B (6:11)

I had difficulty, you know, with those kinds of categorizations. You know, the categorization of them is an inexplicable aberration. He talked very clearly and explicitly about his motives and that he was responding to the fact that he believed that black people had gained too much power in American society. Also worth noting, this was during the presidency of Barack Obama in the White House, and that he was calling upon white people to regain their ordained position at the top of American society. That's how he understood this.

A (6:52)

In his manifesto, discovered days after the murders on a website registered to Roof, he framed the attack as an act of white supremacy. He said he'd become radicalized online after discovering the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group that promoted racist propaganda under the guise of defending southern heritage. He chose a church in Charleston, Roof wrote, because of its history and black congregation. In his confession to the FBI, he'd said he hoped the attack would ignite a race war. Roof may very well have been a whacked out kid, but for Jelani, his decision to target Charleston's Emanuel AME Church revealed an understanding of history. AME stands for African Methodist Episcopal. The denomination was founded in 1818 by two black congregants who were kicked out of a church in Philadelphia for praying too close to white Christians and decided to form their own congregation.

B (7:50)

What they call Mother Emanuel or Emanuel Ame is one of the earliest of the churches in that denomination, and the history of it connects to one of the more resonant incidents in antebellum South Carolina history, which is the attempted slave revolt organized by Denmark Vesey, who was a member of that congregation, you know, a founding member of that congregation at Emanuel ame. And in the aftermath of the exposure of the plot, it culminated in the hanging death of Denmark Vesey. And then the church was burned to the ground.

A (8:32)

Writer Jack Hitt grew up just blocks away from the Emanuel AME Church. He remembers hearing stories about Denmark Vesey as a kid.

C (8:41)

He was an amazing figure in Southern history. He was an enslaved man who, not long after the Brits, abandoned their attempt to suppress the colonies. And I think it's 1799, he buys a lottery ticket and he wins. And with those lottery winnings, he bought his own freedom and started his own carpentry shop and was a quite successful businessman. And then later he helped found the AME Church, which eventually set up its central bank edifice there on Calhoun Street.

A (9:20)

The short Version of Vesey's attempted slave revolt says Vesey planned to kill all the whites in their beds in downtown Charleston and then flee to Haiti. But evidence suggests there may have been no plot at all. At the time, Charleston's white planter class was terrified by the idea of black religious freedom, mainly because they feared black people would use their churches to plot a slave rebellion for them. Mother Emanuel was the fulfillment of that fear. Some historians believe Vesey was framed and later killed to get him and his church out of the picture.

C (9:56)

And after he was executed for this alleged plot, Right. That church was razed and the church was destroyed, the original building. And, you know, just by way of saying just how dangerous the white planter class thought the black church was, they destroyed it. And the AME church in Charleston for the next few years or so, met underground. It still continued, but eventually, after the Civil War, it was rebuilt. Denmark Vesey Jr becomes one of the prominent ministers at Mother Emanuel. So the relationship between Vesey and that church are very powerful and very strong.

A (10:35)

Jelani Cobb traveled to Charleston after the murders. And one thing that struck him was how eager locals were to point out that Roof was not from Charleston.

B (10:45)

People in Charleston consistently said, he's not from here. And, you know, in fact, he was from just outside of Columbia. But the distance between Columbia and Charleston was played up as if they were different time zones, different countries even. And I was like, but he's not from Charleston proper, but he is from the state of South Carolina, as are many people who are Charlestonians now that aren't native Charlestonians, but maybe from other parts of South Carolina. And there was an attempt, I think, to create psychological, if not geographic, distance between themselves and Dylann Roof.

A (11:28)

And locals desire to distance themselves from Dylann Roof. Jelani saw something else at play, namely a desire to distance themselves from Charleston's own sympathy with the Confederate cause, which, as he walked the streets of downtown, was as plain as could be. The Emanuel AME church sits on Calhoun street, named after John C. Calhoun, a South Carolina senator and former vice president under John Adams and Andrew Jackson. Calhoun was a fierce defender of slavery and one of the chief architects of the South's doctrine of secession.

C (12:02)

I mean, Calhoun was the great sort of grand unified theorist of the necessity for slavery. Right. He argued that there was a scientific reason for slavery and a biblical one and an economic one and a humanitarian one and a historical one. And he was sort of like the Stephen Hawking of all of those sort of racist theories about why blacks should

A (12:22)

be enslaved at the time. Of the shooting in 2015, there was a statue of Calhoun just around the corner from the church.

