“The Last Rhodesian,” devoted to white nationalism. He liked to wear Rhodesian flag patches and posed on his Facebook page wearing one while waving a Confederate flag.
Roof was an ardent member of the South Carolina branch of the CCC, although it is not clear to what extent he had associated with Rogers or other CCC leaders. In the days before he walked into a Charleston church with a gun, he had put together his manifesto, which made clear that the CCC had informed and ultimately inspired his actions that day. “I was not raised in a racist home or environment,” Roof wrote.
Living in the South, almost every White person has a small amount of racial awareness, simply because of the numbers of negroes in this part of the country. But it is a superficial awareness. Growing up, in school, the White and black kids would make racial jokes toward each other, but all they were were jokes. Me and White friends would sometimes watch things that would make us think that “blacks were the real racists” and other elementary thoughts like this, but there was no real understanding behind it.
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 first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?
The remainder of the manifesto—which does not mention Donald Trump or any other politician—appears to be more or less a distillation of CCC and other white-nationalist talking points. Roof defends the history of slaveholding, adopting talking points drawn from neo-Confederate organizations such as the League of the South and the pseudo-historians they deploy to minimize the harm of slavery and its legacy. He discusses the need for American and European white nationalists to link arms in what they see as the struggle against “multiculturalism.”
And some of it is just unrestrained bigotry (spelling as in originals):
Niggers are stupid and violent. At the same time they have the capacity to be very slick. Black people view everything through a racial lense. Thats what racial awareness is, its viewing everything that happens through a racial lense. They are always thinking about the fact that they are black.
…
Segregation was not a bad thing. It was a defensive measure. Segregation did not exist to hold back negroes. It existed to protect us from them.
…
Anyone who thinks that White and black people look as different as we do on the outside, but are somehow magically the same on the inside, is delusional. How could our faces, skin, hair, and body structure all be different, but our brains be exactly the same? This is the nonsense we are led to believe.
…
Negroes have lower IQs, lower impulse control, and higher testosterone levels in generals. These three things alone are a recipe for violent behavior.
The CCC’s website and other similar sites were cloacae of such ignorant rants. But Roof chose to take all this in his own direction.
To take a saying from a film, “I see all this stuff going on, and I dont see anyone doing anything about it. And it pisses me off.” To take a saying from my favorite film, “Even if my life is worth less than a speck of dirt, I want to use it for the good of society.”
I have no choice. 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.
Roof’s bizarre, rambling manifesto was reminiscent of a similar document penned in 2008 by a conservative Tennessee man named Jim David Adkisson, who also walked into a church with a gun. Adkisson was driven to anger by the looming nomination of a black man as the Democratic candidate for the presidency: “I’m protesting the DNC running such a radical leftist candidate. Osama Hussein Obama, yo mama. No experience, no brains, a joke. Dangerous to America, he looks like Curious George!” He was also appalled by the race-mixing mores of modern times as exemplified by Obama’s mother: “How is a white woman having a niger [sic] baby progress?” he asked.
In July 2008, Adkisson walked into a Unitarian Universalist church in downtown Knoxville armed with a 12-gauge shotgun during a performance of a children’s musical and opened fire. He killed two people and wounded seven more; when he stopped to reload, he was tackled and immobilized by members of the congregation until the police arrived.
Contrary to his expectations of being killed by police, Adkisson instead stood trial for murder, pleaded guilty, and is now serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole.
In the seven and a half years between Jim David Adkisson’s 2008 rampage and Dylann Roof’s in 2015, domestic terrorism in America spiked dramatically. But hardly anyone noticed.
During that time span, there were 201 total cases of domestic terrorism in the United States—almost three times the rate of the preceding eight years. The large majority of these crimes were committed by right-wing extremists—some 115 in all, compared to 63 cases of Islamist-inspired domestic terror, and 19 cases of left-wing-extremist terrorism.
Despite that disproportionate reality, the image most Americans have when they think of terrorism is an act committed by someone wearing a turban. That is mostly a result of the Al Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, and their lingering aftermath, especially a declared War on Terror that focused on battling radical Islamists in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere.
However, domestic terrorism—acts that are plotted and executed on American soil, directed at US citizens, by actors based here —is a different story. It has been there all along. The most damaging domestic terrorist attack ever committed on American soil was the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people and injured another 680. The perpetrators were a pair of white right-wing extremists, Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols. For at least a generation, such homegrown extremists have been far and away the largest source of terrorism in the United States. Even before Obama’s election in 2008—but also in anticipation of that event—the rate of incidents began to rise dramatically, seemingly triggered by Jim David Adkisson’s rampage. And it remained at that same high level for most of the Obama presidency.
Right-wing extremist terrorism was more often deadly than Islamist extremism: nearly a third of incidents involved fatalities, for a total of seventy-nine deaths, whereas just 8 percent of Islamist incidents caused fatalities. However, the total number of deaths resulting from Islamist incidents was higher—ninety—due largely to three mass shootings in which nearly all the casualties occurred: in 2009 at Fort Hood, Texas, and in 2015 in San Bernardino, California, and Orlando, Florida, in 2016.
Incidents related to left-wing ideologies, including ecoterrorism and animal rights actions, were comparatively rare: nineteen incidents resulted in five deaths.
Despite these statistics, officialdom and the media focused only on terrorism threats plotted by Islamist radicals. Right-wing pundits viciously attacked and silenced anyone who tried to bring up right-wing violence in the framework of terrorism; they had grown touchy about
