Bible study, we enjoyed you. But may God have mercy on you.”

The statements offered a moment of grace in a day when new details emerged about a massacre that has stunned the nation, echoing a long history of racial violence.

“All the victims were hit multiple times,” the Charleston Police Department wrote in an arrest warrant released Friday. The gunman walked in wearing a fanny pack, the statement said, and sat with the group talking Scripture for nearly an hour before he drew a gun and began firing — and on his way out, stood over a surviving witness “and uttered a racially inflammatory statement.”

After the police released security camera images of the suspect outside the church, Mr. Roof’s father and an uncle contacted the Charleston police and positively identified the defendant and his vehicle as those they saw in the photographs, the warrant revealed.

“Defendant’s father told investigators that his son owns a .45-caliber handgun,” the warrant said, the same caliber shell casings that the police had recovered from the church floor.

Mr. Roof, 21, who is white, was charged Friday with nine counts of murder, punishable by death, and one count of criminal possession of a firearm during the commission of a violent crime. Law enforcement officials said that after he was arrested on Thursday in Shelby, N.C., he told investigators he had just done something big in Charleston, and the pistol believed to have been used in the shooting was recovered from his car.

Joseph Meek, a friend of Mr. Roof’s, said that his parents each gave him $350 toward the purchase of the gun, which he bought this spring, and that at some point they took it away from him. There have been reports that his parents gave him the gun directly, as a 21st birthday present, but Mr. Meek said Mr. Roof made a point of buying it himself so that his parents would not be implicated in any trouble he might get into.

Friends said Mr. Roof voiced virulently racist views and had talked recently about starting a new civil war — even about shooting black people. Photographs of him wearing patches with the flags of the former white supremacist governments of South Africa and Rhodesia, and leaning against a car with Confederate States of America on its license plate, drew millions of views online.

Gov. Nikki R. Haley, a Republican, was one of many officials to label the shootings a hate crime, and called for the death penalty in the case.

President Obama, who on Thursday lamented the poor prospects for new gun control, said Friday that his words had been misinterpreted as resignation that nothing would change, and renewed his call for legislation.

“Every country has hateful or mentally unstable people,” Mr. Obama said at a United States Conference of Mayors meeting in San Francisco. “What’s different is that not every country is awash with easily accessible guns. So I refuse to act as if this is the new normal. Or to pretend that it is sufficient to grieve, or as if any attempt to act is politicizing the problem.”

The Justice Department, which was already looking into the possibility of a hate crime prosecution, said Friday that it had not ruled out the possibility of calling the case an act of domestic terrorism.

To Cornell William Brooks, the N.A.A.C.P. president, who spoke in Charleston, there was no doubt. “This was an act of racial terrorism,” he said, adding that the police and prosecutors should determine whether Mr. Roof had ties to any hate groups.

But if the gunman set out to stir up hostility between races, Charleston was having none of it, and the families appearing in court helped set a tone of unity.

Deborah Dills, a motorist on her way to work on Thursday, called in the tip that led the police to Dylann Roof, who is accused of killing nine people at a church in Charleston, S.C. By Reuters on Publish Date June 19, 2015. Photo by Reuters.

“I acknowledge that I am very angry,” said Bethane Middleton-Brown, sister of one of the victims, DePayne Middleton-Doctor. But “she taught me that we are the family that love built. We have no room for hating.”

Laws in South Carolina and other states allow victim statements in certain criminal court proceedings, a product of the victims’ rights movement of recent decades. But it is unusual for that right to be invoked in something as mundane as a bail hearing, and the words spoken Friday by the survivors were rarer still.

Thousands of Charleston residents filled the TD Arena at the College of Charleston for an interfaith evening prayer vigil, suffused with expressions of Christian faith, the history of slavery and civil rights in the city and the state, and a collective resolve.

The crowd was a multicultural mix of residents that included families with small children and older people using canes.

“We all have one thing in common. Our hearts are broken,” said Mayor Joseph Riley Jr., who received a standing ovation when another speaker recalled his protest to remove the Confederate battle flag from the state capitol grounds in Columbia.

Mr. Riley told people in the crowd — each holding a single rose given to them as they entered the arena — that if “that young man thought he was going to divide this community or divide this country with his racial hatred, we are here today and all across America to resoundingly say he measurably failed.”

The Rev. Nelson B. Rivers III of the National Action Network seemed to set a more defiant tone at the end of the program.

“I’m maladjusted,” he said. “I never got used to being disrespected. I never got used to being mistreated,” he said as the crowd roared so loud that he could hardly be heard.

But the evening was also about the families of the victims, who were asked to stand and receive applause from the audience. Mr. Riley announced that funds were pouring in to help families with funerals, for maintenance of the historic Emanuel A.M.E. Church and to help low-income people living in South Carolina’s Lowcountry region.

Smaller expressions of grief, both organized and impromptu, played out across the city.

In court on Friday, Magistrate Judge James B. Gosnell Jr. set Mr. Roof’s bail at $1 million on the gun charge, but explained that he did not have the authority to set bail on the murder charges, which would be handled by the state’s Circuit Court. The defendant watched impassively on a video link from a nearby jail.

The judge drew mixed reactions for another statement from the bench when he stated that Mr. Roof’s family were also victims in the case. The family released a statement Friday saying, “Words cannot express our shock, grief, and disbelief as to what happened that night,” but gave no insight into the defendant’s state of mind or racial views.

Witnesses said the gunman specifically asked for the church’s well-known pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, who was also a state senator, and sat next to him in the Bible study. First he listened, they said, then he argued, and eventually he began ranting against black people, until finally, he stood, drew a gun and fired, reloading as many as five times.

He fatally shot six women and three men, ranging in age from 26 to 87. Among the dead was Mr. Pinckney.

Mr. Roof had an unsettled personal life — he had been arrested twice this year, and friends said he sometimes slept in his car — and a recent history of antiblack views. But law enforcement officials said he was not on their radar as someone who posed a serious threat of violence.

“This is an absolute hate crime,” Ms. Haley said on Friday on NBC’s “Today” show. “We absolutely will want him to have the death penalty. This is the worst hate that I’ve seen and that the country has seen in a long time.”

At Emanuel A.M.E., on Calhoun Street, scores of bouquets rested on the sidewalk on Friday, along with wreaths and a simple wooden cross. Gold, silver and white balloons were tied to the church’s ironwork; nearby, nine white ribbons, each bearing the name of a victim, were tied to a fence.

In downtown Charleston, there was talk of the long-term anxiety the shooting might stir.

“The question that I have is, is it going to happen again?” said Jeremy Dye, 35, a taxi driver and security guard from North Charleston who said he knew three of the nine victims of Wednesday’s shootings. “It’s always going to be fear. People in Charleston are going to have that fear now forever. It’s not going to wash away. They’re going to be worried about, ‘O.K., when’s the next church going to get hit?’ ”

Mr. Riley said Friday that the arrest of Mr. Roof was crucial to helping the city heal, though he pointedly avoided using his name.

“We are in a period of loving and healing for all of those who have been so terribly injured,” Mr. Riley said, adding that it was time for a dialogue about race in America.

“We in America were not taught African-American history,” he said. “It was never in the history books, and we don’t know the story.”

Nikita Stewart reported from Charleston, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York. Alan Blinder and Frances Robles contributed reporting from Charleston, Campbell Robertson from Shreveport, La., Michael S. Schmidt from Washington, and Erik Eckholm from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on June 20, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘I Will Never Be Able to Hold Her Again. But I Forgive You.’.

In Charleston, Raw Emotion at Hearing for Suspect in Church Shooting,
NYT, JUNE 19, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/20/us/charleston-shooting-dylann-storm-roof.html

Henry Louis Gates:

If Clementa Pinckney Had Lived

 

JUNE 18, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr.

I have no doubt that had the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney lived, he would have become known — and celebrated — across our country for his leadership, rather than sealed immortally in tragedy, one more black martyr in a line stretching back to the more than 800 slave voyages that ended at Charleston Harbor.

I know this because I filmed a long interview with Mr. Pinckney — who was killed in his church in Charleston, S.C., along with eight congregants on Wednesday evening — for a PBS documentary series three years ago. It was clear that there was a reason this young man had been called to preach at 13, to minister at 18, to serve in the State Legislature at 23, and to shepherd one of America’s most historic black churches at 26, reminding us of other prodigies — and martyrs — for whom the Good Book has served as a bedrock of public service. He was 41 when he died.

It was Oct. 26, 2012, shortly before the last presidential election, and I was talking to Mr. Pinckney and to State Representative Kenneth F. Hodges about Robert Smalls, a slave who, at the height of the Civil War, commandeered a Confederate ship to sail to freedom beyond Charleston Harbor and ended up returning home to serve in the State Legislature during Reconstruction — representing the very area these two men now served.

“I think about what it must have felt like to be a young black man in America” back then, Mr. Pinckney told me, “to see the state and the country go through tremendous change and to have an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of everybody.” He added that if Smalls, an escaped slave, could make “substantial, systematic changes,” then “I have the same kind of responsibility to work to make a difference.”

Mr. Pinckney paused to clarify his words.

“Now, well, do I say I’m Smalls?” he said. “No, because there’s only one, there’s only been one Robert Smalls. But I think, as being a House member who served in the old Beaufort district that he used to serve in and a state senator that serves that same area, I think I ought to give it my absolute best to try to make a difference with the lives of the people I represent and the people of South Carolina, whether it be in supporting public education, supporting our troops, or wanting to see all people do well in South Carolina.”

All of these things, this quietly impressive man did, and did nobly.

What makes rereading the transcript of our interview so poignant for me today is the reminder that, for one still so young, Mr. Pinckney was deeply aware of the history he carried within himself, a history of the courageous and the slain, of the triumphant and the terrorized. He was fluent in the lives and careers of brave black people who had served state and church since the Civil War. He was acutely conscious of the missed opportunities of Reconstruction, of the contradictions that could have been settled, of the innocent lives that could have been spared, a century before the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, had Americans following the Civil War only been willing to put racial healing and equal economic opportunity first.

The “unfinished work” of America — to quote Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address — didn’t prevent him from loving the South and his country, and feeling a claim to its blessings. “I think it really says that America is changing,” he said of President Obama’s election, “and I think it signals to the world that the American dream is still alive and well.”

Today, our interview seems so long ago. I asked him that day if we were still fighting the Civil War in South Carolina. He answered: “I think South Carolina has — and across the South we have — a deep appreciation of history. We haven’t always had a deep appreciation of each other’s histories. We have, you know, many reenactments across the state and sometimes in our General Assembly I feel that we’re fighting some of the old battles.”

When no action was taken after the Newtown murders, I lost all hope for gun control in this country.

To know him, even over the course of an autumn Carolina afternoon, was to know a man who cherished the values on which our republic was founded, and who held an abiding faith that the great promise of America could, one day, be fulfilled. He was a unifier who, this past spring, taught us how to mourn in communion with one another, following the police slaying of Walter L. Scott, a black man, just north of his city. I don’t believe that he had the capacity to imagine the depth of malice and anger that came down on his congregation, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, on Wednesday night.

Though the Confederate flag still waves above the Statehouse where Mr. Pinckney worked, a monument to the African-American freedom struggle stands nearby, a monument of which he told me he was proud. It is that legacy that will prevail.

“Why does black political participation matter so much?” I asked him.

“We need to be a part, if we want a say in our own life, if we want to be independent, if we want to influence what’s happening around us,” he replied. “Or the reverse is to let everybody else control and influence and then we just sort of take whatever comes. That’s what slaves did. But, you know, we’re not slaves. We’re Americans, so we have a responsibility to look at ourselves — self-help, if you will. I also think that we have a historic legacy that we need to uphold.”

Citing the proverbial “Grandmother’s Prayer,” he said: “Lord, let me be free. If not me, my children. If not my children, my children’s children.” He added: “We don’t have that privilege to say our vote doesn’t count because history tells us different.”

In parting, Mr. Pinckney told me he would be praying for President Obama on Election Day. Sadly, today, it was Mr. Obama who found himself praying for Mr. Pinckney. May we all pray for the soul of Clementa Pinckney, and pray that his children and their children, all our children, be free of the curse of violence.
 

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Henry Louis Gates: If Clementa Pinckney Had Lived,
NYT, JUNE 18, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/opinion/
henry-louis-gates-if-clementa-pinckney-had-lived.html

After Charleston Shooting,

a Sense at the White House of Horror,

Loss and Resolve

 

JUNE 18, 2015

The New York Times

By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — The shooting massacre of a black pastor and his parishioners at a South Carolina church on Wednesday night once again confronted President Obama with a moment of racial turmoil in a country that for all its progress has yet to completely shed the burden of hatred and division.

After a series of police shootings, protests and riots, this latest eruption of violence reflected a country on edge and a president struggling to pull the American people together. Any hopes of what supporters once called a “postracial” era now seem fanciful as Mr. Obama’s second term increasingly focuses on what he termed “a dark part of our history.”

In a pattern that has become achingly familiar to him and the nation, Mr. Obama on Thursday entered the White House briefing room to issue a statement of mourning and grief as he called on the country to unify in the face of tragedy. This time, though, the ritual was made all the more poignant because Mr. Obama knew the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, the pastor slain at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., as well as other members of the congregation.

The president spoke on Thursday about the church shooting in Charleston, S.C., and expressed his “deep sorrow over the senseless murders that took place” Wednesday night. By AP on Publish Date June 18, 2015. Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times.

“This is not the first time that black churches have been attacked, and we know that hatred across races and faiths pose a particular threat to our democracy and our ideals,” Mr. Obama said. “The good news is I am confident that the outpouring of unity and strength and fellowship and love across Charleston today from all races, from all faiths, from all places of worship indicates the degree to which those old vestiges of hatred can be overcome.”

If those words of optimism were belied by his own grim face and subdued tone, perhaps it reflected a certain weariness or frustration over the limits of his ability to change the nation he leads. He grew especially pointed when he noted that this was the latest in a spate of mass shootings, and lamented what he called the easy access to guns, an issue he has tried and failed to address with legislation.

“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,” Mr. Obama said. He added: “It is in our power to do something about it. I say that recognizing the politics in this town foreclose a lot of the avenues right now. But it would be wrong for us not to acknowledge it. And at some point it’s going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it.”

To many, including the president, the shootings echoed the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 that killed four young black girls. Mr. Obama quoted extensively from the eulogy delivered then by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In that speech, Dr. King expressed hope that the tragedy would “transform the negative extremes of a dark past into the positive extremes of a bright future.”

Mr. Obama’s election seemed to promise a brighter future in race relations, but events of recent years appear to mock that hope. The 1963 bombing reflected a broad campaign of white resistance to civil rights, and this week’s shootings represented a violent fringe condemned by whites and blacks alike. Yet Charleston now joins Ferguson, Mo., Staten Island and Baltimore in putting the nation’s unfinished business back on the agenda.

By virtue of his own background, Mr. Obama has addressed these episodes with a personal perspective none of his predecessors in the White House ever could. But easy solutions elude him, just as they did them. Even his responses have generated criticism on cable television and talk radio from those saying his rhetoric itself has been divisive, fanning the flames of the racial divide by blaming the police or white America.

“Part of what I take from this is on the one hand the realization that this struggle still continues and despite profound change there is still profound hatred,” said Lonnie G. Bunch, the founding director of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, set to open in Washington next year. “It is a fundamentally different country. It’s a country that has changed in ways that are amazing. But it is still a country that is torn apart by race.”

Mr. Obama has spent much of the final years of his administration addressing race in a more expansive way than he did in his first term, because of stark events as well as because of the anniversaries of important moments in the civil rights movement. He has started an initiative called My Brother’s Keeper to help young Latino and African-American men, and advanced policies in education, criminal justice and economics that are devised in part to address the racial divide.

Yet in the end, he has run into the same limitations that other presidents have encountered. “The president has the power of the bully pulpit but his authority to affect change is very limited, at least on his own,” said Judith A. Winston, who was the executive director of former President Bill Clinton’s race initiative in the late 1990s.

The challenge, Ms. Winston said, is even more complex for Mr. Obama than it was for Mr. Clinton. “He’s in a very difficult position politically,” she said. “My sense is there’s been not much conversation or policy action that’s been explicitly directed at racial bias because of concerns that it would be seen as favoring people of his own race.”

Joshua DuBois, a former director of faith-based initiatives in Mr. Obama’s White House, said the president could not change deeply embedded attitudes by himself. “Hopefully most reasonable folks in the country are clear that he is doing all that is within his power to address issues of race in this country,” Mr. DuBois said. “But at the same time, he does not have a magic wand to fix issues that have been lying dormant and unaddressed for a long time.”

The shootings in Charleston hit close to home in the White House, where Mr. Pinckney, a state senator, was known. Mr. Obama immediately recognized the name when he was informed about the victims. “They met and formed a bond back in 2007 when they were campaigning early on in the president’s effort to get to the White House,” said Eric Schultz, a White House spokesman. “And that bond was strong enough to endure all the way until today.”

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who appeared with Mr. Obama in the White House briefing room, said later that he last saw Mr. Pinckney less than a year ago at a prayer breakfast in South Carolina. “He was a good man, a man of faith, a man of service,” Mr. Biden said in a written statement.

In Mr. Obama’s televised remarks, he noted the long history of the Charleston church. “Mother Emanuel church and its congregation have risen before — from flames, from an earthquake, from other dark times — to give hope to generations of Charlestonians,” Mr. Obama said. “And with our prayers and our love, and the buoyancy of hope, it will rise again now as a place of peace.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on June 19, 2015, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: A Sense at the White House of Horror, Loss and Resolve.

After Charleston Shooting, a Sense at the White House of Horror, Loss and Resolve, NYT, JUNE 18, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/us/politics/obama-charleston-shooting.html

Many Ask, Why Not Call

Church Shooting Terrorism?

 

JUNE 18, 2015

The New York Times

By RICK GLADSTONE

The massacre of nine African-Americans in Charleston has been classified as a possible hate crime, apparently carried out by a 21-year-old white man who once wore an apartheid badge and other symbols of white supremacy. But many civil rights advocates are asking why the attack has not officially been called terrorism.

Against the backdrop of rising worries about violent Muslim extremism in the United States, advocates see hypocrisy in the way the attack and the man under arrest in the shooting have been described by law enforcement officials and the news media.