B (12:30)

If you are in that area of Charleston, the statue dominates the skyline. And I mean, it's gigantic, towering homage to John c. Calhoun. And so the mere fact that there is this towering monument to him was seen among many black Charlestonians who I talked to as a kind of evidence of the sympathies of the state. You know, one gentleman who I spoke to when I was there told me that he grew up in that neighborhood, and he felt as if the eye of Calhoun were on him anywhere that he went.

A (13:14)

The Calhoun statue was put up in Charleston's Marion Square in 1887. According to Jack Hitt, black residents protested it from the start.

C (13:24)

Originally, the John c. Calhoun statue was a normal looking one. It was, you know, just a few feet off the ground. But blacks would throw paint on it and rotten food. They would shoot at it with their guns in passing. So they desecrated the statue. It had to be kept under armed guard 24 hours a day for a long time. Then finally, they tore that one down, reused the metal, and built a new statue, which they put on a pedestal that was something like 60ft high so no one could shoot at it or throw tomatoes on it.

A (13:53)

The Calhoun statue was not the only Confederate monument near Emanuel ame. In fact, one could see the entire city of Charleston as a monument to the antebellum south, albeit a romanticized, whitewashed version, the same version you get on most plantation tours in the deep south.

B (14:10)

And in fact, Charleston's position as consistently in the top five tourist destinations in the United States each year is largely a product of a kind of Confederate romanticism that's on display. Everything from the gas lamps that are still, you know, there in place of streetlights in certain parts of the city, to the old southern architecture that has been, you know, meticulously maintained. And no one was interested in asking that question about the relationship between this Confederate romanticism and Dylann Roof's loyalty to that cause.

A (14:52)

Two days after the shooting, Roof was charged with nine counts of murder. At his televised bond hearing, several family members of the victim stood up and, in an extraordinary moment, forgave him for what he'd done. That moment partly inspired President Obama's eulogy for the dead, in which he broke into amazing grace and talked about the symbolism of the Confederate flag. The flag was still flying on the grounds of the South Carolina state capitol in Columbia at the time. But just days earlier, governor Nikki Haley had called for its removal, A decision Obama endorsed in his speech.

B (15:28)

It's true a flag did not cause these murders. But as people from all walks of life now acknowledge, including Governor Haley, whose recent eloquence on the subject is worthy of praise. As we all have to acknowledge, the flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride. For many black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation. We see that now. Removing the flag from this state's capitol would not be an act of political correctness. It would not be an insult to the valor of Confederate soldiers. It would simply be an acknowledgment that the cause for which they fought, the cause of slavery, was wrong.

A (16:40)

President Obama may have supported Nikki Haley's decision to remove the Confederate flag, but under South Carolina's Heritage act, only the legislature could move it. The question was whether lawmakers in Columbia would actually follow through. Support for this podcast comes from Progressive, America's number one motorcycle insurer. Did you know? Riders who switch and save with Progressive save nearly $180 per year. That's a whole new pair of riding gloves. And more. Quote today. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. National average 12 month savings of $178 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between October 2022 and September 2023. Potential savings will vary. I'm Sarah Turney. And I'm Courtney Nicole. We're the hosts of the Crime House original podcast. The final hours Crime has impacted both of our families, teaching us how the last conversations, the misbred flag flags can change everything. On the final hours, we examine the moments before a disappearance and the questions that never got answered. A podcast that puts the moments before a disappearance under a microscope. Listen to and follow the final hours available now. Wherever you get your podcasts. Do you want to know what it's like to hang out with Ms. 13 in El Salvador? How the Russian mafia fought battles all over Brooklyn in the 1990s?

B (18:10)

What about that time I got lost in the Burmese jungle hunting the world's biggest meth lab? I'm Sean Williams.

A (18:15)

And I'm Danny Gold. And we're the hosts of the Underworld podcast. We're journalists that have traveled all over reporting on dangerous people and places. And every week we'll be bringing you a new story about organized crime from

B (18:25)

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A (18:35)

I remember the first time I ever saw a real Confederate flag. I know the exact date. April 8, 1994, because it was the same day Kurt Cobain was found dead at his home in Seattle. My family had recently moved from Massachusetts to a suburb of Charleston, South Carolina, and we'd driven to Columbia for a soccer tournament. We'd passed the state Capitol building on the way, and I saw the flag flying from the Capitol dome beneath the American and state flags. Its red background caught the sun in a way the other two flags didn't, making it brighter and more vivid. I must have assumed that it'd been there since the end of the Civil War. In this respect, I was not alone. As journalist Jack Hitt pointed out, many

C (19:21)

South Carolinians presumed that that flag had been flying up there since the Civil War. But of course, no, no, it was put up there in the early 60s as an affront to the rising civil rights movement.

