A hateful act of terror

The nation is still reeling from last Wednesday’s act of domestic terrorism and hate that claimed the lives of nine Black worshippers attending Bible study at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Dylann Storm Roof, 21, reportedly mingled with the church members he murdered for about an hour before unleashing hell on them at the historic Black church. He took the lives of nine people, including the church’s pastor, before deciding to leave someone alive to share the horror they experienced with the world.

It was, without a doubt, a cowardly, despicable act of racial hatred and home-grown terrorism, made all the more despicable by the fact that it was committed on sacred ground.

The killing spree sends a strong message to people of color in the U.S. and around the world — one that other racists sent during the Historic Civil Rights Movement with the bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church and in the 1990s with the widespread burning of Black houses of worship across the Deep South — that there is no sanctuary or place of refuge in America for Black, Brown, Red and Yellow people.

There is no place in this nation where people of color are safe from the whimsical violence, virulent hatred and Machiavellian practices of white supremacy. Not today, not ever.

This carefully calculated act of hatred was carried out in such a way to kill not only the bodies of those attending Bible study Wednesday night at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church but the collective spirit and psyche of Black people across the nation.

Commentators and journalists spent the remainder of the week debating whether the mass shooting was a hate crime or an act of terrorism. Clearly it was both.

But it was also a reminder that America still has a long way to go before it can call itself a civilized nation or a democratic republic that promotes the general welfare of all of its inhabitants.

The mass shooting on June 17 was a manifestation of the hate that hate produced in this troubled land since the dawn of this republic and a bloody reminder that while all men and women are created equal by the Architect of the Universe, there is very little in the way of equal protection under the law or equal justice in the United States.

Shame on the leaders of this nation who have allowed racial hatred to fester since the early days of America and on all those elected officials who today have used race and class to divide, conquer and exploit the American masses.

While it was a hateful, unforgivable act committed in the House of God, Dylann Roof deserves to spend the rest of his life behind bars pondering the sources of his anger, discontentment and rage.

May the same God whose house of worship RooF defiled and covered with innocent blood have mercy on him.

This article originally published in the June 22, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.