Assaults like the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 and the attack on an anti-Islamic gathering in Garland, Tex., last month have been widely portrayed as acts of terrorism carried out by Islamic extremists. Critics say, however, that assaults against African-Americans and Muslim Americans are rarely if ever called terrorism.

Moreover, they argue, assailants who are white are far less likely to be described by the authorities as terrorists.

“We have been conditioned to accept that if the violence is committed by a Muslim, then it is terrorism,” Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights advocacy group in Washington, said Thursday in a telephone interview.

“If the same violence is committed by a white supremacist or apartheid sympathizer and is not a Muslim, we start to look for excuses — he might be insane, maybe he was pushed too hard,” Mr. Awad said.

Dean Obeidallah, a Muslim American radio show host and commentator, said it should be obvious that the Charleston killer was a terrorist.

“We have a man who intentionally went to a black church, had animus toward black people and assassinated an elected official and eight other people,” he said. “It seems he was motivated by a desire to terrorize and kill black people.”

While Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and South Carolina officials said the shooting on Wednesday night was under investigation as a hate crime, much of the reaction on social media Thursday was caustic, with commentators saying they saw a double standard in such terminology.

“A white supremacist massacres 9 black people in Charleston. It is a hate crime, it is terrorism, it is America 2015,” Remi Kanazi, a Palestinian-American activist and poet, said on Twitter.

Samuel Sinyangwe, a civil rights activist who has helped chronicle violence against African-Americans, wrote on Twitter: “#CharlestonShooting terrorist wore an Apartheid flag on his jacket. If a Muslim man wore an ISIS flag, he wouldn’t get past mall security.”

The definition of terrorism is a shifting and contentious subject, usually with political overtones. The antagonists in the Syrian war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example, routinely accuse each other of terrorism. Militant organizations such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, which consider themselves liberators, are officially regarded by the United Nations, among others, as terrorist groups.

Webster’s New World College Dictionary defines terrorism as “the use of force or threats to demoralize, intimidate and subjugate, especially such use as a political weapon or policy.”

Civil rights advocates said the Charleston attack not only fit the dictionary definition of terrorism but reflected a history of attempts by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups to terrorize African-Americans.

“The first antiterrorism law in U.S. history was the Klan Control Act, so really, this has been the definition of terrorism,” William Jelani Cobb, a writer and director of the Africana Studies Institute at the University of Connecticut, said in a Twitter post.

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, a venerable civil rights group, said the Charleston massacre looked like terrorism to him.

“While the terrorist label is often applied to attacks, plots and conspiracies carried out on behalf of designated terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Al Qaeda, politically motivated violence is not the sole domain of supporters of designated terrorist groups,” Mr. Foxman said in a statement.
 

Karen Zraick and Robert Mackey contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on June 19, 2015, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Many Ask, Why Not Call It Terrorism?

Many Ask, Why Not Call Church Shooting Terrorism?,
NYT, JUNE 18, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/us/
charleston-shooting-terrorism-or-hate-crime.html

No Sanctuary in Charleston

 

JUNE 18, 2015

The New York Times

By PATRICIA WILLIAMS LESSANE

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

CHARLESTON, S.C. — ON Wednesday night, while my son watched TV, I logged on to Facebook to check my friends’ updates. Immediately I saw a post about a shooting at Emanuel A.M.E., a historic black church in downtown Charleston that is a stone’s throw from my office at the College of Charleston. I made my son turn from his show to the news coverage. We stayed up and discussed what had happened. I prayed that I didn’t know anyone who had died, but I did.

Today Charleston, nicknamed the Holy City, is in mourning. We are still dealing with last month’s shooting of an unarmed black man in a northern suburb, and in the hours since this latest shooting, many of us in the African-American community were left asking: Is there any sanctuary left?

Five years ago, my ex-husband and I jumped at the chance to leave the violence of Chicago’s South Side to forge a life in a safer, culturally rich community. In hopes of a better life, we eagerly joined the numbers of other African-Americans “returning” south in a wave of reverse migration.

And for a while things were good. But then Trayvon Martin was gunned down in Florida, and almost instantly black people seemed to be under attack. Then came the police shootings of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Walter Scott — just a few miles away, in North Charleston — revealing the threat of violence we face every day. And this month we saw the footage of teenagers being manhandled by the police in Texas and Ohio.

Churches have historically provided a bulwark against such violence, especially here in the Deep South. From the “hush harbors” where enslaved Africans would steal away to worship, to the spirited praise houses that were once the spiritual cornerstone of Charleston’s Gullah community, to the hidden passageways on the Underground Railroad, to the church basements that doubled as strategic operation centers during the civil rights movement, the black church has always been the one place where we most often felt protected and nurtured.

Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church played all those roles in Charleston. From my office every day I see people coming in and out, not just to pray but to organize, to support the community. Called the Mother Church, it was founded in 1816 and was an important site in black Charleston’s struggle for liberation.

Yet even this church couldn’t provide sanctuary from hate.

On Wednesday, Mother Emanuel lost its leader, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, and eight of its members. Not since the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., almost 52 years ago, which left four little girls dead, have we experienced such pain and loss on this level at one of our churches.

I can’t help but think of this senseless act of terror, the largest mass shooting in the country since 2013, within the historical context of the Birmingham bombing, but also within the very current context of the increasing terror we African-Americans face on a daily basis.

The shooter’s reported words to his victims reflect a deep-seated hatred for, and fear of, black people by many Americans. These vitriolic sentiments underscore the way we are stereotyped in the media, demonized and dehumanized by right-wing pundits, policed by law enforcement and terrorized by those who use Stand Your Ground to cut us down without a second thought.

For me, last night’s events signal several visceral truths. One, that we African-Americans have no sanctuary. Charleston is a wonderful city, but in some very real ways, my children are no safer here than they were in Chicago.

This daily threat of terror does not exist within a vacuum. It looms within the growing prison-industrial state, against the backdrop of school-reform debates, our slow movement toward gun reform and the political maneuvers by Republicans to make it increasingly more difficult for poor people and minorities to vote. The reality that our civil rights are under attack is just as heavy as our fear for our lives.

I didn’t go to the office yesterday, nor did many of my friends. Instead we talked, in person and online, about what comes next. We must, of course, honor the spirits of Clementa Pinckney and of my friend Cynthia Hurd, a veteran librarian who loved books and encouraged all children to read, and of the seven other victims.

We must also resist the comfortable fiction that, whatever racial turmoil exists elsewhere, genteel Charleston is a place of calm. The killing of Walter Scott showed otherwise; Wednesday’s mass murder must spur us to action. We must do more than acknowledge the fact that, for all our legal advances, I can walk into any number of Charleston’s finest restaurants and not see anyone who looks like me.

That means committing ourselves, as the black community, to fixing the systemic barriers — in education, employment and housing — to black upward mobility that make it virtually impossible for poor African-American children to ever catch up with their white counterparts.

This is our collective problem. We all have to own it. We all have to fix it. Until then there is no sanctuary for any of us.

Patricia Williams Lessane is the director of the Avery Institute of Afro-American History and Culture at the College of Charleston.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 19, 2015, on page A23 of the National edition with the headline: No Sanctuary in the Holy City.

No Sanctuary in Charleston,
JUNE 18, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/opinion/no-sanctuary-in-charleston.html

Killings Add Painful Page

to Storied History of Charleston Church

 

JUNE 18, 2015

The New York Times

By JONATHAN WEISMAN

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is one of the oldest, most storied black congregations in the South. Its members met in secret in the years when black churches were outlawed here before the Civil War, and it contains a shrine to one of its founders, who helped organize a slave revolt in 1822.

So the mass shooting that took the lives of nine churchgoers, including a state senator who was pastor, Clementa C. Pinckney, had a particularly deep resonance in this genteel city, proud and mindful of its history but still torn by race and class.

“Christ said to Peter, ‘Upon this rock I will build my church,’” said Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, the highest-ranking African-American in the House. He flew to Charleston on Thursday morning to attend a prayer vigil for the shooting victims.

“Emanuel A.M.E. Church is the rock upon which the A.M.E. Church throughout the South is built,” Mr. Clyburn said. “That church has more historic significance to Charleston than any other church in this community.”

Intentionally or not, the gunman had found in Emanuel A.M.E., and in its 41-year-old pastor, rich symbols to attack with deadly racial hatred. Pastor Pinckney was a well-known civil rights leader in Charleston. He was elected to the South Carolina House at age 23, and then to the State Senate at age 27.

After Walter Scott, an African-American, was shot in the back by a North Charleston police officer in April, Mr. Pinckney helped guide through the State Legislature a bill requiring officers to wear body cameras.

Jaime Harrison, chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party and a friend of Mr. Pinckney’s since their teenage years, said all the young Democrats coming up together in the state looked up to Mr. Pinckney. “We all aspired to be like Clementa,” Mr. Harrison said.

Mr. Pinckney was not a divisive figure, community and political leaders say. State Representative James E. Smith Jr., the minority leader and a Democrat who was elected to the State House at the same time as Mr. Pinckney, called him, “a giant voice for justice in South Carolina,” and a conciliatory leader, not a bomb thrower.

Tyler Jones, political director of the South Carolina House Democratic Caucus, said, “I have never heard anyone utter a negative word about Clem Pinckney, and that’s not an exaggeration.”

Mr. Smith, along with others, including Mr. Clyburn, saw the true target as the church itself.

“It’s in the historic district,” Mr. Clyburn said. “It’s where people go when they’re touring the city. It’s right around where all the activity is. So he might have just stumbled upon the church — but I doubt it.”
Photo
Mourners placed ribbons outside Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., on Thursday. Credit Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the church in the African-American South, said Edward Ball, author of “Slaves in the Family,” a history of Low Country South Carolina. Mr. Ball’s forefathers enslaved the forefathers of Emanuel A.M.E.’s leading parishioners.

“This church is much more than a place where people sing gospel,” Mr. Ball said. “It’s tethered to the deep unconscious of the black community.”

Charleston’s historic district has always been home to the city’s white elite, built on wealth generated by the slave trade and rice that could only be cultivated as intensively as it was with slave labor. Charleston was one of the richest cities in antebellum America, and old Charleston has long been known for its clannish exclusivity.

Many of the African-Americans who were able to remain in the historic district over the last century have been chased out more recently by gentrification and soaring property values.

But Emanuel A.M.E. has remained firmly ensconced in what is known as the “Holy City,” a name inspired by all its church spires.

With its prideful reminders of its legacy of rebellion, “Mother Emanuel,” as it is known by blacks here, is still “symbolically recognized by everyone as the thorn in the side of the white body — at the very center of town, the very center of white society,” Mr. Ball said.

The killing of nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., is among a long list of attacks targeting predominantly black churches in the United States.

In 1822, the authorities were tipped off before plans for the slave revolt could be put in effect; 313 suspected conspirators were arrested, and 35, including Denmark Vesey, the organizer who was a founder of the church, were executed. Angry whites in town burned the original church down.

The church, rebuilt in 1891, holds that history dear. A memorial to Mr. Vesey within its Gothic Revival walls is a reminder not only of the revolt, but also of Charleston’s past.

In the 1960s, the church was a center of civil rights organizing. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the church in 1962.

In his remarks on the killings on Thursday, President Obama acknowledged the church’s special history.

“This is a place of worship that was founded by African-Americans seeking liberty,” he said. “This is a church that was burned to the ground because its worshipers worked to end slavery. When there were laws banning all-black church gatherings, they conducted services in secret. When there was a nonviolent movement to bring our country closer in line with our highest ideals, some of our brightest leaders spoke and led marches from this church’s steps.”

He added, “This is a sacred place in the history of Charleston and in the history of America.”

On Thursday, Emanuel was off limits, cordoned off from Charleston’s citizens with police tape and emergency vehicles. The city’s leaders and citizens gathered at Morris Brown A.M.E. Church, about a half-mile away, for the prayer vigil.

The walk between the two churches along King Street leads past trendy galleries, new and trendy restaurants and bars, historical markers and the old American Theater, whose marquee read, “Pray for our Mother Emanuel AME Church.”

Inside Morris, members of the clergy spoke effusively of unity and vowed not to let hate divide the city. Blacks, whites, Jews and Christians jammed the aisles, prayed and sang. A street minister, Mark Irvin, implored “all European-Americans, all non-African-Americans, whether you think your ancestors are innocent or guilty, bring yourselves to ask forgiveness from the Lord.”

Bishop John Richard Bryant looked out on the multiracial, multiethnic throng from the pulpit and pronounced: “You look like what we in the Low Country call a quilt. You’re patches. You all fit somewhere.”

But in front of the church, under a sweltering midday sun, after the clergy had gone inside, an angrier group of young men took over. The memory of Walter Scott’s shooting is still fresh. They held handwritten poster boards declaring, “Black lives matter.”

Terrence Meyers, 34, held one such sign at King and Morris streets as the crowd emptied out of Morris A.M.E., chased out by a bomb threat that seemed to underscore the angrier tone outside the church. He said that as dozens of police cars were screaming toward Emanuel A.M.E. on Wednesday night, he was pulled aside and ticketed by a policeman for riding his bicycle home from work on the sidewalk without a headlight.

He was still furious the next day.

“There’s no such thing as peace, not now,” he said. “Peace is over.”

Jason Horowitz contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on June 19, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Scene of Carnage Has Long History of Pain, Pride and Dignity.

Killings Add Painful Page to Storied History of Charleston Church,
NYT, JUNE 18, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/us/
charleston-killings-evoke-history-of-violence-against-black-churches.html

Dylann Roof,

Suspect in Charleston Shooting,

Flew the Flags of White Power

JUNE 18, 2015

The New York Times

By FRANCES ROBLES,

JASON HOROWITZ

and SHAILA DEWAN

LEXINGTON, S.C. — The Facebook profile picture chosen by Dylann Storm Roof in May is thick with symbolism. It shows Mr. Roof, a scowling young white man, wearing a black jacket adorned with two flags — one from apartheid-era South Africa, the other from white-ruled Rhodesia — that have been adopted as emblems by modern-day white supremacists.

Mr. Roof, 21, was arrested Thursday in North Carolina after law enforcement officers identified him as the suspect in the mass shooting at a black church in Charleston, S.C., on Wednesday night. The shooting left nine dead, including the pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney.

Officials said the shooting was being investigated as a hate crime. Although it was not clear if Mr. Roof had actually joined any organized white supremacist groups, people who knew him said that in recent months, a young man they described as extremely shy had begun to harbor racist views and make increasingly violent statements about attacking black people.

Joseph Meek, 20, a childhood friend who reconnected with Mr. Roof this year, said Mr. Roof had changed, spewing racist ideas and talking about wanting “to hurt a whole bunch of people.”

Dylann Roof, 21, the suspect in the killing of nine people at a Charleston church, was moved from the jail in Shelby, N.C., after his arrest there. By Reuters on Publish Date June 18, 2015. Photo by Chuck Burton/Associated Press.

“He was saying all this stuff about how the races should be segregated, that whites should be with whites,” Mr. Meek said. “I could tell there was something inside him, there was something he wouldn’t let go. I was trying to tell him, ‘What’s wrong?’ All he would say was that he was planning to do something crazy.”

At first Mr. Meek said he did not take Mr. Roof seriously. But he became worried enough that several weeks ago he took away and hid Mr. Roof’s .45-caliber handgun, which Mr. Roof had bought with money given to him by his parents for his 21st birthday. But at the urging of his girlfriend, Mr. Meek returned the weapon because he was on probation and did not want to get into trouble.

Now Mr. Meek and his girlfriend, Lindsey Fry, both of whom are white, say they feel guilt about the shooting. “I feel we could have done something and prevented this whole thing,” Ms. Fry said.

Asked why Mr. Roof picked that particular church, Mr. Meek replied, “Because it was a black church.”

Another friend, Dalton Tyler, said that Mr. Roof had begun talking about wanting “to start a civil war.” But like Mr. Meek, he did not always take Mr. Roof seriously.

Mr. Tyler said on another occasion, the two were driving to a strip club by the zoo when Mr. Roof saw a black woman, used a racist word and said, “I’ll shoot your ass.”

“I was just like, ‘You’re stupid,’ ” Mr. Tyler said. “He was a racist; but I don’t judge people.”

Mr. Roof has had two previous brushes with the law, both in recent months, according to court records. In February, he attracted attention at the Columbiana Centre, a shopping mall, when, dressed all in black, he asked store employees “out of the ordinary questions” such as how many people were working and what time they would be leaving, according to a police report.

When a police officer questioned Mr. Roof, he “began speaking very nervously and stated that his parents were pressuring him to get a job,” but then admitted that he had not asked for applications at any of the stores, the report said.

Asked if he had any contraband, Mr. Roof said no, according to the report, but the officer searched him and found Suboxone, a prescription drug used to treat opiate addiction and frequently sold in illegal street transactions. Mr. Roof admitted that he did not have a prescription for the drug, the report said, and he was arrested and charged with felony drug possession. The case is pending.

In April, Mr. Roof was charged with trespassing at the same mall. The police report said he had been barred from the mall for a year after the drug arrest. Mr. Roof was convicted on that charge, a misdemeanor.

Mr. Roof’s current address is listed in public records as being in this rural speck of a town southeast of Columbia with an overwhelmingly black population. On Mr. Roof’s Facebook profile, which was taken down Thursday, many of his 88 friends were black. More than half a dozen cars from the Richland County sheriff’s office were parked along the dusty driveway outside the two-story wood-frame home in Eastover. A man in a straw hat came out of the house and told a reporter: “Make your way right back where you came from. Get off the property now.”

From school records, Mr. Roof appears to have moved back and forth as a child between Richland County, which includes Columbia and Eastover, and nearby Lexington County to the west. He attended ninth grade twice: at White Knoll High School in Lexington in the 2008-9 school year and, the next school year, at White Knoll until February 2010, when he transferred to Dreher High School in Columbia. Neither school district had records of his finishing high school.

A neighbor in Eastover, Debra Scott, 50, said that she had seen Mr. Roof walking to and from a nearby market but that she knew very little about him or anyone else who might live in his house. She described the house as “very quiet” and said Mr. Roof “seemed like a normal kid.”