A (19:32)

The flag remained on the capitol dome until 2000, when, after mounting pressure from civil rights groups and business leaders worried about tourism boycotts, lawmakers reached a compromise. They agreed to move the flag to a 30 foot flagpole beside the Confederate soldiers monument on the statehouse grounds. Like the statue of John C. Calhoun, the flag's existence at the Capitol had been opposed by black people from day one. But by the time of the Charleston massacre, a movement was underway to get rid of it entirely.

B (20:03)

There were members of the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce that wanted it down. The University of South Carolina wanted it down. You know, the business community viewed it as an impediment to attracting investment, something that made the state look old, like it was still fighting battles of the past. The university was concerned that the Confederate flag might interfere with their ability to attract top tier talent, either as students or graduate students or as faculty or fellows. And so there were a lot of different constituencies, not all of whom were primarily motivated by civil rights, who were interested in seeing the flag removed.

A (20:45)

In fact, just weeks before the massacre, Governor Nikki Haley had faced renewed pressure to move it to a museum. This put Haley in a tricky spot because many of her voters supported the flag being up there.

C (20:58)

And so she really tried to walk that line very carefully. She was the first to say that the flag was about heritage, not hate, and that all of that history about the flag sort of emerging and the sort of lynching era and the Klan era, well, you know, forget all that, because it's really about heritage. And she stuck by that until the Dylann roof controversy and actually not even the Dylann roof murders. What really moved her off the dime was when I think it's around 20,000 Charlestonians marched across the Cooper River Bridge, arm in arm, and came all the way downtown, basically saying, this ends Here.

A (21:49)

It was the day after the march that Nikki Haley called for the flag's removal. 19 days later, it was lowered, folded, and transferred to the state's Confederate relic room for display. The flag's removal was hailed as a symbolic victory. But in interviews with black Charlestonians, including relatives of the Emanuel 9, Jelani heard something more complicated.

B (22:13)

The range of reactions to it were really telling and insightful. When I talked with people there, some people were thrilled to see it removed. Other people shrugged and, you know, thought that it really didn't have a substantial impact in the lives of African Americans in the state and that they would have preferred to see then governor Haley create an initiative to further equalize education.

A (22:40)

Another opinion was conveyed to Jelani by the brother of Cynthia Graham Hurd, one of the victims of the attack.

B (22:47)

And he said the removal of the flag presumed a level of equivalence between the importance of the flag and the importance of his sister's life, that this had been done in response to his sister's death and in life, and in death, he viewed his sister as being infinitely more important and infinitely more valuable than the Confederate flag was. And so he didn't accept that as currency as any kind of recompense, moral or otherwise, for his sister's loss.

A (23:22)

The question of what should happen to Dylann Roof also drew mixed reactions. Close to a year after the massacre, Attorney general Loretta lynch announced the DOJ would seek the death penalty. Emmanuel, AME's new pastor responded by pointing out that the church officially opposes capital punishment. So did most of the victim's family members, but not all of them. Some believed that executing Roof was the only way to affirm that black lives matter in a system that has so often devalued them. Roof was appointed a defense attorney named David Bruck, one of the country's leading experts on capital cases. Bruck initially planned an insanity defense, but Roof refused to cooperate with a competency hearing and ultimately barred his attorney from arguing that he was mentally ill.

B (24:10)

He very stringently argued, you know, for his own capacity, his own mental capacity, that he was not impaired, that he rationally made the decision to do what he did. I'm not a mental health professional. I don't know what the particulars are, but we at least had to countenance the idea that someone might not be crazy. That might not be the easy explanation, because there were so many people who had done things like what Roof did in years past, and there was no appellation of quote, unquote, crazy attached to them.

A (24:45)

Dylann Roof's trial officially began on December 7th of 2016. Jelani covered it for the New Yorker. Since Roof had already confessed to the murders, his attorney, David Bruck, was basically reduced to arguing for life in prison. Bruck was a death penalty abolitionist. He'd argued for years that capital punishment was racist because it's historically been applied mostly to black defendants who kill white victims. This was true in South Carolina, but at the time of Roof's attack, executions in the state and across the country had been declining. Bruck argued that the death penalty was on its deathbed, and the court shouldn't allow Dylann Roof's execution to resuscitate it. And yet, in claiming that Roof deserved mercy, Bruck faced a moral dilemma.

B (25:34)

Because on the one hand, Dylann Roof being killed would make it easier, at least more consistent logically, the next time an African American was subjected to the death penalty. And at the same time, if Dylann Roof is not killed or not given the death penalty, it harkens back to this tradition of disparate justice in itself. He was allowed to have a life sentence for something that would almost certainly have resulted in a death sentence for a black defendant.

