5 years after church massacre, S Carolina protects monuments

Five years ago after eight black church members and their pastor were shot and killed in a racist attack, South Carolina came together and took down the Confederate flag from the Capitol lawn.

Roof didn’t hesitate to explain his racist beliefs to FBI agents and left a handwritten journal full of his views, such as blacks being inferior to whites. He also left behind pictures of himself holding the gun used in the killings, posing at historic Civil War and African American sites and holding the Confederate flag.

Outraged political leaders came together and overwhelmingly voted to take down aThat was the last time the General Assembly invoked a 2000 law called theThat's a tough task in a state where conservative Republicans dominate the House and Senate, made harder after Republican House Speaker Jay Lucas said days after the Confederate flag came down in 2015 that he would never consider another change like it while he led the House.

Tillman gained prominence wguke supporting a white mob that killed four black men in 1876 after they surrendered to them. He later became South Carolina's governor and a U.S. senator, committed to destroying any rights blacks obtained after the Civil War.

“We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him,” Tillman said in a 1900 congressional speech. Sims and Tillman also have statues on the Statehouse lawn. Some African American lawmakers want plaques added, explaining their racist views. Others, like Rep. Justin Bamberg, want Tillman and the others gone.

“I don't like seeing ‘Pitchfork’ Ben Tillman every dang day I go to the Statehouse,” the Democrat said. “He boldly and proudly supported lynching my people.” And in Charleston on Tuesday, the current pastor of Mother Emanuel stood with civil rights activists and politicians who called for the removal from a downtown park of a 100-foot-tall (30-meter) statue of former U.S. Vice President John C. Calhoun.

Calhoun's support of slavery never wavered. And in an 1836 speech before the U.S. Senate, he said slaves in the South were better off than free blacks in the North. The Rev. Nelson Rivers said Calhoun “represents Dylann Roof to us" and said Charleston leaders should defy the unjust Heritage Act — which does not include penalties for breaking it — and remove the statue.

“The time has come to not just acknowledge your racist evil wicked past. The time has come to take down the monuments that honor the evil that was done in the name of Charleston, in the name of South Carolina," Rivers said Tuesday at the foot of Calhoun's statue.Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg said he will announce the city's decision Wednesday on the statue's future.

The time has come for Republicans in South Carolina to either clear the way to remove monuments or show their true colors, said Rivers, who spent nearly 40 years with the NAACP and is now a vice president with the civil rights group National Action Network.“Either you support a monument to hate or you do not," Rivers said. “There is nothing fuzzy about this.”

(Image Credit: AP)