But Ms. Scott, who is black, said she was “scared to death” after hearing news reports that Mr. Roof wanted to kill black people. “My concern is that he’s saying he’s out to kill black people,” she said, unaware that he had been arrested. “We’re the closest ones to him.”

She added that her grandmother had called her Thursday morning and told her: “Get out of that bed. That boy was from Garners Ferry,” the name of the street where she and Mr. Roof lived.

Mr. Meek said that as a child, Mr. Roof would sometimes sleep over at his house. He described Mr. Roof as so quiet and shy that “his mom pushed him out of the house and told him to make friends.” He added, “Every friend he made, I made for him.”

Mr. Roof dropped out of high school after the ninth grade, Mr. Meek said, and the two fell out of touch. But this year, Mr. Roof sent him a Facebook friend request and the two got together again, often to go drinking or to strip clubs. Mr. Roof liked vodka and water, Mr. Meek said, adding, “I never saw him with a girl.”

He said Mr. Roof worked in landscaping and seemed to live an itinerant life, sometimes sleeping in his car. In recent weeks his behavior turned more bizarre, as he talked about wanting to burn an American flag and get his neck tattooed with the word “dagger.”

The friends last saw Mr. Roof on Tuesday when Ms. Fry found him sleeping in his car parked on a sandy patch in front of Mr. Meek’s house. Asked if she considered that odd, Ms. Fry replied, “He does weird things all the time.”

Correction: June 18, 2015

An earlier version of a home page summary with this article misspelled the given name of the suspect. He is Dylann Roof, not Dylan.

Frances Robles and Jason Horowitz reported from Lexington, and Shaila Dewan from New York. Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from New York. Susan Beachy contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on June 19, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Flying the Flags of White Power.

Dylann Roof, Suspect in Charleston Shooting,
Flew the Flags of White Power,
NYT, JUNE 18, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/us/
on-facebook-dylann-roof-charleston-suspect-wears-symbols-of-white-supremacy.html

Recalling Nine Spiritual Mentors,

Gunned Down During Night of Devotion

 

JUNE 18, 2015

The New York Times

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

and ALAN BLINDER

When Tywanza Sanders, the poet and peacemaker of the family, saw the man draw his gun during Bible study and point it as his elderly aunt, Susie Jackson, he shielded her and tried to talk the gunman into laying down his weapon, a relative said Thursday.

“That was who he was,” said Kristen Washington, a relative who recounted what she heard from witnesses to the shooting.

Instead, the gunman killed Mr. Sanders, and then gunned down his aunt and seven other churchgoers who had driven to the church on a Wednesday night for one reason: to discuss Scripture, and how to make Jesus’ actions come alive in their own lives and communities.

The nine victims — three men and six women, who ranged in age from 26 to 87 — were leaders, motivators, counselors and the people everyone could turn to for a heap of prayer, friends and relatives said. Led by the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, 41, the pastor of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church who was also a state senator, the group included a girls’ track coach, a recent college graduate, a librarian, a university admissions coordinator and others devoted to churches in the area.

Tywanza Sanders

Mr. Sanders, 26, had graduated from Allen University last year and worked full-time as a barber to pay his bills. He was proud of his degree in business administration from Allen, a historically black college, but he wanted more. He told Torrence Shaw, a friend, that he wanted to go to graduate school to pursue music production. Mr. Sanders had been researching scholarships.

But it was his personality, even more than his ambition, that left an impression on his friends and family.

“For him being so young, he was wise,” Mr. Shaw said. “He was always caring and would give the shirt off his back to anybody. He was the first person I would always call to get his wisdom and advice.”

The two met in high school and Mr. Sanders helped Mr. Shaw cope with the death of his father. But he reminded him that, with Mr. Shaw’s older brother away at school, he had to step up and be the “man of the family.”

Ms. Washington, his cousin, said there was not a lot that would get Mr. Sanders down. He wrote poetry and attended open mic nights. He loved rap. And he could not get enough of the water.

Mr. Shaw’s brother Tyrone said Mr. Sanders was focused on getting his life in order and being positive.

Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45, who was on the church’s ministerial staff, held two roles at Goose Creek High School. She was a speech therapist, and coached the girls’ track and field team, the kind of school booster who could never be missed at games because of all the shouting and cheering.

“She was teaching them track: How to throw the discus, how to do shot, triple jump, those types of things,” said Jimmy Huskey, the school principal, at a news conference. “But she taught these young ladies how to be better young ladies. This is something that can never be replaced.”

Ms. Coleman-Singleton was never the type to preach aggressively. She demonstrated her faith, not with words, but with her behavior.

“She didn’t go out there and say it or anything else,” Mr. Huskey said. “It was by her actions. It was what she did for people.”

Ms. Coleman-Singleton had three children, including a son, Chris Singleton, an outfielder for Charleston Southern University.

Cynthia Hurd, 54, lived amid books. A librarian for 31 years for the Charleston County library system, Ms. Hurd once said in an interview with a local newspaper that she loved finding answers, like a detective. But it was working with people that she loved most about her job, she told the paper. She named Maya Angelou as her favorite author.

The Charleston City Council announced Thursday that it would rename the St. Andrews library branch in her honor.

“It is unimaginable that she would walk into a church and not return,” Ms. Hurd’s brother, Malcolm Graham, a former state senator, said in a statement. “But that’s who she was — a woman of faith.”

DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49, a minister who loved to sing, had retired from county government as head of the Community Development Block Grant Program in 2005. Last year, she joined her former school, Southern Wesleyan University, as the admissions coordinator. Ms. Middleton-Doctor had gotten a master’s degree in management from there.

“DePayne truly believed in the mission of S.W.U. to help students achieve their potential by connecting faith with learning,” said the university’s president, Tom Voss.

The Charleston City Council chairman, Elliott Summey, said as a county worker Ms. Middleton-Doctor, who had four daughters in junior high through college, tended to the needs of underprivileged communities. “In a very big way, she was doing very human, kindly things,” he said.

Like others attending the Bible study, Ethel Lee Lance, 70, was dedicated to Emanuel. She was a sexton at the church and had worked there for three decades, her grandson told The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C.

Ms. Jackson, 87, Mr. Sanders’s aunt, was a longtime Emanuel churchgoer in a spiritually rooted family that considered churchgoing as nonnegotiable.

Myra Thompson, 59, had traveled over from Holy Trinity Reformed Episcopal Church, the church where her husband, the Rev. Anthony Thompson, serves as vicar, to join the study group.

The Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons Sr., 74, had made a similar journey. He was a retired pastor from another church but would regularly stop by Emanuel, according to his daughter-in-law, Arcelia Simmons of Newport News, Va. Mr. Simmons was the only victim to die at the hospital.

“Many people are struggling with this right now, and we think it’s a time to start the healing process,” Mr. Huskey, the principal, said.

“We’re in a society today that is broken, pretty much,” he added. “And there will be a time when those times will be made right.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on June 19, 2015, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Recalling Nine Spiritual Mentors, Gunned Down During Night of Devotion.

Recalling Nine Spiritual Mentors, Gunned Down During Night of Devotion,
NYT, JUNE 18, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/us/
nine-victims-of-charleston-church-shooting-remembered.html

Church Shooting Suspect Dylann Roof

Is Brought to Charleston

JUNE 18, 2015

The New York Times

By NICK CORASANITI,

RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

and LIZETTE ALVAREZ

CHARLESTON, S.C. — The mass murder of nine people who gathered Wednesday night for Bible study at a landmark black church has shaken a city whose history from slavery to the Civil War to the present is inseparable from the nation’s anguished struggle with race.

Fourteen hours after the massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in which the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, the church pastor and a prominent state senator, was among the dead, the police in Shelby, N.C., acting on a tip from a motorist, on Thursday arrested Dylann Storm Roof, a 21-year-old white man with an unsettled personal life and a recent history of anti-black views.

The killings, with victims ranging in age from 26 to 87, left people stunned and grieving. Witnesses said Mr. Roof sat with church members for an hour and then started venting against African-Americans and opened fire on the group.

At Morris Brown A.M.E. Church here, blacks, whites, Christians and Jews gathered to proclaim that a racist gunman would not divide a community already tested by the fatal police shooting in April of an unarmed African-American, Walter Scott.

“We cannot make sense of what has happened, but we can come together,” declared the Rev. George Felder Jr., pastor of New Hope A.M.E. Church.

Gov. Nikki R. Haley fought back tears, her voice trembling and cracking, at a news conference here. “We woke up today, and the heart and soul of South Carolina was broken,” she said. “Parents are having to explain to their kids how they can go to church and feel safe, and that is not something we ever thought we’d deal with.”

President Obama, once again having to confront the nation’s divisions, saw systemic issues of guns, violence and race in the tragedy in Charleston.

“We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” he said at the White House.

And quoting the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after four black girls were killed in the bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Ala., 52 years ago, he said the lessons of this tragedy must extend beyond one city and one church. He cited Dr. King’s words that their deaths were a demand to “substitute courage for caution,” and urging people to ask not just who did the killing but “about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers.”

Even amid calls here for calm and compassion, at least three bomb threats were made Thursday that forced the evacuation of buildings around Charleston, including churches where prayer vigils were being held for the shooting victims. And while the racially mixed crowds inside those churches linked arms and appealed for harmony, the tone among some black people gathered on the city’s streets was not so conciliatory.

Jareem Brady, 42, said the shooting was only an extension of what black people face daily. “We’re not worth the air they don’t want us to breathe,” he said of Charleston’s white citizens.

The church holds a special place in the history of Charleston and particularly of its African-American population. It has the oldest black congregation south of Baltimore, according to the National Park Service, and its website calls it the oldest A.M.E. church in the South. The church’s current Gothic Revival building was completed in 1891, but the congregation dates to before 1820.

Of those killed, the most prominent was the church’s leader, Mr. Pinckney, 41.

A prayer vigil near the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church early Thursday. Credit David Goldman/Associated Press

Mr. Pinckney was holding a Bible study session with a small group on Wednesday when, surveillance video shows, the suspect arrived after 8 p.m. — a slight, blond man with a bowl haircut and a gray sweatshirt. He sat down with the others for a while and listened, then began to disagree with others as they spoke about Scripture, said Kristen Washington, who heard the harrowing story from her family members who were at the meeting and survived.

Witnesses to the killings said the gunman asked for the pastor when he entered the church, and sat next to Mr. Pinckney during the Bible study.

They said that almost an hour after he arrived, the gunman suddenly stood and pulled a gun, and Ms. Washington’s cousin Tywanza Sanders, 26, known as the peacemaker of the family, tried to calmly talk the man out of violence..

“You don’t have to do this,” he told the gunman, Ms. Washington recounted.

The gunman replied, “Yes. You are raping our women and taking over the country.”

The gunman took aim at the oldest person present, Susie Jackson, 87, Mr. Sanders’s aunt, Ms. Washington said. Mr. Sanders told the man to point the gun at him instead, she said, but the man said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m going to shoot all of you.”

Mr. Sanders dived in front of his aunt and the first shot struck him, Ms. Washington said, and then the gunman began shooting others. She said Mr. Sanders’s mother, Felicia, and his niece, lay motionless on the floor, playing dead, and were not shot.

The gunman looked at one woman and told her “that she was going to live so that she can tell the story of what happened,” said City Councilman William Dudley Gregorie, a friend of the woman and a trustee of the church.

“She is still in shock, the carnage was just unbelievable is my understanding,” he said. “One of the younger kids in the church literally had to play dead, and it’s my understanding that my friend might have also laid down on top of him to protect him as well.”

The gunman left six women and three men dead or dying, including a library manager, a former county administrator, a speech therapist who also worked for the church, and two ministers. Greg Mullen, the Charleston police chief, called it a hate crime, and Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch said the Justice Department was investigating that possibility.

In a photo on his Facebook page, a glowering Mr. Roof wears symbols of two former white supremacist governments — the flags of apartheid-era South Africa, and of Rhodesia, the nation that became Zimbabwe. Other photos, posted by a Facebook friend of his and widely circulated online, show Mr. Roof leaning against a car with a license plate that reads, Confederate States of America.

The tragedy had a particular resonance in a city that offers perhaps the sharpest contrast in the South between its cosmopolitan, tolerant present and its antebellum past, when Charleston was the capital of the slave trade. It was in Charleston that a state convention adopted the “ordinance of secession” in December 1860, putting South Carolina on a path to become the first state to leave the Union, and the first shots of the Civil War were fired four months later at Fort Sumter.

The shooting reignited demands that the South Carolina Legislature end its practice of flying the Confederate battle flag on the grounds of the state Capitol in Columbia.

But if the church shooting prompted comparisons to the 1963 bombing of a black church in Birmingham by white supremacists that killed four girls, it also illustrated how much has changed. The earlier bombing took place as black people struggled to secure basic civil rights, at a time when many were barred from voting, much less holding office. Alabama’s governor at the time, George C. Wallace, was the public face of white resistance, and no one was charged with the crime until 12 years later.

The shooting Wednesday took the life a black state legislator, an arrest was made in hours, and some of the most emotional expressions of mourning came from Ms. Haley, whose parents are from India and who is the state’s first female governor and the first not of European descent.

Local, state and federal law enforcement officials started a manhunt for the suspect, distributing pictures of him entering the church, and asking people to be on the lookout for him or his 2000 Hyundai sedan. By midmorning Thursday, he had been identified as Mr. Roof, described as 5-foot-9 and weighing 120 pounds.

The police said it was a tip from a commuter that led to the arrest.

Deborah Dills was traveling along Highway 74 on Thursday morning from her home in Gastonia, N.C., to her part-time job at a florist in Kings Mountain, N.C., when she spotted a dark Hyundai Elantra with South Carolina plates. The car — and its driver, Ms. Dills, 51, soon thought — matched the descriptions in the police alert she had heard on the morning news.

“She got kind of nervous and pulled off,” Mr. Frady said. He insisted she follow the car, while he called the Kings Mountain police.

Ms. Dills rushed back onto the highway, lined with stores and fast-food restaurants in a chain of suburbs west of Charlotte, in pursuit of the Hyundai. Finally at a stoplight near a Walmart in Shelby, N.C., she pulled up behind the car and read its license plate number to Mr. Frady, who relayed it to the police.

“That’s it,” he told her. “That’s him.”

A short time later, at 10:43 a.m., the police in Shelby, 250 miles north of Charleston, pulled over the Hyundai and arrested Mr. Roof. He waived extradition and was flown to South Carolina on Thursday evening and, amid extraordinary security, walked into the jail in Charleston County at 7:25 p.m.

Nearby, a 15-year-old boy from North Charleston held a handwritten sign: “Your evil doing did not break our community! You made us stronger!”

The boy, Hikaym Rivers, said that he doubted Mr. Roof saw his message — and he questioned whether the suspect would have cared if he noticed the sign — but he said it was important to make a public statement one night after the shooting in Charleston.

“We’re supporting our community, and we’re taking a stand that no one can just take this away from us,” he said. “It’s our peace of mind.”

Jail officials said that Mr. Roof would make a court appearance on Friday afternoon.

In Charleston, nicknamed the Holy City for its large number of churches, many houses of worship held prayer vigils, for the dead and for survivors, that drew people from different communities, races and denominations together.

At Morris Brown A.M.E. Church, just a few blocks from Emanuel, the mood of a packed house alternated between grief, hope and resilience. Calls of “enough is enough” echoed as the Rev. John Richard Bryant called for an end to gun violence.

“You look like a quilt, you look like patches,” Mr. Bryant said. “You all fit somewhere.”

Hundreds of people packed the pews of the white-columned Second Presbyterian Church on Thursday evening in a vigil to remember the victims of the shooting. Pastors read Scripture, the congregation sang and the Rev. Sidney Davis delivered a rousing sermon, his voice cracking at times. After reading a passage from the Bible, he said, “Last night, Satan came again. Satan came to say white and black cannot raise God.”

Later, he told the racially mixed congregation that the bullets were not simply penetrating the people who died in the church. “It was all of us dying last night,” he said.
Correction: June 18, 2015

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of Shelby, N.C. It is west, not east of Charlotte.

Nick Corasaniti reported from Charleston, Richard Pérez-Peña from New York and Lizette Alvarez from Miami. Reporting was contributed by John Eligon, Jason Horowitz, Jonathan Weisman and Alan Blinder from Charleston, Michael S. Schmidt and Michael D. Shear from Washington, and Jonathan M. Katz from Kings Mountain, N.C..

A version of this article appears in print on June 19, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: CHARLESTON MASSACRE SUSPECT HELD AS CITY GRIEVES.

Church Shooting Suspect Dylann Roof Is Brought to Charleston,
NYT, JUNE 18, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/us/charleston-church-shooting.html

Racial Penalties in Baltimore Mortgages

MAY 30, 2015

The New York Times

SundayReview | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The mortgage crisis that brought the economy to its knees seven years ago was especially devastating for black communities, where homeowners who qualified for safe, traditional mortgages were often steered into ruinously priced loans that paid off handsomely for brokers and lenders while leaving borrowers vulnerable to foreclosure. The crisis left many middle-class minority communities strewn with abandoned houses, further widening the already huge wealth gap between African-Americans and whites.

A study published this month in the journal Social Problems lays out how this happened in Baltimore in the run-up to the recession and comes at a time when the banking industry and its friends in Congress are fighting proposed federal rules that would make it much easier to ferret out discrimination and enforce fair-lending laws.

The research, by the sociologists Jacob Rugh, Len Albright and Douglas Massey, focuses on 3,027 loans made in Baltimore from 2000 to 2008 by Wells Fargo, which in 2012 agreed to pay $175 million to settle allegations of predatory lending in Baltimore and elsewhere. The study takes into account credit scores, income, down payments — all of the information that was available to brokers and lenders when these loans were made.

It found that black borrowers in Baltimore, especially those who lived in black neighborhoods, were charged higher rates and were disadvantaged at every point in the borrowing process compared with similarly situated whites. Had black borrowers been treated the same as white borrowers, the authors say, their loan default rate would have been considerably lower. Instead, discrimination harmed individuals and entire neighborhoods.

Over the life of a 30-year loan, the researchers say, these racial disparities would cost the average black borrower an extra $14,904 — and $15,948 for the average black borrower living in a black neighborhood — as compared with white borrowers. That money might otherwise have been put into savings, invested in children’s education, or used to improve health or living standards.

