Exclusive: A 21-year-old white supremacist is charged with entering an historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and murdering nine black parishioners, merging two of America’s great evils — gun violence and racial injustice. But what can be done, asks Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The latest gun massacre — this time at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and apparently driven by racial hatred — reminds Americans how we all live at the forbearance of the next nut with easy access to weapons that can efficiently kill us, our neighbors or our children. Yet, we remain politically powerless to take even the smallest step to stop this madness.
We also remain in political denial about one of America’s original sins, the cruel enslavement of blacks for the first quarter millennium of white settlement of this continent, followed by another century of brutal racial segregation, the residues of which we refuse to scrub from the corners of our national behavior — fearing that doing so will get some pro-Confederate white people mad.
Accused mass murderer Dylann Roof, posing on Facebook with the white supremacist flags of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa.
In Arlington, Virginia, where I live, the political leadership can’t even find the will or courage to remove the name of Confederate President Jefferson Davis from state roads that skirt Arlington Cemetery, which was founded to bury Union soldiers, and that pass near historic black neighborhoods in South Arlington, sending them an enduring message of who’s boss.
Davis’s name was added to Southern sections of Route 1 in 1920 at the height of the Ku Klux Klan’s power and amid an upsurge in lynchings — and to Route 110 near the Pentagon in 1964 as a counterpoint to the Civil Rights Act.
Besides leading the secessionist slave states in rebellion, Davis signed an order authorizing the execution of captured black soldiers fighting for the Union, a practice that was employed in several battles near the end of the Civil War.
Some of the victims of Davis’s order were even trained at Camp Casey in what is now Arlington County before those U.S. Colored Troops marched south to…