dylann storm roof

Messages America must hear from Charleston: Rev. Barber's sermon on the Emanuel AME massacre

By Sue Sturgis
June 24, 2015 - Rev. Dr. William Barber, president of the NC NAACP and leader of the Moral Monday movement, delivered a sermon Sunday about the messages of the Charleston church shootings: that nine people were killed because their church fought racism, that racism is not just ugly words but policies often promoted through coded racist language, and that we need not closure but systemic change.

He had to be carefully taught

By Timothy B. Tyson
June 22, 2015 - Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof embraced the flags of white-supremacist regimes that did not exist in his lifetime. This is no ordinary racial bias: Someone had to teach him these elaborated historical traditions.

Charleston and the South's sordid history of attacks on black churches

By Chris Kromm
June 18, 2015 - The massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church calls to mind the long history of racially-motivated attacks on black congregations in the South, including a wave of church-burnings in the 1990s. The man arrested in the Charleston killings appears to share at least some aspects of the profile of the typical church arsonist.