The racial penalty was highest for black borrowers earning over $50,000. This is consistent with other studies showing that brokers who earned more fees for larger, higher-cost loans deliberately targeted black families of means. As the study notes, these facts show that whiteness still confers “concrete advantages in the accumulation of wealth through homeownership” and that pervasive racial disadvantage continues to “undermine black socioeconomic status in the United States today.”

The discrimination that was apparently widespread in the mortgage crisis has been difficult to document, partly because the data that lenders were required to report to the federal government did not include crucial information like the property value, the term of the loan, the total points and fees, the duration of any teaser or introductory interest rates, and the applicant’s or borrower’s age and credit score. The Dodd-Frank financial reform law of 2010 sought to remedy that problem by directing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to require lenders to report this information.

The bureau needs to resist the pressure and make the final rules as strong as possible. The additional information would make it easier to determine if lenders are operating in accordance with fair-housing law.

Beyond that, federal regulators need to conduct regular audits of lenders to make sure that racial disparities are flagged and corrected before they become entrenched.
 

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A version of this editorial appears in print on May 31, 2015, on page SR10 of the New York edition with the headline: Racial Penalties in Baltimore Mortgages.

Racial Penalties in Baltimore Mortgages,
NYT, MAY 30, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/opinion/sunday/
racial-penalties-in-baltimore-mortgages.html

President Obama Condemns

Both the Baltimore Riots

and the Nation’s ‘Slow-Rolling Crisis’

 

APRIL 28, 2015

The New York Times

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

and MATT APUZZO

WASHINGTON — President Obama responded with passion and frustration on Tuesday to the violence that has rocked Baltimore and other cities after the deaths of young black men in confrontations with the police, calling for a period of soul-searching about what he said had become a near-weekly cycle of tragedy.

Speaking from the White House Rose Garden, Mr. Obama condemned the chaos unfolding just 40 miles north of the White House and called for “full transparency and accountability” in a Department of Justice investigation into the death of Freddie Gray, the young black man who died of a spinal cord injury suffered while in police custody.

He said that his thoughts were also with the police officers injured in Monday night’s unrest in Baltimore, which he said “underscores that that’s a tough job, and we have to keep that in mind.”

But in a carefully planned 14-minute statement during a news conference with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, Mr. Obama made clear that he was deeply dismayed not only by the recent unrest in several cities but also by the longstanding yet little-discussed racial and societal forces that have fed it.

“We have seen too many instances of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals, primarily African-American, often poor, in ways that raise troubling questions,” Mr. Obama said. “This has been a slow-rolling crisis. This has been going on for a long time. This is not new, and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s new.”

He spoke as Loretta E. Lynch, the new attorney general, dispatched two of her top deputies to Baltimore to handle the fallout: Vanita Gupta, her civil rights chief, and Ronald L. Davis, her community-policing director. The unrest there and the epidemic Mr. Obama described of troubled relations between white police officers and black citizens have consumed Ms. Lynch’s first two days on the job and could define her time in office.

They have also raised difficult and familiar questions for Mr. Obama about whether he and his administration are doing enough to confront the problem, questions made all the more poignant because he is the first African-American to occupy the White House.

The president struggled for balance in his remarks. He pushed back against critics who have said he should be more aggressive in his response to questionable practices by the police, saying: “I can’t federalize every police department in the country and force them to retrain.”

Mr. Obama also made clear that he had no sympathy for people rioting in the streets, calling them “a handful of people taking advantage of the situation for their own purposes,” who should “be treated as criminals.”

And he said that law enforcement officials and organizations that represent them must also admit that “there are some police who aren’t doing the right thing.”

But he emphasized that the problem went far beyond the police, who he said are too often deployed to “do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise” in broken urban communities where fathers are absent, drugs dominate and education, jobs and opportunities are nonexistent.

The president had initially avoided commenting on the unrest in Baltimore, allowing only still photographers into the Oval Office on Monday afternoon as he held an unscheduled meeting with Ms. Lynch, thus denying reporters the chance to ask him questions about the chaos then unfurling one state away. The issue dominated Ms. Lynch’s first day on the job, and her response to it will be watched closely. As he prepared to swear her in, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said that Ms. Lynch, the first black woman in the post, was uniquely qualified to bridge the divide between minority neighborhoods and police officers clashing over the use of deadly force. Within hours, Baltimore was in flames.

Ms. Lynch’s predecessor, Eric H. Holder Jr., the first black attorney general, was the face of the Obama administration’s response to unrest in Ferguson, Mo., last year after a white police officer killed an unarmed black teenager there, and he relished the opportunity to talk about policing and race relations.

It made him a hero of the civil rights movement, but drew sharp criticism from police groups who said the attorney general did not do enough to support them.

Ms. Lynch, a career prosecutor, came into office promising to strike a new tone and planned to visit police groups this summer. But the riots in Baltimore after the death of the 25-year-old Mr. Gray have overtaken that timeline. Almost as soon as she had taken her oath, there were signs that Baltimore was about to erupt.

As mourners gathered for Mr. Gray’s funeral, the police announced that three street gangs had pledged to work together to “take out” police officers. The University of Maryland shut down its Baltimore campus early, saying it had been warned that the area could soon turn violent.

A turbulent day in Baltimore ended with rioting by rock-throwing youths and a call to end the violence by religious leaders and the mother of Freddie Gray. By Axel Gerdau on Publish Date April 28, 2015.

At the Justice Department, Ms. Lynch was met by Ms. Gupta and Mr. Davis for a lengthy update on Baltimore. It was her first meeting as attorney general, and it led to the unscheduled trip to the White House to meet with Mr. Obama.

In one meeting on Tuesday, Ms. Lynch told officials that while in Baltimore, they should meet not only Mr. Gray’s family but also the officers who were most seriously injured. “When officers get injured in senseless violence, they become victims as well,” she said, a Justice Department official told reporters.

As night set in on Monday, chaos reigned on Baltimore’s streets. Rioters burned and looted businesses. Others hurled rocks. Police officers were injured, and the police commissioner said his department was outnumbered in its own city.

Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland activated the National Guard, sending hundreds of soldiers into the city after dawn on Tuesday.

Ms. Lynch issued a statement in which she condemned “the senseless acts of violence by some individuals in Baltimore that have resulted in harm to law enforcement officers, destruction of property and a shattering of the peace in the city.”

It was a message that Mr. Obama echoed on Tuesday, as he bristled at what he argued was the news media’s habit of focusing on dramatic images of brutality and chaos rather than on what have been mostly peaceful protests in Baltimore and other cities.

“One burning building will be looped on television over and over and over again, and thousands of demonstrators who did it the right way, I think, have been lost in the discussion,” Mr. Obama said.

He said the that “overwhelming majority” in Baltimore protested peacefully and went back into the streets Tuesday to clean up after “a handful of criminals and thugs who tore up the place.” Ms. Lynch, a child of the segregated South and the daughter of a local civil rights leader, has spoken of the need for police officers — because they wield the power — to repair broken relationships. But she has also spoken repeatedly about the police as a force for good in minority neighborhoods.

A version of this article appears in print on April 29, 2015, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: President Condemns Both the Riots and the Nation’s ‘Slow-Rolling Crisis’.

President Obama Condemns Both the Baltimore Riots
and the Nation’s ‘Slow-Rolling Crisis’, NYT, APRIL 28, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/us/politics/
events-in-baltimore-reflect-a-slow-rolling-crisis-across-us-obama-says.html

Freddie Gray in Baltimore:

Another City, Another Death

in the Public Eye

 

APRIL 21, 2015

The New York Times

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

and RON NIXON

BALTIMORE — In life, friends say, Freddie Gray was an easygoing, slender young man who liked girls and partying here in Sandtown, a section of west Baltimore pocked by boarded-up rowhouses and known to the police for drug dealing and crime.

In death, Mr. Gray, 25, has become the latest symbol in the running national debate over police treatment of black men — all the more searing, people here say, in a city where the mayor and police commissioner are black.

Questions are swirling around just what happened to Mr. Gray, who died here Sunday — a week after he was chased and restrained by police officers, and suffered a spine injury, which later killed him, in their custody. The police say they have no evidence that their officers used force. A lawyer for Mr. Gray’s family accuses the department of a cover-up, and on Tuesday the Justice Department opened a civil rights inquiry into his death.

But as protests continued Tuesday night — with hundreds of angry residents, led by a prominent pastor and Mr. Gray’s grieving family, chanting and marching in the streets — the death has also fueled debate on whether African-American leadership here can better handle accusations of police brutality than cities like Ferguson, Mo., and North Charleston, S.C., with their white-dominated governments.

“Unlike other places where incidents like this have happened, they understand what it means to be black in America,” said City Councilman Brandon Scott, an ally of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and a frequent critic of Police Commissioner Anthony Batts.

“They understand how something like this can get out of hand very quickly,” Mr. Scott said. “They understand the community’s frustration more than anyone else. But at the same time they also understand the opposite — they understand the need to have law enforcement in neighborhoods. So it puts them in a bind.”

This week the mayor and police commissioner have appeared repeatedly in public promising a full and transparent review of Mr. Gray’s death. On Tuesday, the police released the names of six officers who had been suspended with pay, including a lieutenant, a woman and three officers in their 20s who joined the force less than three years ago. Officers canvassed west Baltimore, looking for witnesses.

Mr. Batts turned up in Mr. Gray’s neighborhood, chatting with residents and shaking hands. And Ms. Rawlings-Blake said in an interview that she had asked Gov. Larry Hogan for help in getting an autopsy on Mr. Gray performed by the state medical examiner made public, even piecemeal, as quickly as possible. The mayor said she supported the Justice Department inquiry.

Chanting “Black Lives Matter” and “Justice for Freddie,” protesters marched Tuesday evening on the block where Mr. Gray was arrested. The Rev. Jamal Bryant asked for a moment of silence. Mr. Gray’s relatives — including his mother, her head shrouded in the hood of a sweatshirt — paused quietly.

Mr. Gray’s arrest, which was captured on a cellphone video that shows him being dragged, seemingly limp, into a police van, has revived a debate in this city over police practices.

“We have a very challenging history in Baltimore,” Ms. Rawlings-Blake said, adding that she had worked hard “to repair a broken relationship” between black residents and the police. She called Mr. Gray’s death “a very sad and frustrating setback.”

Ms. Rawlings-Blake and Mr. Batts had been talking about the problem long before the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August spawned national protests and the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. But the officials’ actions are doing little to assuage angry residents here. Rosa Mobley says she witnessed Mr. Gray’s arrest from her bedroom window, and heard him screaming as the police dragged him into a transport van. “We got this so-called black mayor, but she don’t care nothing about us,” Ms. Mobley said as Mr. Batts pulled up in the neighborhood in a black SUV just before noon on Tuesday. “They don’t come around here. Just because we’re poor, we don’t need to be treated like this.”

Because there are no national statistics on police-involved killings, it is impossible to say whether their numbers are increasing. But the growing prevalence of cellphone and police video, coupled with heightened scrutiny by the news media and the public after Ferguson, has focused intense attention on such cases, especially when officers are white and victims are black.

The police here did not release the racial breakdown of the six suspended officers. Now the Justice Department will look into whether they violated Mr. Gray’s civil rights. Such inquiries are not unusual; in Ferguson, the department did not find Mr. Brown’s rights were violated. However, a second broader Justice Department review of the Ferguson Police Department resulted in a scathing report detailing abusive and discriminatory practices by the city’s law enforcement system.

In Baltimore, police-community tensions date at least to 2005, when the Police Department, following a practice known as “zero-tolerance policing” made more than 100,000 arrests in a heavily African-American city of then roughly 640,000 people.

In 2006, the N.A.A.C.P. and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the city, alleging a broad pattern of abuse in which people were routinely arrested without probable cause. The city settled in 2010 for $870,000, agreed to retrain officers and publicly rejected “zero-tolerance policing.” Ms. Rawlings-Blake became mayor that year.

In 2012 she brought in Mr. Batts, who had run the police department in Oakland, Calif. In 2013, he proposed that police officers wear body cameras to capture encounters like the one that injured Mr. Gray; plans are now in the works for a pilot project.

Ms. Rawlings-Blake has also eliminated a police unit that had a reputation for treating suspects harshly. Last year, she and Mr. Batts asked the Justice Department to investigate after The Baltimore Sun reported that taxpayers had paid nearly $6 million since 2011 in judgments or settlements in 102 lawsuits alleging police misconduct. That investigation is ongoing.

William Murphy Jr., the lawyer for the Gray family, said Tuesday in an interview that “the commissioner’s heart is in the right place,” and that the mayor — whose father, Pete Rawlings, was a civil rights advocate and powerful Maryland politician — “understands police brutality and the extent to which it has a cancerous effect on our society.”

But Mr. Murphy said they had inherited “a dysfunctional department” whose officers “had no probable cause” to arrest Mr. Gray, who was stopped early on the morning of April 12 after a police lieutenant made eye contact with him and he ran away. That lieutenant was one of the six officers who were suspended.

“He was running while black,” Mr. Murphy said of Mr. Gray, “and that’s not a crime.”

At a news conference Monday, Deputy Police Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said Mr. Gray “gave up without the use of force.” Mr. Gray, who was apparently asthmatic, then asked for his inhaler, but he did not have one; he was conscious and speaking when he was loaded into the van to be taken to the police station, Mr. Rodriguez said.

In interviews on Tuesday, witnesses gave various accounts. Michelle Gross, who took cellphone video of the arrest, said she saw two officers standing over Mr. Gray as people said: “He’s just lying there? Why don’t you call an ambulance? Why don’t you get him some help?”

Another witness, Kiona Mack, who said she took the cellphone video that showed Mr. Gray being dragged into the van, said she saw officers “sitting on his back, and having his leg twisted.”

Members of Mr. Gray’s family have said he suffered three fractured vertebrae in his neck and that his larynx was crushed, according to The Baltimore Sun; Mr. Murphy, the lawyer, said Mr. Gray’s spinal cord was 80 percent severed. Those details have not been confirmed by doctors or authorities, but experts on spinal cord injury said even less obvious neck trauma could be life-threatening.

“It doesn’t necessarily take huge force to fracture or dislocate a vertebra, and have a traumatic compression of the spinal cord,” said Ben A. Barres, professor of neurobiology at the Stanford School of Medicine. “It gets worse very rapidly if it’s not treated.” And, he said, “moving the person, like lifting him into a van, or even the ride in the van, could make the injury much worse.”

The police have said they will complete their inquiry by May 1 and turn it over to the state’s attorney for Maryland, who will determine whether to bring criminal charges. Ms. Rawlings-Blake has said she will also convene an independent commission.

In Mr. Gray’s neighborhood, which is adjacent to a public housing development called the Gilmor Homes, people remembered him Tuesday as a likable young man who sometimes got into trouble with the law — Maryland court records show he had at least two arrests for drug-related charges since December.

Mr. Gray had a twin sister, and a brother who died, friends say, and he also suffered lead poisoning as a child. They are furious about his death, and particularly about police conduct.

“He wasn’t out causing any trouble,” said Roosevelt McNeil, 26, who had known Mr. Gray since Mr. Gray was a child. “He had some arrests, but he wasn’t a big drug dealer or something like that. He was a great guy over all — he didn’t deserve to be handled like that. Why won’t the cops say how they ended up going after him, from that to him having his neck broken?”
 

Jason Grant contributed reporting from Baltimore, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York. Susan Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on April 22, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Another City, Another Death in Public Eye.

Freddie Gray in Baltimore: Another City, Another Death in the Public Eye,
NYT, APRIL 21, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/22/us/another-mans-death-another-round-of-questions-for-the-police-in-baltimore.html

1.5 Million Missing Black Men

APRIL 20, 2015

The New York Times

By JUSTIN WOLFERS,

DAVID LEONHARDT

and KEVIN QUEALY

In New York, almost 120,000 black men between the ages of 25 and 54 are missing from everyday life. In Chicago, 45,000 are, and more than 30,000 are missing in Philadelphia. Across the South — from North Charleston, S.C., through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi and up into Ferguson, Mo. — hundreds of thousands more are missing.

They are missing, largely because of early deaths or because they are behind bars. Remarkably, black women who are 25 to 54 and not in jail outnumber black men in that category by 1.5 million, according to an Upshot analysis. For every 100 black women in this age group living outside of jail, there are only 83 black men. Among whites, the equivalent number is 99, nearly parity.

African-American men have long been more likely to be locked up and more likely to die young, but the scale of the combined toll is nonetheless jarring. It is a measure of the deep disparities that continue to afflict black men — disparities being debated after a recent spate of killings by the police — and the gender gap is itself a further cause of social ills, leaving many communities without enough men to be fathers and husbands.

Perhaps the starkest description of the situation is this: More than one out of every six black men who today should be between 25 and 54 years old have disappeared from daily life.

“The numbers are staggering,” said Becky Pettit, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas.

And what is the city with at least 10,000 black residents that has the single largest proportion of missing black men? Ferguson, Mo., where a fatal police shooting last year led to nationwide protests and a Justice Department investigation that found widespread discrimination against black residents. Ferguson has 60 men for every 100 black women in the age group, Stephen Bronars, an economist, has noted.

The gap in North Charleston, site of a police shooting this month, is also considerably more severe than the nationwide average, as is the gap in neighboring Charleston. Nationwide, the largest proportions of missing men generally can be found in the South, although there are also many similar areas across the Midwest and in many big Northeastern cities. The gaps tend to be smallest in the West.

Incarceration and early deaths are the overwhelming drivers of the gap. Of the 1.5 million missing black men from 25 to 54 — which demographers call the prime-age years — higher imprisonment rates account for almost 600,000. Almost 1 in 12 black men in this age group are behind bars, compared with 1 in 60 nonblack men in the age group, 1 in 200 black women and 1 in 500 nonblack women.

Higher mortality is the other main cause. About 900,000 fewer prime-age black men than women live in the United States, according to the census. It’s impossible to know precisely how much of the difference is the result of mortality, but it appears to account for a big part. Homicide, the leading cause of death for young African-American men, plays a large role, and they also die from heart disease, respiratory disease and accidents more often than other demographic groups, including black women.

Several other factors — including military deployment overseas and the gender breakdown of black immigrants — each play only a minor role, census data indicates.

