South Carolina honors slain minister
Bible study meets again 1 week after church shootings
Mourners in Capitol rotunda filed past open casket of pastor who was a state legislator for 20 years.
COLUMBIA, S.C. — The body of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a state senator, was carried Wednesday into the Statehouse where he served the people for nearly 20 years, becoming the first African-American since Reconstruction to rest in honor in the South Carolina rotunda. Hours later, his congregation returned to the scene of the massacre, keeping up his work of saving souls.
Meeting for Wednesday night Bible study exactly one week after Pinckney and eight others were fatally shot, a crowd of people packed the basement of Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church to show their faith and restore a sense of peace to their sanctuary.
The killings appear to be creating waves of soulsearching that are reverberating far beyond the historic black church and the state Capitol where Pinckney’s widow and two young daughters met his horsedrawn caisson, evoking memories of black-andwhite images of other slain civil rights figures five decades earlier.
In state after state, the Confederate symbols embraced by the shooting suspect have suddenly drawn official disdain.
Gov. Nikki Haley started the groundswell Monday by calling on South Carolina lawmakers to debate taking down the Confederate battle flag flying near the Statehouse. But Alabama’s governor was able to act swiftly, issuing an executive order that brought down four secessionist flags Wednesday.
In Montgomery, where the Confederacy was formed 154 years ago and where Jefferson Davis was elected president, Gov. Robert Bentley, a Republican, compared the banner to the universally shunned symbols of Nazi Germany, a stunning reversal in a region where the flag has played a huge cultural role.
The iconic Confederate battle flag in particular “is offensive to some people because unfortunately, it’s like the swastika; some people have adopted that as part of their hate-filled groups,” Bentley said.
In South Carolina, making any changes to “heritage” symbols requires a two-thirds supermajority of both houses of the state Legislature. Prodded by Haley, lawmakers voted overwhelmingly for a debate this summer, but few wanted to risk ugly words during a week of funerals.
As mourners filed by Pinckney’s open casket, a makeshift drape over a huge second-floor window obscured the secessionist battle flag outside.
Pinckney, 41, arrived at the Statehouse as a page, and in 1997 became the youngest African-American member elected to the House at that time. He became a senator in 2001.
Those honoring him also had to file past a statue of John Calhoun, the vice president who argued in the 1820s and 1830s that slavery was a “positive good,” and that states should be able to pick the federal laws they want to follow.
Other conservative Republicans weighed in across the country Wednesday.
Both of Mississippi’s U.S. senators and a U.S. representative endorsed removing the Confederate symbol from the flag the state has flown since Reconstruction, even though the state’s voters decided to keep it in 2001.
Sen. Thad Cochran declared his intentions a day after Attorney General Jim Hood, the only Democrat holding statewide office in Mississippi, said, “You’ve got to ask yourself the question: What would Jesus do in this circumstance?”
Other lawmakers and activists took aim at symbols, including a bust of Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest in Tennessee’s Senate.
Many said change is imperative after shooting suspect Dylann Roof, a 21-year- old white man, was charged with nine counts of murder.
Roof was captured after a motorist spotted his Confederate license plate. Images on a website created in his name months before the attacks show him posing with the Confederate flag and burning and desecrating the U.S. flag. He also posed at Confederate museums, former slave plantations and slave graves. In an essay on the same website, the writer wished every white person had a chance to brutalize blacks before the Civil War.
A growing number of the Confederate symbols that appear all over the South have been defaced by graffiti.
The words “black lives matter” were spray-painted Wednesday on a centuryold Confederate memorial in St. Louis, not far from Ferguson, Mo., where the phrase took root after a white officer killed an unarmed black man in August.
In Charleston, the words “racist” and “slavery” were painted Tuesday on a monument to Calhoun, just a block from where the Emanuel AME church stands on Calhoun Street.
The few lawmakers openly defending the flag include Republican Jonathon Hill, a freshman South Carolina representative who said it should remain above the monument to fallen Confederate soldiers, and that addressing it now disrespects the victims’ families.
“Dylann Roof wanted a race war, and I think this has a potential to start one in the sense that it’s a very divisive issue,” Hill said. “I think it could very well get ugly.”