‘Fighting to not be angry’: Jacksonville mourns victims killed by racist gunman
The pastor of a church near the site of the racist fatal shooting of three Black people in Florida told congregants Sunday to follow Jesus Christ’s example and keep their sadness from turning to rage.
Jacksonville’s mayor wept. Others at the service focused on Florida’s political rhetoric and said it has fueled such racist attacks.
The shooting traumatized an historically Black neighborhood in Jacksonville on Saturday as thousands visited Washington DC, to attend the Rev Al Sharpton’s 60th anniversary commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where the Rev Martin Luther King Jr delivered his historic I Have A Dream speech.
The latest in a long history of American racist killings was at the forefront of Sunday services at St Paul AME church, about 3 miles from the crime scene.
“Our hearts are broken,” the Rev Willie Barnes told about 100 congregants Sunday morning. “If any of you are like me, I’m fighting trying to not be angry.”
The attorney general, Merrick Garland, said Sunday that the justice department was “investigating this attack as a hate crime and an act of racially motivated violent extremism”.
“No person in this country should have to live in fear of hate-fueled violence and no family should have to grieve the loss of a loved one to bigotry and hate,” he said.
The Jacksonville mayor, Donna Deegan, cried as she addressed the congregation.
“It feels some days like we’re going backward,” she said.
“I’ve heard some people say that some of the rhetoric that we hear doesn’t really represent what’s in people’s hearts, it’s just the game. It’s just the political game,” Deegan said. “Those three people who lost their lives, that’s not a game.”
The choir sang Amazing Grace before ministers said prayers for the victims’ families and the broader community. From the pews, congregants with heads bowed answered with “amen”.
A masked white man carried out the shooting with at least one weapon bearing a swastika inside a Dollar General store, leaving two men and one woman dead.
The shooting happened just before 2pm within a mile of Edward Waters
University, a small, historically Black university. In addition to carrying a firearm painted with a symbol of Germany’s Nazi regime of the 1930s and 1940s, the shooter issued racist statements before the shooting. He killed himself at the scene.
“He hated Black people,” Jacksonville Sheriff TK Waters said.
At the St Paul AME church service, elected officials said racist attacks like Saturday’s have been encouraged by political rhetoric targeting “wokeness” and policies from the Republican-led state government headed by Florida governor Ron DeSantis, including one taking aim at the teaching of Black history in Florida.
“We must be clear, it was not just racially motivated, it was racist violence that has been perpetuated by rhetoric and policies designed to attack Black people, period,” said state representative Angie Nixon, a Jacksonville Democrat and one of several elected officials to speak during the church service.
“We cannot sit idly by as our history is being erased, as our lives are being devalued, as wokeness is being attacked,” Nixon said. “Because let’s be clear – that is red meat to a base of voters.”
Professor David Jamison, who teaches history at Edward Waters, attended St Paul AME Church on Sunday morning with four students from the university. The Rev Barnes acknowledged them from the pulpit.
“These young men, they were within feet of their lives being taken,” Barnes told the congregation. “And we’re grateful God spared their lives.”
The four students declined to speak with reporters after church. The pastor didn’t elaborate on what happened to them, and Jamison said he didn’t know details.
“They’re overwhelmed,” the professor said, “and thankful to be alive.”
Rudolph McKissick, a national board member of the Rev Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, Baptist bishop, and senior pastor of the Bethel church in Jacksonville, was in Jacksonville on Saturday when the shooting occurred in the historically Black New Town neighborhood.
“Nobody is having honest, candid conversations about the presence of racism,” McKissick said.
DeSantis, who spoke with the sheriff by phone from Iowa while campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, called the shooter a “scumbag”.
“This guy killed himself rather than face the music and accept responsibility for his actions. He took the coward’s way out,” DeSantis said.
McKissick, the Jacksonville pastor, was one of those saying that DeSantis’s politics were contributing to racial tensions in Florida.
“This divide exists because of the ongoing disenfranchisement of Black people and a governor, who is really propelling himself forward through bigoted, racially motivated, misogynistic, xenophobic actions to throw red meat to a Republican base,” McKissick said.
Past shootings targeting Black Americans include one at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket in 2022 and a historic African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
The Buffalo shooting, which killed 10 people, stands apart as one of the deadliest targeted attacks on Black people by a lone white gunman in US history. The shooter was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.