The gender gap does not exist in childhood: There are roughly as many African-American boys as girls. But an imbalance begins to appear among teenagers, continues to widen through the 20s and peaks in the 30s. It persists through adulthood.

The disappearance of these men has far-reaching implications. Their absence disrupts family formation, leading both to lower marriage rates and higher rates of childbirth outside marriage, as research by Kerwin Charles, an economist at the University of Chicago, with Ming-Ching Luoh, has shown.

The black women left behind find that potential partners of the same race are scarce, while men, who face an abundant supply of potential mates, don’t need to compete as hard to find one. As a result, Mr. Charles said, “men seem less likely to commit to romantic relationships, or to work hard to maintain them.”

The imbalance has also forced women to rely on themselves — often alone — to support a household. In those states hit hardest by the high incarceration rates, African-American women have become more likely to work and more likely to pursue their education further than they are elsewhere.

The missing-men phenomenon began growing in the middle decades of the 20th century, and each government census over the past 50 years has recorded at least 120 prime-age black women outside of jail for every 100 black men. But the nature of the gap has changed in recent years.

Since the 1990s, death rates for young black men have dropped more than rates for other groups, notes Robert N. Anderson, the chief of mortality statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Both homicides and H.I.V.-related deaths, which disproportionately afflict black men, have dropped. Yet the prison population has soared since 1980. In many communities, rising numbers of black men spared an early death have been offset by rising numbers behind bars.

It does appear as if the number of missing black men is on the cusp of declining, albeit slowly. Death rates are continuing to fall, while the number of people in prisons — although still vastly higher than in other countries — has also fallen slightly over the last five years.

But the missing-men phenomenon will not disappear anytime soon. There are more missing African-American men nationwide than there are African-American men residing in all of New York City — or more than in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, Washington and Boston, combined.

1.5 Million Missing Black Men,
NYT, APRIL 20, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing-black-men.html

A Police Shot

to a Boy’s Back in Queens,

Echoing Since 1973

APRIL 16, 2015

The New York Times

It was 1973, long before anyone could imagine hashtag declarations of solidarity and protest, the kind of message to the world that today might read, #IamCliffordGloverInTheFourthGrade.

No one could pull out a phone to make a video of Clifford Glover, a 10-year-old running from a plainclothes police officer with a gun who had just jumped out of a white Buick Skylark in Jamaica, Queens, on a spring morning in 1973.

“I am sure a camera would have helped, but the ballistics were clear,” Albert Gaudelli, a former Queens prosecutor, said this week. “The bullet entered his lower back and came out at the top of his chest. He was shot T-square in the back, with his body leaning forward. He was running away.”

That bullet killed Clifford Glover. Its trajectory — through a family, a neighborhood, a generation — can be traced to this day, in injuries that never healed, in a story with no final word. When a black man named Walter Scott was shot by a white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., on April 4, a cellphone video made by a passer-by showed that Mr. Scott was also running away when he was killed and that he was not, as the officer claimed, carrying a police Taser.

“With all this killing and stuff,” said Pauline Armstead, a sister of the dead boy, “they need to go back to Cliffie Glover.”

Clifford, a black boy, had been shot by Officer Thomas Shea, a white man, who said he had tried to question him and his stepfather because they fit the descriptions of cab robbers. They ran. The officer said he fired when Clifford, in flight, pointed a gun at him, which the mortally injured boy had then managed to toss or hand to his stepfather.

In the hours and days that followed the shooting, armies of investigators scoured the streets and sewers, pored over court records and arrived, without warrants, to search the homes of Clifford’s family and relatives.

“Guys were trying to help Shea, and coming up with all kinds of stuff,” said Mr. Gaudelli, who was the chief homicide prosecutor in Queens at the time. “Someone showed up with a starter’s pistol, but as soon as you pressed them on it, they folded. There was no gun.”

People in Jamaica rose in protest; the streets were blocked with heavy construction equipment owned by a black contractor. Mr. Shea became the first police officer in nearly 50 years to be charged with committing murder while on duty.

“Shea says that the kid turned and appeared to have a gun,” Mr. Gaudelli said. “That’s what got him indicted: The ballistics made Shea a liar.”

But not, apparently, a murderer, at least in the eyes of the jury of 11 white men and one black woman who found him not guilty. Afterward, many of the jurors joined Mr. Shea and his lawyers at a Queens Boulevard restaurant to celebrate. They told reporters it was possible Mr. Shea had been telling the truth about seeing a gun.

That same day, word of the verdict reached a baseball field on the grounds of the South Jamaica Houses, known locally as the 40 Projects. Eric Adams, who was then a 13-year-old from the neighborhood, was waiting to bat.

“We were playing a Long Island team that happened to be all white,” said Mr. Adams, who became a police officer and is now the Brooklyn borough president. “When the news came out, about 200 people emerged on the field. They just took the baseball bats and started beating the white players, chanting, ‘Shea got away.’ ”

Later, Mr. Shea would be fired despite a rally by police officers and the pleas of his lawyer, Jacob Evseroff, who said his client was needed on the force “to protect us from the animals who roam the streets of New York.”

The Long Island baseball team had come to Queens as part of “an interracial, inter-neighborhood thing,” Mr. Adams said. “It was their first visit.” The Jamaica team tried to stop the assault but could not. “That was all the outrage,” he said, adding that “because of what happened, a lot of our guys quit the team, never played baseball again.”

For his generation of black boys and girls, Mr. Adams said, the verdict “brought a lot of despair.”

The year after Clifford Glover died, the number of shots fired by officers declined by nearly half. (In 2013, the number of shots fired was 248, the fewest since the Police Department began keeping detailed records in 1971; at the peak, in 1972, officers fired 2,510 bullets.)

Because Mr. Shea had spoken freely with his superiors, the largest police union began a campaign urging its members not to talk after a shooting until a union lawyer had arrived.

For Clifford’s family, his death changed everything.

“They wrote that we were poor,” Darlene Armstead, a younger sister, said this week. As she and three other siblings, Kenneth, Pauline and Patricia Armstead, described the household this week, the family may not have had much money, but before Clifford’s killing, it was sound.

Darlene’s father, Add Armstead, who was Clifford’s stepfather, went to work every morning at a junkyard.

The family had dinner each night at the same time, around one table, Ms. Armstead said, then watched cowboy shows on television. On summer weekends, neighborhood children feasted in the backyard on watermelon laid out on a door, covered by a sheet, that rested on two clean garbage cans. Add Armstead and his brothers enjoyed cigars and burgers.

“My father taught us structure,” Darlene Armstead said.

She had to make beds. One brother had to clean the yard and bring out the garbage. Clifford, a fourth grader at Public School 40, went with his stepfather on weekends to the junkyard, carrying his own little wrench.

On the morning of April 28, 1973, a Saturday, Add Armstead woke Clifford before dawn so they could be at the yard to move cranes into place for a delivery. They walked a few blocks along New York Boulevard — known today as Guy R. Brewer Boulevard — when an unmarked car pulled alongside them. Mr. Armstead, carrying wages that he had been paid the day before, said he and Clifford ran, afraid that they were going to be robbed. Hearing shots, he flagged down a patrol car, not realizing that Clifford had been felled.

Mr. Shea testified that he did not realize that Clifford, who stood just five feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds, was a child. After the shooting, prosecutors said, Mr. Shea’s partner, Walter Scott, was recorded on a radio transmission saying, “Die, you little,” adding an expletive. Mr. Scott — who by coincidence has the same name as the man killed in North Charleston — denied it was his voice.

Clifford’s death sent his mother, Eloise Glover, into a tailspin.

“My mother turned on my father — ‘Did you have a gun, they said you had a gun,’ ” Darlene Armstead said. “It caused them to break up. My mother lost her mind.”

The family received a settlement from New York City that, in the memory of the children, came to about $50,000, most of which the mother lent to local churches but never got back.

“My mother didn’t want no one to know when she going outside,” Ms. Armstead said. “She always used the back door.”

Ms. Armstead recalled sleeping nights on chairs in hospital emergency rooms while her mother was being treated, and living off restaurant handouts. “She was going to pay this guy to board up the house and she would pay him to bring the food to us,” she said.

The children went to foster care and group homes. One brother was in a psychiatric institution for about 10 years. Her mother, who had diabetes, died in 1990 at age 54.

Add Armstead died in 2005, at 83. “They put guns on him; they said he had guns at work, at home,” Kenneth Armstead said. “To demonize him would help Shea’s story.”

Mr. Shea, who moved out of the state after his marriage broke up, could not be reached. “I’ve lost it all,” he told the author Thomas Hauser, whose 1980 book, “The Trial of Patrolman Thomas Shea,” is a comprehensive account of the episode.

The defense lawyer, Mr. Evseroff, said a video would have changed nothing. “The case was resolved as a result of a trial,” he said.

For Mr. Adams, the quick termination of the South Carolina police officer in the shooting this month of Walter Scott was a positive step.

“That mayor said: ‘You know what? It has just gone too far,’ ” Mr. Adams said. “The pathway of Shea’s bullet physically stopped when it hit Clifford Glover, but the emotional pathway probably still continues to this day.”

A Police Shot to a Boy’s Back in Queens, Echoing Since 1973,
NYT, APRIL 16, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/nyregion/
fired-at-queens-boy-fatal-1973-police-shot-still-reverberates.html

The Walter Scott Murder

 

APRIL 8, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The horrifying video of a white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., shooting and killing an unarmed black man — while the man is running away — may still come as a shock to many Americans. But this heinous act, which the officer tried to explain away by claiming that he feared for his life, strikes a familiar chord in communities of color all across the United States.

The case underscores two problems that have become increasingly clear since the civic discord that erupted last year after the police killed black citizens in New York, Cleveland and Ferguson, Mo. The first, most pressing problem is that poorly trained and poorly supervised officers often use deadly force unnecessarily, particularly against minority citizens. The second is that the police get away with unjustly maiming or killing people by lying about the circumstances that prompted them to use force.

The shooting death of Walter Scott on Saturday would have passed into the annals of history unremarked upon had a bystander not used a cellphone to document what happened after Mr. Scott encountered the police officer, Michael Slager, after a routine traffic stop.

Mr. Slager subsequently reported by radio that he had shot Mr. Scott after Mr. Scott wrestled away his electronic stun gun. The video, provided to The New York Times by the Scott family’s lawyer, shows a different story. The video begins in the vacant lot, apparently moments after Officer Slager fired his stun weapon at Mr. Scott. The two men tussle, an object that may have been the stun gun falls to the ground and then Mr. Scott turns to run away. He appears to be 15 feet to 20 feet away and fleeing when the officer fires eight times. Later in the video, the officer runs back toward the place where the initial scuffle occurred and picks up something from the ground and drops it near Mr. Scott’s body.

As The Times noted on Tuesday, police reports say that officers performed CPR and delivered first aid to Mr. Scott. But the video suggests that they were in no rush to help. For several minutes after the shooting, the mortally wounded man remained face down with his hands cuffed behind his back. A second officer arrives, puts on medical gloves and attends to Mr. Scott but is not shown performing CPR. As sirens are heard, a third officer arrives, apparently with a medical kit, but he also is not seen performing CPR. Stunned by Mr. Scott’s death, a brother is left to ask: “How do you lose your life at a traffic stop?”

Mr. Slager was charged with murder on Tuesday and subsequently fired by the North Charleston Police Department. The swiftness of the charge was encouraging. The F.B.I. and the Justice Department, which has opened several civil rights investigations into police departments under Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., is also investigating. On its face, the officer’s conduct seems inconsistent with rulings by the Supreme Court, which has held that officers can use deadly force against a fleeing suspect only when there is probable cause that the suspect “poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”

Police departments all over the country clearly need to do a better job of training on how to de-escalate encounters with citizens and explaining when and how deadly force can be used. To get a handle on this problem, Congress must compel local police departments to report to the Justice Department all instances in which officers are fired upon or fire their own weapons at citizens. During the 1990s, Congress enacted legislation that was intended to aid the collection of data on officer-involved shootings. But many local governments do not provide the data because reporting it is optional. Mr. Holder was on the mark in January when he described this state of affairs as “unacceptable.”

Better tracking of shooting data is, of course, important. But states and local governments need to understand that the growing outrage over wrongful death cases, like the one in North Charleston, undermines trust in law enforcement and presents a clear danger to the civic fabric. The country needs to confront this issue directly and get this problem under control.
 

A version of this editorial appears in print on April 9, 2015, on page A28 of the New York edition with the headline: The Walter Scott Murder.

The Walter Scott Murder, NYT, APRIL 8, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/opinion/the-walter-scott-murder.html

Video of Walter Scott Shooting

Reignites Debate on Police Tactics

 

APRIL 8, 2015

The New York Times

By MATT APUZZO

and TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

WASHINGTON — Nothing has done more to fuel the national debate over police tactics than the dramatic, sometimes grisly videos: A man gasping “I can’t breathe” through a police chokehold on Staten Island, a 12-year-old boy shot dead in a park in Cleveland. And now, perhaps the starkest video yet, showing a South Carolina police officer shooting a fleeing man in the back.

The videos have spurred calls from statehouses to the White House for more officers to attach cameras to their uniforms. While cameras frequently exonerate officers in shootings, the recent spate of videos has raised uncomfortable questions about how much the American criminal justice system can rely on the accounts of police officers when the cameras are not rolling.

“Everyone in this business knows that cops have been given the benefit of the doubt,” said Hugh F. Keefe, a Connecticut lawyer who has defended several police officers accused of misconduct. “They’re always assumed to be telling the truth, unless there’s tangible evidence otherwise.”

In the fatal shooting in South Carolina, the most compelling evidence, provided by a bystander with a camera phone, was shaky and at times unfocused. But the video clearly showed the officer, Michael T. Slager, firing eight times as Walter L. Scott, 50, tried to flee after a traffic stop. The officer had said that he fired amid a scuffle, when Mr. Scott seized his stun gun and the officer feared for his safety.

“Without the video, we wouldn’t know what we know,” said Matthew R. Rabon, a college student who joined a demonstration on Wednesday outside City Hall in North Charleston, S.C., where Officer Slager now faces a murder charge. “And what we know here is really significant: It’s the difference between an officer doing his job and an officer killing a man in cold blood.”

Many cities have installed cameras in their police cruisers for years, and some — an estimated 25 percent of departments that responded to a 2013 survey — require so-called body cameras. Those numbers are dwarfed by the millions of Americans who carry camera-equipped cellphones. As cameras become ubiquitous, the digital video is likely to become a go-to source of impartial evidence in much the same way that DNA did in the 1990s.

Video evidence is not new, of course; the tape of officers beating Rodney King in 1991 helped ignite the Los Angeles riots after the officers were acquitted. When departments began installing dashboard cameras in the 1990s, many officers opposed it. But they quickly concluded that the recordings often cleared them of wrongdoing after citizen complaints. “For the most part, unless you are behaving badly, those things are going to back you up,” said David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who studies police practices.

Many officers similarly opposed efforts to videotape confessions, but that resistance has been fading in recent years. Police organizations have endorsed the practice, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. recently required the F.B.I. to start taping interviews.

But cellphone videos taken by bystanders tend to make many police officers uncomfortable, because they have no control over the setting and often are not even aware they are being filmed until later. Though the courts have held that people have a constitutional right to record the police, those who do are frequently challenged by officers.

While investigating the Police Department in Ferguson, Mo., after a deadly police shooting last summer, the Justice Department found that officers there were enraged to discover people taping them.

As an example, a Justice Department report cited a traffic stop in which a Ferguson officer told the driver’s 16-year-old son not to videotape him. The confrontation escalated, the officer wrestled the phone away from the teenager, and everyone in the car was arrested “under disputed circumstances that could have been clarified by a video recording,” the report said.

Cellphone videos have captured police officers pushing and slapping a homeless man in Florida and shooting a man who threw rocks at officers in Washington State. In February, two Pelham, N.Y., officers retired after a video contradicted their account of an arrest of a black man.

“The ability to record has gotten so prevalent that police can no longer count on their account to be the truth,” Mr. Harris, the Pittsburgh professor, said.

The increase in cellphone cameras is one reason many police unions do not oppose requirements that officers carry body cameras, said Chuck Wexler, the head of the Police Executive Research Forum in Washington. “The big push for body cameras has been driven in part by the sense that citizens have their phones and can record, and it was only part of the whole story,” he said.

“We are very used to being videotaped,” said Lt. Mark Wood, the executive officer in the operations division of the Indianapolis Police Department, where the department is testing body cameras. “We are under the impression that we are always being videotaped, because we probably are.”

Data is still spotty, but an early study in Rialto, Calif., suggests that when officers carry body cameras, they are less likely to use force. Similar studies in Mesa, Ariz., and in Britain showed that citizen complaints also decreased.

North Charleston, a city of about 100,000 people, has ordered about 100 body cameras, but its officers are not yet using them. Mayor R. Keith Summey said Wednesday that he had ordered 150 more “so that every officer that’s on the street in uniform will have a body camera.”

Marlon E. Kimpson, a South Carolina state senator who represents North Charleston and helped push for financing for the cameras, said he hoped they would help calm tensions between residents and officers. He said he believed a body camera would have prevented Saturday’s shooting. “I don’t believe the officer would have behaved the way he did had he been wearing a body camera,” he said.

Even without the video, it is likely that other forensic evidence would have raised questions about Officer Slager’s account. The coroner found that Mr. Scott was shot several times in the back, and forensic examiners can typically tell whether someone was shot at close range in a scuffle or from a distance. Nevertheless, the dramatic video pushed the shooting into the national spotlight. Eddie Driggers, the North Charleston police chief, told reporters Wednesday that he was sickened by the video.

Chris Fialko, a criminal defense lawyer in Charlotte, N.C., said that while the ubiquity of video had changed the dynamic between the police and citizens, jurors still viewed police officers as credible, even when faced with incriminating video.

Mr. Fialko said he once represented an officer in a case where a dashboard camera had captured the officer slamming a man, who appeared to offer no resistance, to the ground. The officer testified in his own defense.

“Video can lie,” Mr. Fialko recalled saying in his closing argument. “The cop is the one out there, hearing what the guy is saying and smelling the guy and seeing his sweat, and he is acting based on years of experience.”

The jury, Mr. Fialko said, acquitted the officer.

Correction: April 8, 2015

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a college student who attended a demonstration on Wednesday. He is Matthew R. Rabon, not Rabo.

Matt Apuzzo reported from Washington, and Timothy Williams from New York. Alan Blinder contributed reporting from Charleston, S.C.

A version of this article appears in print on April 9, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: CITIZENS’ VIDEOS RAISE QUESTIONS ON POLICE CLAIMS.

Video of Walter Scott Shooting Reignites Debate on Police Tactics,
NYT, APRIL 8, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/us/video-of-fatal-shooting-of-walter-scott-reignites-debate-on-police-use-of-force.html

In South Carolina,

Shot in the Back as He Ran

APRIL 8, 2015

The New York Times

 The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Charles M. Blow

I am truly weary, deep in my bones, of writing these columns about the killings of unarmed people of color by the police. Indeed, you may be weary of reading them. Still, our weariness is but a dim shadow that falls near the darkness of despair that a family is thrust into when a child or parent or sibling is lost, and that family must wonder if the use of deadly force was appropriate and whether justice will be served.

And so, we can’t stop focusing on these cases until there are no more cases on which to focus.

Which brings me to the latest case, a truly chilling one: A video shows an apparently unarmed 50-year-old black man, Walter L. Scott, running away from an officer after an incident during a traffic stop in North Charleston, S.C.

The officer, Michael T. Slager, fires his weapon eight times, striking Scott in the back, upper buttocks and ear.

According to The New York Times:

“Moments after the struggle, Officer Slager reported on his radio: ‘Shots fired and the subject is down. He took my Taser,’ according to police reports.”

But The Times continues:

“Something — it is not clear whether it is the stun gun — is either tossed or knocked to the ground behind the two men, and Officer Slager draws his gun, the video shows. When the officer fires, Mr. Scott appears to be 15 to 20 feet away and fleeing. He falls after the last of eight shots.

“The officer then runs back toward where the initial scuffle occurred and picks something up off the ground. Moments later, he drops an object near Mr. Scott’s body, the video shows.”

In fact, the video appears to dispute much of what the police reports claim.

Scott, of course, dies of his injuries.

After the video surfaces, the officer is charged with murder and fired from the police force. In a news conference, the mayor of the city, Keith Summey, says of the incident: “When you’re wrong, you’re wrong. And if you make a bad decision, don’t care if you’re behind the shield or just a citizen on the street, you have to live by that decision.”

But even the phrase “bad decision” seems to diminish the severity of what has happened. A life has been taken. And, if the video shows what it appears to show, there may have been some attempts by the officer to “misrepresent the truth,” a phrase that one could also argue may diminish the severity of what is alleged to have happened.

This case is yet another in a horrifyingly familiar succession of cases that have elevated the issue of use of force, particularly deadly force, by officers against people of color and inflamed the conversation that surrounds it.

And it further erodes an already tenuous trust by people of color in the police as an institution. CBS News polling has shown that a vast majority of blacks believe that the police are more likely to use deadly force against a black person than a white person (zero percent believe the inverse.) This is not good for the proper function of a civil society.

As a Sentencing Project report put it last year: “Racial minorities’ perceptions of unfairness in the criminal justice system have dampened cooperation with police work and impeded criminal trials.”

And the police are needed in society, so if you don’t trust them, whom do you call when help is truly needed?

This case has also refocused attention on the power of video evidence and is likely to redouble calls for the universal implementation of police body cameras (the video in this case came from a witness). What would have happened if video of this incident had not surfaced? Would the officer’s version of events have stood? How many such cases must there be where there is no video?

But I would argue that the issue we are facing in these cases is not one of equipment, or even policy, but culture.

I would submit that cameras would have an impact on policy and culture, but that a change in culture must be bigger than both. It must start with “good cops” no longer countenancing the behavior of “bad cops.” It will start with those good cops publicly and vociferously chastising and condemning their brethren when they are wrong. Their silence has never been — and is certainly no longer — suitable. We must hear from them, not necessarily from the rank-and-file but from those higher up the ladder.

One of the most disturbing features of the Department of Justice’s report on the killing of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson was the number of witnesses who said that they were afraid to come forward because their version of events contradicted what they saw as community consensus.

But isn’t the unwillingness, or even fear, of “good cops” to more forcefully condemn bad behavior just the same glove turned inside out?

As Radley Balko wrote in the February 2011 issue of Reason magazine, “For all the concern about the ‘Stop Snitchin’  message within the hip-hop community, police have engaged in a far more impactful and pernicious Stop Snitchin’ campaign of their own. It’s called the Blue Wall of Silence.”

This case also highlights once again the issue of police forces not being representative of the communities they serve. As The Times pointed out:

“North Charleston is South Carolina’s third-largest city, with a population of about 100,000. African-Americans make up about 47 percent of residents, and whites account for about 37 percent. The Police Department is about 80 percent white, according to data collected by the Justice Department in 2007, the most recent period available.”

And yet there is a vicious cycle of mistrust — re-enforced by cases like this — that helps to make diversifying police forces difficult. As the International Business Times put it in August, law enforcement agencies “are often hard pressed to find black applicants. Recruiters want to fill their ranks with officers of all backgrounds, experts say, but cultural biases put them at a disadvantage.”

And lastly, there remains a disturbing desire to find perfection in a case, to find one devoid of ambiguity, as if police interactions with the public are not often complicated affairs in which many judgments are made in quick order by all involved and in which a tremendous amount of discretion is allowed to be exercised.

Tuesday on CNN, the North Charleston police chief, Eddie Driggers, was asked the question that is always circling cases like this like a condor: whether he thought race played a role in what happened. His was a diplomatic and humane response: “I want to believe in my heart of hearts that it was a tragic set of events after a traffic stop.” He continued, “I always look for the good in folks, and so I would hope that nobody would ever do something like that.”

I, too, would hope that nobody would ever do something like that, but it seems to me that the end of the line has come for hoping alone. Now is the time for fundamental change: not just in one particular case or with one particular officer, but also systemically. (The President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing has already recommended some policy changes.)

And now is the time for not only considering the interplay of race and power in these cases, but also the ability to register and respect humanity itself. That requires a change of culture.

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In South Carolina, Shot in the Back as He Ran, APRIL 8, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/opinion/charles-blow-walter-scott-video-south-carolina-shooting-michael-slager.html

South Carolina Officer

Is Charged With Murder

in Black Man’s Death

APRIL 7, 2015

The New York Times

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

and MATT APUZZO

WASHINGTON — A white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., was charged with murder on Tuesday after a video surfaced showing him shooting in the back and killing an apparently unarmed black man while the man ran away.

The officer, Michael T. Slager, 33, said he had feared for his life because the man had taken his stun gun in a scuffle after a traffic stop on Saturday. A video, however, shows the officer firing eight times as the man, Walter L. Scott, 50, fled. The North Charleston mayor announced the state charges at a news conference Tuesday evening.

The shooting came on the heels of high-profile instances of police officers’ using lethal force in New York, Cleveland, Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere. The deaths have set off a national debate over whether the police are too quick to use force, particularly in cases involving black men.

A White House task force has recommended a host of changes to the nation’s police policies, and President Obama sent Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to cities around the country to try to improve police relations with minority neighborhoods.

North Charleston is South Carolina’s third-largest city, with a population of about 100,000. African-Americans make up about 47 percent of residents, and whites account for about 37 percent. The Police Department is about 80 percent white, according to data collected by the Justice Department in 2007, the most recent period available.

“When you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” Mayor Keith Summey said during the news conference. “And if you make a bad decision, don’t care if you’re behind the shield or just a citizen on the street, you have to live by that decision.”

The shooting unfolded after Officer Slager stopped the driver of a Mercedes-Benz with a broken taillight, according to police reports. Mr. Scott ran away, and Officer Slager chased him into a grassy lot that abuts a muffler shop. He fired his Taser, an electronic stun gun, but it did not stop Mr. Scott, according to police reports.

Moments after the struggle, Officer Slager reported on his radio: “Shots fired and the subject is down. He took my Taser,” according to police reports.

But the video, which was taken by a bystander and provided to The New York Times by the Scott family’s lawyer, presents a different account. The video begins in the vacant lot, apparently moments after Officer Slager fired his Taser. Wires, which carry the electrical current from the stun gun, appear to be extending from Mr. Scott’s body as the two men tussle and Mr. Scott turns to run.

Something — it is not clear whether it is the stun gun — is either tossed or knocked to the ground behind the two men, and Officer Slager draws his gun, the video shows. When the officer fires, Mr. Scott appears to be 15 to 20 feet away and fleeing. He falls after the last of eight shots.

The officer then runs back toward where the initial scuffle occurred and picks something up off the ground. Moments later, he drops an object near Mr. Scott’s body, the video shows.

The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the state’s criminal investigative body, has begun an inquiry into the shooting. The F.B.I. and the Justice Department, which has opened a string of civil rights investigations into police departments under Mr. Holder, is also investigating.

For several minutes after the shooting, Walter L. Scott remained face down with his hands cuffed behind his back.
The Supreme Court has held that an officer may use deadly force against a fleeing suspect only when there is probable cause that the suspect “poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”

Officer Slager served in the Coast Guard before joining the force five years ago, his lawyer said. The police chief of North Charleston did not return repeated calls. Because police departments are not required to release data on how often officers use force, it was not immediately clear how often police shootings occurred in North Charleston, a working-class community adjacent to the tourist destination of Charleston.

Mr. Scott had been arrested about 10 times, mostly for failing to pay child support or show up for court hearings, according to The Post and Courier newspaper of Charleston. He was arrested in 1987 on an assault and battery charge and convicted in 1991 of possession of a bludgeon, the newspaper reported. Mr. Scott’s brother, Anthony, said he believed Mr. Scott had fled from the police on Saturday because he owed child support.

“He has four children; he doesn’t have some type of big violent past or arrest record,” said Chris Stewart, a lawyer for Mr. Scott’s family. “He had a job; he was engaged. He had back child support and didn’t want to go to jail for back child support.”

Mr. Stewart said the coroner had told him that Mr. Scott was struck five times — three times in the back, once in the upper buttocks and once in the ear — with at least one bullet entering his heart. It is not clear whether Mr. Scott died immediately. (The coroner’s office declined to make the report available to The Times.)

Police reports say that officers performed CPR and delivered first aid to Mr. Scott. The video shows that for several minutes after the shooting, Mr. Scott remained face down with his hands cuffed behind his back. A second officer arrives, puts on blue medical gloves and attends to Mr. Scott, but is not shown performing CPR. As sirens wail in the background, a third officer later arrives, apparently with a medical kit, but is also not seen performing CPR.

The debate over police use of force has been propelled in part by videos like the one in South Carolina. In January, prosecutors in Albuquerque charged two police officers with murder for shooting a homeless man in a confrontation that was captured by an officer’s body camera. Federal prosecutors are investigating the death of Eric Garner, who died last year in Staten Island after a police officer put him in a chokehold, an episode that a bystander captured on video. A video taken in Cleveland shows the police shooting a 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, who was carrying a fake gun in a park. A White House policing panel recommended that police departments put more video cameras on their officers.

Mr. Scott’s brother said his mother had called him on Saturday, telling him that his brother had been shot by a Taser after a traffic stop. “You may need to go over there and see what’s going on,” he said his mother told him. When he arrived at the scene of the shooting, officers told him that his brother was dead, but he said they had no explanation for why. “This just doesn’t sound right,” he said in an interview. “How do you lose your life at a traffic stop?”

Anthony Scott said he last saw his brother three weeks ago at a family oyster roast. “We hadn’t hung out like that in such a long time,” Mr. Scott said. “He kept on saying over and over again how great it was.”

At the roast, Mr. Scott got to do two of the things he enjoyed most: tell jokes and dance. When one of Mr. Scott’s favorite songs was played, he got excited. “He jumped up and said, ‘That’s my song,’ and he danced like never before,” his brother said.
 

Ben Rothenberg contributed reporting from North Charleston, S.C. Kitty Bennett and Sarah Cohen contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on April 8, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Officer Is Charged With Murder of a Black Man Shot in the Back.

South Carolina Officer Is Charged With Murder in Black Man’s Death,
NYT, APRIL 7, 2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/us/south-carolina-officer-is-charged-with-murder-in-black-mans-death.html

Flash Point Ferguson

MARCH 16, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Charles M. Blow

Ferguson, Mo., is once again a flash point in this nation’s struggle to come to grips with itself, as its citizens are embroiled in a profound conversation about bias, policing, the criminal justice system, civil rights and social justice.

The Department of Justice has released its scathing report documenting widespread racial targeting of citizens with fine and tickets. The city manager, the police chief and a judge cited in the report have stepped down. Cases will now be adjudicated outside the corrupt system described in the report. According to an article last week in The Times:

“The Missouri Supreme Court, citing the need for ‘extraordinary action’ to restore trust in Ferguson’s court system after the Department of Justice blasted it for routinely violating constitutional rights, assigned a state appeals court judge on Monday to oversee all municipal cases.”

All of it has caused the nation’s attention to once again turn to this small town and the sustained protests there.

Sometimes we understandably want justice to come quickly — but justice, if it is to be permanent, often inches forward. For those in the grip of injustice, toiling in the shadow of oppression, the wait can be nearly unbearable. But that hasn’t necessarily happened in this case.

It could be argued that the protest movement born in Ferguson in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson — a movement that quickly expanded from a focus on a single case to a sprawling indictment of the system — has been one of the most successful in recent history, both in terms of the speed at which it has garnered results and the breadth of those results.

And yet, that progress has been tarnished by flashes of violence.

That doesn’t have to be the case. There is a moral continuity that bridges and binds all people of good conscience.

There is universal condemnation of predation. No one should ever be targeted for harm. No cause can turn wrong to right. Violence can never be liberated from its inherent abhorrence.

As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in the 1967 book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”:

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.” King continued, “Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: Only love can do that.”

Violence is weakness masquerading as strength. It is a crude statement of depravity voiced by the unethical and impolitic. It reduces humanity rather than lifts it.

The violent must find no asylum in the assembly of the righteous. We can and must stand up to injustice and against vigilante justice simultaneously.

(Authorities announced Sunday that an arrest had been made in the shootings. The prosecutor insisted the suspect had been a “demonstrator” — a fact that protest leaders denied — although the prosecutor did acknowledge that the shooter said he had a dispute with people in front of the police department “which had nothing to do with the demonstrations that were going on.”)

To those peaceful protesters who eschew violence as much as the rest of us, we must say: Hold tight. Be encouraged, steadfast and unmovable. We know the fatigue that builds from feeling that one must always fight. But your efforts are not in vain.

This is your moment. History has heard you, and justice is coming to meet you.

And we can do as a nation what those protesters have shown us can be done. We can elevate dialogue so that racial realities — both interpersonal and structural — can be acknowledged and remedies developed and implemented.

We can register indignation while preserving civility.

On “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” President Obama put it this way:

“What had been happening in Ferguson was oppressive and objectionable and was worthy of protest. But there was no excuse for criminal acts. And whoever fired those shots shouldn’t detract from the issue — they’re criminals. They need to be arrested. And then what we need to do is to make sure that like-minded, good-spirited people on both sides — law enforcement who have a terrifically tough job and people who understandably don’t want to be stopped and harassed just because of their race — that we’re able to work together to try to come up with some good answers.”

We can honor the lives of police officers — and applaud them when proper service is rendered — and at the same time marvel at the persistence and efficacy of the protesters who have gotten the nation’s attention and gotten results.
 

I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 16, 2015, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Flash Point Ferguson.

Flash Point Ferguson, MARCH 16, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/16/opinion/charles-m-blow-flash-point-ferguson.html

Man, 20, Is Arrested

in the Shooting of 2 Officers in Ferguson

 

MARCH 15, 2015

The New York Times

By MANNY FERNANDEZ

and JOHN ELIGON

FERGUSON, Mo. — A 20-year-old suspect was charged Sunday with shooting two police officers during a protest outside Police Headquarters here Thursday. Law enforcement officials said the man, Jeffrey L. Williams, claimed to have been targeting someone other than the officers and shot them by accident from inside a car.

Mr. Williams was arrested late Saturday and charged with first-degree assault in connection with the shooting, which had ratcheted up tensions between the police and protesters here. With the gunman at large, the officers guarding the police station as demonstrations continued had concerns for their safety, while protesters had criticized police officials for suggesting that the shooting was linked to them.

Discord has been simmering since Aug. 9, when a white police officer, Darren Wilson, fatally shot an unarmed, 18-year-old black man, Michael Brown, in a confrontation in the middle of a street. A grand jury declined to indict Mr. Wilson in November.
 

The arrest seemed to resolve almost none of the tension, and Mr. Williams’s motive was unclear. Prosecutors expressed skepticism at his version of events, but said he had attended the demonstration the evening of the shooting as well as previous rallies. Several protest leaders, however, quickly took to Twitter to deny that Mr. Williams was one of them, or that they had even seen him among the crowd the night of the shooting.

The authorities said Mr. Williams, who was on probation at the time of the shooting for receiving stolen property, admitted his involvement to investigators and acknowledged firing the shots. He told investigators that he had a dispute with some people outside the police station that had nothing to do with the demonstration, officials said.

“It’s possible at this point that he was firing shots at someone other than the police, but struck the police officers,” Robert P. McCulloch, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, said at a news conference Sunday afternoon at the Buzz Westfall Justice Center in Clayton, Mo., the seat of St. Louis County. “He has stated that he may have had a dispute with some other individuals. I’m not sure we completely buy that part of it. But in any event, it’s possible he was firing at some other people.”

Mr. McCulloch added: “We’re not 100 percent sure that there was a dispute. That’s part of the claim right now. It’s possible that there was a dispute. It’s possible that he was targeting police officers. We just have to wait for the investigation to develop.”

By Friday, the investigation had appeared stalled. The break in the case that pointed to Mr. Williams as the primary suspect appeared to come from tips and information provided by members of the public. Investigators recovered a .40-caliber handgun they believed had been used in the shooting. Mr. McCulloch said more arrests were possible.

Ferguson’s mayor, James Knowles III, and City Council members said in a statement that they were grateful to citizens who had provided assistance, and that while they supported peaceful protesting, they would “not allow, nor tolerate, the destructive and violent actions of a few to disrupt our unifying efforts.”

In a statement from Washington, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., whose Justice Department released a scathing report that found widespread misconduct, racial bias and unconstitutional practices by Ferguson’s police department and its municipal courts, praised “the swiftness of this action.”

“This arrest sends a clear message that acts of violence against our law enforcement personnel will never be tolerated,” Mr. Holder said.

At the St. Louis address listed in court documents as Mr. Williams’s residence, no one answered the door of the blue-clapboard house, on a tree-lined street about five miles from the police station. A woman who later entered the house declined to comment. Mr. Williams, who will turn 21 in two weeks, remained in custody; bond was set at $300,000.

DeRay McKesson, who has been participating in and documenting the demonstrations on social media, said that to his knowledge, Mr. Williams was not “a regular member of the protest community in St. Louis.”

Mr. McKesson criticized the way the police handled the investigation, pointing to previous statements made by Chief Jon M. Belmar of the St. Louis County Police Department in which he called the shooting an ambush and said the shooter may have been embedded with the demonstrators. Both of those assertions have been called into question now, Mr. McKesson said.

What Chief Belmar said “was intentionally said to incite and invoke fear,” Mr. McKesson said. “This does not change the momentum of the protesters. This person was not aligned with the protest community and the values within.”

The two officers — one from the county police and the other from the nearby Webster Groves department — were standing shoulder to shoulder outside the police station Thursday shortly after midnight as part of a protective line facing demonstrators across the street. At least three gunshots came from a distance behind the demonstrators, as much as 125 yards away, the authorities said.

Demonstrators had denounced the shooting, but vowed to continue marching and protesting, saying they would not be distracted from seeking justice for Mr. Brown’s killing and for systemic change in Ferguson’s police and court system. Police officials had taken steps after the shooting to reduce the visibility of the officers securing the police station, having them stand behind parked vehicles rather than out in the open. And they had taken a more hands-off approach to the demonstrators, allowing many to occasionally block traffic in front of the police station and declining to arrest those who ignored their orders to move onto the sidewalk.

The two officers, whom the authorities have declined to name, were treated at a hospital and are recuperating at home, according to Chief Belmar. The Webster Groves officer, 32, a seven-year veteran, was shot in the face, the bullet entering under his right eye and becoming lodged behind his ear, officials said. The county officer, 41, a 14-year veteran, was shot in the shoulder, with the bullet coming out of his back.

Manny Fernandez reported from Ferguson, and John Eligon from Kansas City, Mo.

A version of this article appears in print on March 16, 2015, on page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Suspect, 20, Is Arrested in the Shooting of 2 Police Officers in Ferguson.

Man, 20, Is Arrested in the Shooting of 2 Officers in Ferguson,
NYT, MARCH 15, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/16/us/suspect-arrested-in-shooting-of-2-officers-in-ferguson-police-say.html

Manhunt Is Underway

After Police Officers Are Shot in Ferguson

MARCH 12, 2015

The New York Times

By JOHN ELIGON, SHAILA DEWAN

and RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

FERGUSON, Mo. — The police conducted a manhunt in this tense and battered city on Thursday in search of whoever shot two police officers as they worked at a protest after the resignation of the chief.

The shooting just after midnight on Thursday morning, described as “really an ambush” by Chief Jon Belmar of the St. Louis County Police Department, was denounced by all sides in the continuing conflict over law enforcement here after the death, at the hands of the police, of an unarmed black teenager last summer, and the police crackdown on the ensuing protests.

By Thursday night, relative calm had returned to the streets as clergy members and activists gathered for a candlelight prayer vigil that paired condemnations of the officers’ shootings with support for nonviolent protests. About 100 protesters later marched outside the Ferguson Police Department, but by midnight, with a light rain falling, most of the demonstrators had cleared the way, and the streets were largely quiet. The police said no one had been arrested — neither protesters, nor suspects.

Earlier, police SWAT units surrounded a house a few blocks from the scene of the shooting, and officers climbed onto the roof and broke through a vent to gain access. The police took in three people from the house for questioning and released them hours later.

The three, Iresha Turner, who lives at the home, and her friends Martez Little and Lamont Underwood, said they had attended the protest but had nothing to do with the shootings. Ms. Turner and Mr. Underwood said they fled from the protest to Ms. Turner’s house when the shots were fired, and Mr. Little said he came to Mr. Turner’s home later and was also detained.

Ms. Turner said her 6-year-old son had been traumatized by the search and the implication that his mother might have something to do with the crime.

“I have to live here,” said Ms. Turner, who identified herself as a single mother. “I have no help. I’m a good woman.”

Mr. Underwood speculated that someone might have seen him and Ms. Turner speeding away from the protest scene and reported it to the police.

On Thursday, the St. Louis County Police Department and the Missouri State Highway Patrol assumed responsibility for security in Ferguson, just as they did after the unrest following the shooting of the teenager, Michael Brown Jr., by a white police officer, Darren Wilson. A grand jury did not indict the officer, and the Justice Department also declined to bring charges.

The two police officers were shot shortly after midnight during a protest in front of the police station after the chief, Thomas Jackson, announced his resignation. His departure was the most recent in a shake-up of the city’s most senior administrators after a recent Justice Department report that described a city that used its legal system to generate revenue, in the process violating constitutional rights and disproportionately targeting blacks.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. denounced the shootings as “heinous and cowardly attacks.”

“This was not someone trying to bring healing to Ferguson,” Mr. Holder said at a news conference in Washington.

Community organizers extended sympathy to the officers who were shot, while trying to keep the focus on their own longstanding complaints.

“As frequent victims of violence, we certainly understand the pain of these senseless acts,” said the Rev. Traci Blackmon of Christ the King Church of Christ in nearby Florissant.

Gov. Jay Nixon visited, his motorcade rolling past the site of the shootings that he called, in a statement, “cowardly and reprehensible.”

The shootings came at a vulnerable time, just as the city was making “good-faith steps,” as Mr. Holder put it, to restore faith in its criminal justice system. In a statement, the City of Ferguson said it was “diligently working to make systematic changes necessary to instill confidence,” but added, “We cannot continue to move forward under threats of violence and destruction.”

With the issue of police shootings bringing political polarization, Mr. Holder, who has been at the forefront of the effort to bring change to Ferguson’s policing, came in for some criticism.

“There’s an atmosphere of unbalance here,” Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former mayor of New York, said on Fox News, blaming the Justice Department for emphasizing the faults of the Ferguson Police Department without saying that the officer who fatally shot Mr. Brown last August “did exactly what he should do.”

Witnesses and the St. Louis County police chief described the scene after two officers were shot on Thursday during a protest that began only hours after the police chief in Ferguson, Mo., resigned.

The late-night protest on Wednesday started as a celebration of Chief Jackson’s resignation, but also as a call for more action.

“Not just Jackson, we want Knowles, Ferguson has got to go!” the demonstrators yelled in reference to James Knowles III, the mayor.

When the shots echoed through the crisp air, striking the two officers, demonstrators and police officers hit the ground. Many people ran for cover, and police officers clad in riot gear dragged their wounded comrades to safety.

“We’re lucky by God’s grace we didn’t lose two officers last night,” Chief Belmar said at a midmorning news conference. It was clear that the police were the targets, he said.

Based on the sound of the shots and the officers’ wounds, he said, the weapon was a handgun, not a rifle.

The officers who were shot were standing side by side, part of a cordon from multiple police departments, keeping protesters away from the police station. There had been as many as 69 officers in the evening, dwindling to about 50 at the time of the shooting, Chief Belmar said.

One of the wounded officers was from the Webster Groves Police Department. He is 32 and a seven-year veteran of the force. The other was from the St. Louis County Police and is 41 with 14 years’ experience, the county police said. Both were treated at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis.

The younger officer was shot in the cheekbone, just below his right eye, and the bullet lodged behind his right ear, Chief Belmar said. A bullet struck the other officer in the right shoulder and exited his back on the right side. No officers returned fire. The officers were released from a hospital Thursday morning.

Chief Belmar said that people had a right to protest peacefully, but also that “there is an unfortunate association with that gathering” and the shooting.

Witnesses among the demonstrators denied any link to the shootings, saying that they believed the shots originated from the top of a hill about 220 yards directly opposite the station. Chief Belmar did not specify a location but estimated the distance at 125 yards.

“There’s just no way anybody I know did that,” said Bob Hudgins, a protester who is running for City Council. “Nobody’s happy about this today.”

The Brown family, in a statement from its lawyer, denounced “the actions of stand-alone agitators” who tried to derail the protests. “We reject any kind of violence directed toward members of law enforcement,” the statement said. “It cannot and will not be tolerated.”

Chief Belmar said the shooting realized his worst fears over the months of unrest since Mr. Brown’s killing. He drew a parallel to the fatal shooting in December of two New York City police officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, by a man who said he was enraged by killings by the police, including Mr. Brown’s.

“We were very close to having happen what happened to N.Y.P.D.,” Chief Belmar said.
 

John Eligon reported from Ferguson, and Shaila Dewan and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York. Mitch Smith and Jack Healy contributed reporting from Ferguson.

A version of this article appears in print on March 13, 2015, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Manhunt Is Underway After Police Officers Are Shot in Ferguson.

Manhunt Is Underway After Police Officers Are Shot in Ferguson, NYT,
MARCH 12, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/13/us/ferguson-police.html

Race, History, a President, a Bridge

Obama and Selma: The Meaning of ‘Bloody Sunday’

MARCH 8, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

As our van in the presidential motorcade reached the crest of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., and began the descent toward the thousands of waiting faces and waving arms of those who had come to commemorate the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” the gravity of that place seized me, pushing out the breath and rousing the wonder.

The mind imagines the horror of that distant day: the scrum of bodies and the cloud of gas, the coughing and trampling, the screaming and wailing, the batons colliding with bones, the opening of flesh, the running down of blood.

In that moment I understood what was necessary in President Obama’s address: to balance celebration and solemnity, to honor the heroes of the past but also to motivate the activists of the moment, to acknowledge how much work had been done but to remind the nation that that work was not complete.

(I, along with a small group of other journalists, had been invited by the White House to accompany the president to Selma and have a discussion with him during the flight there.)

About an hour north of where the president spoke was Shelby County, whose suit against the Department of Justice the Supreme Court had used to gut the same Voting Rights Act that Bloody Sunday helped to pass.

His speech also came after several shootings of unarmed black men, whose deaths caused national protests and racial soul-searching.

It came on the heels of the Justice Department’s report on Ferguson, Mo., which found pervasive racial bias and an oppressive use of fines primarily against African-Americans.

It came as a CNN/ORC poll found that four out of 10 Americans thought race relations during the Obama presidency had gotten worse, while only 15 percent thought they had gotten better.

The president had to bend the past around so it pointed toward the future. To a large degree, he accomplished that goal. The speech was emotional and evocative. People cheered. Some cried.

And yet there seemed to me something else in the air: a lingering — or gathering — sense of sadness, a frustration born out of perpetual incompletion, an anger engendered by the threat of regression, a pessimism about a present and future riven by worsening racial understanding and interplay.

To truly understand the Bloody Sunday inflection point — and the civil rights movement as a whole — one must appreciate the preceding century.

After the Civil War, blacks were incredibly populous in Southern states. They were close to, or exceeded, half the population in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina.

During Reconstruction, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were ratified, abolishing slavery, granting citizenship and equal protection to former slaves and extending the vote to black men. As a result, “some 2,000 African-Americans held public office, from the local level all the way up to the U.S. Senate,” according to the television channel History.

This was an assault on the traditional holders of power in the South, who responded aggressively. The structure of Jim Crow began to form. The Ku Klux Klan was born, whose tactics would put the current Islamic State to shame.

Then in the early 20th century came the first wave of the Great Migration, in which millions of Southern blacks would decamp for the North, East and West.

This left a smaller black population in Southern states that had developed and perfected a system to keep those who remained suppressed and separate.

Here, the civil rights movement and Bloody Sunday played out.

The movement was about justice and equality, but in a way it was also about power — the renewed fear of diminished power, the threat of expanded power, the longing for denied power.

Now, we must look at the hundred years following the movement to understand that another inflection point is coming, one that again threatens traditional power: the browning of America.

According to the Census Bureau, “The U.S. is projected to become a majority-minority nation for the first time in 2043,” with minorities projected to be 57 percent of the population in 2060.

In response, fear and restrictive laws are creeping back into our culture and our politics — not always explicitly or violently, but in ways whose effects are similarly racially arrayed. Structural inequities — economic, educational — are becoming more rigid, and systemic biases harder to eradicate. But this time the threat isn’t regional and racially binary but national and multifaceted.

So, we must fight our fights anew.

As the president told a crowd in South Carolina on Friday, “Selma is not just about commemorating the past.” He continued, “Selma is now.”

I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytimes.com.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 9, 2015, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Race, History, a President, a Bridge.

Race, History, a President, a Bridge, NYT,
MARCH 8? 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/09/opinion/charles-blow-obama-and-selma-the-meaning-of-bloody-sunday.html

Obama, at Selma Memorial, Says,

‘We Know the March Is Not Yet Over’

 

MARCH 7, 2015

The New York Times

By PETER BAKER

and RICHARD FAUSSET

SELMA, Ala. — As a new generation struggles over race and power in America, President Obama and a host of political figures from both parties came here on Saturday, to the site of one of the most searing days of the civil rights era, to reflect on how far the country has come and how far it still has to go.

Fifty years after peaceful protesters trying to cross a bridge were beaten by police officers with billy clubs, shocking the nation and leading to passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, the nation’s first African-American president led a bipartisan, biracial testimonial to the pioneers whose courage helped pave the way for his own election to the highest office of the land.

But coming just days after Mr. Obama’s Justice Department excoriated the police department of Ferguson, Mo., as a hotbed of racist oppression, even as it cleared a white officer in the killing of an unarmed black teenager, the anniversary seemed more than a commemoration of long-ago events on a black-and-white newsreel. Instead, it provided a moment to measure the country’s far narrower, and yet stubbornly persistent, divide in black-and-white reality.

In an address at the scene of what became known as “Bloody Sunday,” Mr. Obama rejected the notion that race relations have not improved since then, despite the string of police shootings that have provoked demonstrations. “What happened in Ferguson may not be unique,” he said, “but it’s no longer endemic. It’s no longer sanctioned by law or custom, and before the civil rights movement, it most surely was.”

But the president also rejected the notion that racism has been defeated. “We don’t need the Ferguson report to know that’s not true,” he said. “We just need to open our eyes and our ears and our hearts to know that this nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us. We know the march is not yet over; we know the race is not yet won. We know reaching that blessed destination where we are judged by the content of our character requires admitting as much.”

An estimated 40,000 people, most but not all African-American, gathered on a sunny, warm day in this small town of elegant if weathered homes and buildings to mark the occasion. The celebration had a festival feeling, with vendors hawking barbecue, funnel cakes, hamburgers and posters of Mr. Obama, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali and others. They came from near and far, some lining up before 6:30 a.m. to make sure they got in.

Ferguson was on the minds of many. Dontey Carter, 24, even came from Ferguson, saying he wanted to make a connection with protests he took part in back in Missouri. “I feel like it’s critical for me to be here,” said Mr. Carter, wearing a T-shirt with the words “We Are Justice” on the front. “The same tactics they used in Ferguson is kind of close to what they did here.”

Bridgette Traveler, 48, a disabled Army veteran who came from Shreveport, La., was in Ferguson last year protesting the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown.

“We have a long way to go when Michael Brown was killed for just walking down the street,” Ms. Traveler said.

Some attendees still angry about the Ferguson case interrupted Mr. Obama’s speech, banging a drum, holding up signs that read “Stop the Violence” and chanting “We Want Change.” Others in the audience tried to quiet those responsible for the outbursts, but eventually police officers — three white and two black — carried off one protester.

Joining Mr. Obama on Saturday was former President George W. Bush, who signed the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act in 2006, as well as more than 100 members of Congress. About two dozen of them were Republicans, including the House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy of California. While sitting onstage, Mr. Bush made no remarks, but rose to his feet to applaud Mr. Obama, and the two men hugged afterward.

Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican majority leader, did not attend, nor did most Republican presidential candidates, who were in Iowa campaigning. But the Republican-led Congress voted to award the Congressional Gold Medal to the “foot soldiers” of Bloody Sunday as “an expression of our affection and admiration for those who risked everything for their rights,” as Mr. Boehner put it.

Several prominent Democrats were missing, too. Former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is preparing to run for the White House next year, were in Miami for an event sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative. In the Clintons’ adopted state of New York, about 250 people marched across the Brooklyn Bridge in commemoration of Selma.

Gov. Robert Bentley, a Republican who spoke in Selma on Saturday, said he hoped the occasion would show how much Alabama has changed. “We want people in America and the world to realize that Alabama is a different place and a different state than it was 50 years ago,” Mr. Bentley said in an interview. “It has become probably as much of a colorblind state as any state in the country, and we’re very proud of the advancement we’ve made.”

But that was not a universal view in a state where Mr. Obama received just 15 percent of the white vote in 2012.

“I think in many ways we’ve gone backwards on race in this country,” former Representative Artur Davis of Alabama, who is African-American and switched parties to become a Republican, said in an interview. “There’s obviously a very deep racial divide in Alabama when it comes to President Obama.”

Alabama is also on the front lines of what some see as the modern-day successor to the civil rights movement. Although a federal court threw out the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, Alabama’s Supreme Court has tried to block the issuance of marriage certificates. Mr. Obama made several references to gay rights but did not directly address the fight over marriage in Alabama.

He did take the opportunity to implicitly fire back at Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, who recently questioned his patriotism. The president cited the bravery of the marchers who risked everything 50 years ago to stand up for their rights.

“That’s what it means to love America,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s what it means to believe in America. That’s what it means when we say America is exceptional.” The president added later in his address, “That’s what America is, not stock photos or airbrushed history or feeble attempts to define some of us as more American as others.“

The events of March 7, 1965, proved a turning point in the civil rights movement, recently depicted in the movie “Selma.” When 600 demonstrators embarking on a 50-mile march to Montgomery for voting rights crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, state troopers and Sheriff Jim Clark’s posse attacked with billy clubs and tear gas. Among the 17 hospitalized was John Lewis, who suffered a skull fracture. National revulsion helped President Lyndon B. Johnson push the Voting Rights Act through Congress.

Mr. Lewis, 74, who has gone on to a long career in Congress, was on hand Saturday, as were Mr. Johnson’s daughters and a daughter of George Wallace, Alabama’s segregationist governor. The crowd turned exceptionally quiet as Mr. Lewis, speaking in the deep preacher’s cadence for which he is famous, turned around, looked at the bridge where he was nearly killed and described what it was like on that day. “Our country will never be the same because of what happened on this bridge,” he said.

A voting rights workshop later in the day underscored the continuing battles over the law. The Supreme Court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, in effect deeming it outdated and freeing nine states, including Alabama, to change election laws without advance approval. Mr. Obama called on lawmakers here to return to Washington and pass legislation reviving the act.

But in an era of low turnout, the president said Americans as a whole needed to use their franchise. “What’s our excuse today for not voting?” he asked. “How do we so casually discard the right for which so many fought? How do we so fully give away our power, our voice, in shaping America’s future?”

Correction: March 7, 2015

A picture caption with an earlier version of this article misidentified the city in Alabama where President Obama was photographed. It was in Montgomery, Ala., not Selma, Ala.

Julie Hirschfeld Davis contributed reporting from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on March 8, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Work of Selma ‘Not Yet Over,’ President Says.

Obama, at Selma Memorial, Says, ‘We Know the March Is Not Yet Over’, NYT,
MARCH 7, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/us/obama-in-selma-for-edmund-pettus-bridge-attack-anniversary.html

Urging Persistence on Racial Gains,

Obama Recalls Sacrifice in Selma

MARCH 6, 2015

The New York Times

By PETER BAKER

and JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

COLUMBIA, S.C. — For the nation’s first African-American president, it was a week of two documents that told the story of a country still grappling with its own history.

The first was a draft speech that President Obama was marking up with his distinctive left-hand scrawl to deliver in Selma, Ala., on Saturday to celebrate a half-century of civil rights gains. The second was a report he received accusing the police in Ferguson, Mo., of systematically discriminating against African-Americans.

More than once, Mr. Obama has credited the courage of protesters in Selma who were confronted by club-wielding state troopers 50 years ago for clearing the way for his own barrier-breaking election as president. But the path from Selma to the Oval Office has also led to Ferguson and back to Selma, a path littered with hope and progress and disappointment and setback.

“What happened in Ferguson is not a complete aberration,” Mr. Obama told a young African-American man who asked him about it Friday at Benedict College, a historically black school. “It’s not just a one-time thing. It’s something that happens.”
Continue reading the main story
Report: What Is Wrong With the Ferguson Police Department?

In a scathing report released Wednesday, the Justice Department concluded that the Ferguson Police Department had been routinely violating the constitutional rights of its black residents.

And so, he added, “Our task is to work together to solve the problem and not get caught up in either the cynicism that says this is never going to change because everybody is racist. That’s not a good solution.”

“That’s not what the folks in Selma did,” he added. “They had confidence that they could change things, and change people’s hearts and minds.”

Eight years after Mr. Obama first spoke at Selma, the dream of a post-racial society that some foresaw in his rise to power has receded into a murkier reality.

Mr. Obama presides over a country where blacks are still twice as likely to be unemployed as whites; where gaps in income and wealth between races are widening rather than closing; where blacks are five times likelier to be in prison and young black men are nine times as likely to be killed in a homicide as their white counterparts; and where blacks get sick more, die younger and own less.

“When you look at all the statistics, I don’t know that the last six years have been particularly good for people of color,” said Senator Tim Scott, a Republican from South Carolina and one of two black members of the Senate. “And when you look at race relations, I think you could say at best they’re where they were before six years ago.”

He went on: “I don’t know that you can lay that on the shoulders of one person, but when you look at the policies” enacted by Mr. Obama, they “have had a miserable impact on the country.”

To Mr. Obama’s supporters, the fierce opposition to his presidency has been fueled by race, even if that is not openly acknowledged.

And in that regard, paradoxically, race relations may seem worse today than before he was elected. A new CBS News poll found that 50 percent of African Americans think real progress has been made in getting rid of racial discrimination, down from 59 percent last summer before episodes in Ferguson and elsewhere involving police officers and black suspects.

“For many people it feels worse because we have seen such a reaction to this presidency that has been really alarming and without question from many quarters has been based in part on his race,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “His candidacy suggested we had reached a new moment in America, and I think some people overestimated the meaning of that moment.”

Many of Mr. Obama’s supporters blame his opponents. “I think the president has done all he could do,” said George E. Battle Jr., senior bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. “But sometimes I think once the president was elected, we thought he could do everything. But he can’t. When you have governors and you have senators and you have Congress people determined to turn back the clock, there’s not that much the president can do other than getting on the stump.”

Consumed by the economy and health care, and with re-election ahead, Mr. Obama avoided focusing much on race in his first term. He has argued that restoring the economy and expanding health care were in fact policies that disproportionately helped African Americans. Indeed, 1.7 million more blacks have health insurance coverage now, with the drop in uninsured larger among blacks than whites.

But lately, with the economy on the mend and re-election behind him, Mr. Obama has more actively engaged on issues like voting rights and disparities in the criminal justice system.

And advisers said no one should underestimate the continuing power of Mr. Obama’s presence in the Oval Office. “By breaking through that barrier, there are children growing up today who think it’s perfectly normal to have an African-American president because that’s all they have ever known,” said Valerie Jarrett, his senior adviser.

Still, she added that it was not enough. “This is no time for us to rest on our laurels,” she said. “The fact that there are states that are trying to make it harder to vote 50 years after the Voting Rights Act is an indication that there’s still work to do.”

Mr. Obama seldom speaks at length about his views of the role that race plays in today’s politics or the opposition to his policies. At a session with civil rights and religious leaders recently, he focused on policy proposals instead of ruminating on racial tensions, said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League.

But Mr. Morial said the president’s policies were his way of addressing persistent issues in America, citing health care. “The things he’s done I think clearly indicate that race and leaving a legacy on race are very important to his presidency,” he said.

Peter Baker reported from Columbia, and Julie Hirschfeld Davis from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on March 7, 2015, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Urging Persistence on Racial Gains, Obama Recalls Sacrifice in Selma.

Urging Persistence on Racial Gains, Obama Recalls Sacrifice in Selma,
NYT, MAR. 6, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/07/us/politics/obama-backs-justice-departments-decision-not-to-indict-ferguson-officer.html

A Chilling Portrait of Ferguson

MARCH 4, 2015

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The riots that erupted in Ferguson, Mo., last summer after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown were partly about his death. They were also deeply connected to a lamentable history of abuse suffered by African-American citizens at the hands of local police and court officials.

The Justice Department announced on Wednesday that its investigation did not support federal civil rights charges against Darren Wilson, the officer who shot and killed Mr. Brown. Still, the department found overwhelming evidence of entrenched racism in Ferguson’s police force and what amounted to the habitual use of primitive and clearly unconstitutional law enforcement techniques. Ferguson must move far more aggressively than it has to correct a dangerous, socially corrosive problem.

Data from 2012-14, for instance, showed that African-Americans — who made up 67 percent of Ferguson’s population — accounted for 85 percent of vehicle stops, 90 percent of citations and 93 percent of all arrests. African-Americans were more than twice as likely as white drivers to be searched during vehicle stops, and were significantly more likely to be ticketed for speeding.

The police’s use of force showed similar disparities — with nearly 9 of 10 cases involving African-Americans. In every canine bite incident for which racial information was available, the person bitten was black.

The court system displayed the same biases. According to the report: “African-Americans are 68 percent less likely than others to have their cases dismissed by the court, and are more likely to have their cases last longer and result in more required court encounters. African-Americans are at least 50 percent more likely to have their cases lead to an arrest warrant, and accounted for 92 percent of cases in which an arrest warrant was issued by the Ferguson Municipal Court in 2013. Available data show that, of those actually arrested by F.P.D. only because of an outstanding municipal warrant, 96 percent are African-American.”

The arrests and fines of blacks were driven to some extent by the fact that Ferguson’s budget relies partly on fines and fees; city officials routinely urged the Police Department to generate more revenue through ticket writing. In 2013, for instance, the city finance director wrote: “Court fees are anticipated to rise about 7.5 percent. I did ask the chief if he thought the P.D. could deliver 10 percent increase. He indicated they could try.”

But budget needs could not explain, let alone justify, the pattern of racism. They merely combined with deep-seated biases throughout Ferguson’s power structure to entrap the city’s black community in a hellish cycle of arrests for minor offenses, fines they could not pay, to crippling financial penalties, loss of drivers licenses, and jail time. All of that meant lost jobs and eviction.

Not surprisingly, Ferguson’s African-Americans do not see the police as neutral enforcers of the law but as agents of exploitation. No municipality can prosper with that kind of hostility, overt or just below the surface, day in and day out. City officials should grasp this opportunity to take corrective steps. If they don’t, the Justice Department would be wholly justified in taking them to court.
 

A version of this editorial appears in print on March 5, 2015, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: A Chilling Portrait of Ferguson.

A Chilling Portrait of Ferguson, NYT, MAR. 4, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/05/opinion/a-chilling-portrait-of-ferguson.html

Edward W. Brooke III, 95,

Senate Pioneer, Is Dead

 

JAN. 3, 2015

The New York Times

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Edward W. Brooke III, who in 1966 became the first African-American elected to the United States Senate by popular vote, winning as a Republican in overwhelmingly Democratic Massachusetts, died on Saturday at his home in Coral Gables, Fla. He was 95. Ralph Neas, a family spokesman, confirmed the death.

Mr. Brooke won his Senate seat by nearly a half-million votes in 1966 and was re-elected in 1972. He remains the only black senator ever to have been returned to office.

A skilled coalition builder at a time when Congress was less ideologically divided than it is today, Mr. Brooke shunned labels, but he was seen as a centrist. His positions and votes were consistently more liberal than those of his increasingly conservative Republican colleagues.

He opposed the expansion of nuclear arsenals, pushed for improved relations with China and championed civil rights, the legalization of abortion and fair housing policies. He urged Republicans to match the Democrats in coming up with programs to aid cities and the poor.

“Where are our plans for a New Deal or a Great Society?” he asked in a 1966 book, “The Challenge of Change: Crisis in Our Two-Party System.”

He was a thorn in the side of his party’s leader, President Richard M. Nixon. He successfully led the fight against two Nixon Supreme Court nominees whose positions on civil rights were called into question. When Nixon became entangled in the Watergate scandal, Mr. Brooke called for the appointment of a special prosecutor. He was the first Republican senator to demand Nixon’s resignation.

“His presence in the Senate in those years was absolutely indispensable,” said Mr. Neas, who was chief legislative assistant to Mr. Brooke and later president of the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way. “There were repeated battles during those years. Even some Democrats were retreating on the Senate floor on issues like school desegregation and abortion rights, and Senator Brooke was the one who often single-handedly took on the radical right.”

Still, he disappointed liberals by opposing a program to recruit teachers to work in disadvantaged areas. He sought to deny federal aid to New York City during its financial crisis and resisted changing Senate rules to make filibusters against civil rights legislation easier to stop.

On the issue of the Vietnam War, Mr. Brooke, a decorated combat veteran, was torn, moving from dove to hawk, then back to dove. He was a forceful speaker, often described as gentlemanly and charming, and meticulous about his appearance, sometimes changing clothes three times a day.

His political career began collapsing in 1978. What Mr. Brooke thought would be an amicable divorce from his first wife, the former Remigia Ferrari-Scacco, turned bitter and was played out in the news media, resulting in an admission by Mr. Brooke that he had made a false statement under oath in a deposition.

He lost his bid for a third term to Representative Paul E. Tsongas, a Democrat, who received 55 percent of the vote. Mr. Brooke described the experience as “the lowest point in my life.”

Cleared by the Senate Ethics Committee four months later, he was nevertheless devastated. “Why did it happen?” he said in an interview with The Boston Globe in 2000. “I don’t know. I’ve asked my God that many times. ‘Why, why, why, dear God?’ ”

Mr. Brooke was twice elected attorney general of Massachusetts, the first African-American to be elected attorney general of any state. When President John F. Kennedy heard the news in 1962, on the same day that his brother Edward was elected to the United States Senate, he said, “That’s the biggest news in the country.”

In 1964, as President Lyndon B. Johnson led a Democratic landslide, Mr. Brooke was re-elected attorney general by more votes than any other Republican in the nation. In 1968, he was at the top of many lists of possible Republican vice-presidential candidates. By his own and others’ accounts, he turned down cabinet posts and a seat on the Supreme Court.

The only previous black senators, Blanche K. Bruce and Hiram R. Revels, both Republicans, were elected not by voters but by the Mississippi Legislature in the 1870s.

Mr. Brooke never presented himself as a black politician and grew tired of being called “first this, first that,” he said. He represented all the people of Massachusetts, he said, and wanted no part of being “a national leader for the Negro people.”

In a statement Saturday, Kirsten Hughes, the spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Republican Party, said, “The Massachusetts Republican Party is proud to have had Senator Brooke as one of our party’s leaders, and we extend our deepest condolences to his family.”

Edward William Brooke III was born on Oct. 26, 1919, in Washington. He was the third child and only son of the former Helen Seldon and Edward W. Brooke II, a lawyer for the Veterans Administration and a Republican, as most blacks were then.

He grew up in “a cocoon,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Bridging the Divide: My Life” (2007). He had a stable home, firm religious guidance — he was an Episcopal altar boy — and a good education, attending Dunbar High School, a prestigious black school in Washington.

Surrounded by middle-class blacks, he wrote, he rarely encountered direct racial discrimination, although when the Washington opera was closed to blacks his mother took him to the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Mr. Brooke earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Howard University in 1941. A reservist during college, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant after Pearl Harbor in 1941 and joined the all-black 366th Combat Infantry Regiment.

The regiment was assigned to guard duty in Italy; combat was reserved for whites. “An insult to our dignity,” Mr. Brooke wrote. Put in charge of special events, he brought opera and the heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis to his troops.

After black troops were allowed to serve in combat, Mr. Brooke became a scout assigned to go behind enemy lines to aid Italian partisans. He rose to captain and received the Bronze Star and the Combat Infantryman Badge. But the sting of segregation in the armed forces left him eager to leave the Army. “In some respects,” he said in an interview, “the German prisoners of war fared better than Negro soldiers.”

After his discharge, Mr. Brooke enrolled at Boston University School of Law, where he became an editor of the Law Review. He also corresponded with Ms. Ferrari-Scacco, an Italian woman he had met during the war, and she came to Boston. They married in 1947.

A year after Mr. Brooke began practicing law in the predominantly black Roxbury section of Boston, he returned to Boston University to earn a master’s degree in law.

In 1950, persuaded by friends, he ran for state representative in both the Democratic and Republican primaries, as was legal then. He won the Republican nomination but was buried in a Democratic landslide in the general election. He ran and lost again in 1952.

In 1960, Mr. Brooke won the Republican nomination for Massachusetts secretary of state, becoming the first black to be nominated for statewide office in Massachusetts. He was defeated by the Democrat, Kevin H. White, whose campaign issued a bumper sticker saying, “Vote White.”

The new governor, John Volpe, a Republican, appointed Mr. Brooke chairman of the Boston Finance Commission. He turned what had been an ineffectual post into a crusading one, uncovering a scandal involving the illegal disposal of public land.

Two years later, in 1962, Mr. Brooke won the Republican nomination for attorney general by a razor-thin margin over Elliot L. Richardson, a future attorney general of the United States. In the general election, the campaign of his Democratic opponent, Francis E. Kelly, hired blacks to drive through white suburbs yelling that they planned to move in as soon as Mr. Brooke won.

Mr. Brooke was the only statewide Republican winner.

In 1963, Mr. Brooke fought civil rights groups that were calling on students to boycott school to protest segregation in Boston. He said it was his job to enforce state laws, which required children to go to school.

In 1964, Mr. Brooke refused to support the Republican presidential nominee, Barry M. Goldwater, or to be photographed with him. Mr. Brooke said he was serving not just his conscience but also the best interests of the party, which he believed should be more liberal.

Massachusetts voters were hardly put off by his liberal views: In 1966, he handily defeated his Democratic opponent in the Senate race, former Gov. Endicott Peabody.

On the opening day of Congress in 1967, Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts’ senior senator, escorted Mr. Brooke down the Senate’s center aisle to a standing ovation. When Mr. Brooke got his first haircut on Capitol Hill, he integrated the Senate barbershop.

After losing to Mr. Tsongas, Mr. Brooke resumed private law practice in Washington and became chairman emeritus of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. In 1988, he was investigated for using his influence to win a client millions of dollars in federal subsidies for rehabilitation of low-income housing. An aide pleaded guilty to charges in the case, but Mr. Brooke was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing.

Mr. Brooke was divorced from his first wife, Remigia, in 1979. She died in 1994. He is survived by their daughters, Remi Cynthia Brooke Goldstone and Edwina Helene Brooke Petit, and four grandchildren. Mr. Brooke married Anne Fleming in 1979, and she survives him, as does their son, Edward. In May 2008, the television newswoman Barbara Walters revealed in a memoir that she and Mr. Brooke had begun a clandestine romance in 1973. After telling him in a letter that she would divulge the affair in her book, he wrote back “a very nice note,” Ms. Walters said. In 2004, Mr. Brooke was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush, whose administration he frequently criticized over the war in Iraq, the antiterrorism legislation called the USA Patriot Act, and its opposition to same-sex marriage.

In September 2002, Mr. Brooke learned that he had breast cancer. He was one of about 1,500 American men to receive that diagnosis every year. After a double mastectomy, he was declared cancer free. He then spoke out to warn men — particularly black men, who are statistically more susceptible — about the danger of breast cancer.

Although Mr. Brooke had sought to de-emphasize his race, he remained concerned about racial progress.

“My fervent expectation,” he wrote in his autobiography, “is that sooner rather than later, the United States Senate will more closely reflect the rich diversity of this great country.”
 

Lynette Clemetson, Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Katharine Q. Seelye contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on January 4, 2015, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: Edward W. Brooke III, 95, Senate Pioneer, Is Dead.

Edward W. Brooke III, 95, Senate Pioneer, Is Dead,
NYT, 3.1.2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/us/
edward-brooke-pioneering-us-senator-in-massachusetts-dies-at-95.html