A (26:09)

Adding to the complexity was the fact that just days before Roof's trial began, a jury in North Charleston had deadlocked in the case of Michael Slager. Slager was the police officer who shot a black man named Walter Scott in the back as he fled a traffic stop. Despite Roof's confession and the mountain of evidence against him, some people feared that a jury might spare him, too. One afternoon during the Dylann Roof trial, Jelani paid a visit to Charleston's Confederate Museum. The Daughters of the Confederacy had opened it in 1899 on the second floor of a market where, as the museum's website pointed out, no slaves were sold. He later wrote about the experience. There's an interesting moment where you go during the trial to visit the Confederate Museum in Charleston, and you speak to some people there, and I can just kind of imagine you walking in during that moment, and them, the folks who work there, as sweet as they probably were being from Charleston, kind of bracing themselves and going, oh, boy, what does Jelani want to talk about?

B (27:30)

Yeah, when I visited the museum, first off, I will say that, you know, the two women who worked there were as polite and welcoming as anyone could be. And, you know, I really appreciated their hospitality and, you know, showing me the different artifacts that the museum had in its collection and so on. The tenor of that conversation changed when I articulated. I still had my press book badge on. I'd Forgotten to take it off. And one of the women inquired about why I was wearing a press badge. And I said, oh, I'm here to cover Dylann Roof's trial. She was horrified. She thought he was a monster. She thought he had done, you know, this terrible thing. And so I then raised the question I thought was obvious, which was, what do you make of the idea that he did what he did as a tribute to the same cause that's being memorialized in this museum? And that was when everyone. It was like you could have heard a pin drop. Everything changed. And people rushed into this defense of the Confederacy, and they claimed that Roof didn't know what the Confederacy was about. And I said, he flew the Confederate flag himself, and it was like he didn't understand. And I said, but white supremacist organizations around the world fly the Confederate flag. And she said, oh, they just saw it on the Internet. They didn't know what it was about. And it occurred to me in that moment, you know, the fact was that Roof was one of the few people who was willing to actually talk about what the history of the Confederacy had been. You know, that heritage and hate were not mutually exclusive. You know, the heritage of the Confederacy had been this ideal of white supremacy and black subordination, violently if necessary. And that was the point at which I realized much of the city that I experienced was invested in this kind of denial that RUF had no time or patience for.

A (29:29)

For Jelani, sitting through the trial was a deeply emotional experience. Graphic photographs of the inside of the church after the massacre were displayed. Witnesses recounted in detail the death of their loved ones. A survivor named Felicia Sanders testified about smearing blood on her body to trick Roof into thinking she'd already been shot.

B (29:52)

She did that in order to save the life of her granddaughter. She was laying on top of her granddaughter with her body and listening to her testify about, you know, the one consequence of her protecting her granddaughter being that she could not assist her son, who had also been shot, who was dying. And she said in words that I likely will never forget, I watched my son take his first breath in his life, and I watched my son take his last breath in his life. That I think, stripped away the veil that there was such a thing as remove. As a journalist. I started crying when she said that. I looked around, and most of the other reporters were crying. The court officer was crying, was tearing up.

A (30:43)

Throughout the proceedings, Jelani occasionally glanced over at Dylann Roof. At times, Roof appeared to be grappling with the enormity of what he'd done, but most of the time he was inscrutable. It seemed impossible to know what he was thinking. When the prosecution rested, Roof made a short closing statement telling the jury, I felt like I had to do it. I still feel like I had to do it. In the end, Roof was convicted on all counts. The jury recommended the death penalty, which was later imposed by the judge. But the ruling was of little solace to the victims families in the ultimate

B (31:20)

imposition of the death penalty. I don't think any of the people, as a matter of fact, the people who I talked to said this outright. People didn't feel any degree of closure or any degree of relief. It had just simply been, you know, this is the next development in this series of things that are happening.

A (31:41)

In late 2024, on his way out of office, Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 federal inmates on death row, converting them to life in prison without the possibility of parole. But he left out three high profile cases. Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh synagogue attacker, and Dylann Roof. Roof may have failed to achieve his goal of igniting a race war, but in the years since, the ideas that fueled his actions have found a louder voice in American life. Looking back on it 10 years later, Jelani sees it as a harbinger of things to come.

B (32:22)

In the immediate aftermath, thousands of people came to Charleston to reject what Roof stood for and what he believed in. But by the same token, people who think the way he thought are more prominent in American public life than they have been anytime in this century and, you know, probably anytime in the last third of, of the prior century. And so did he achieve what he set out for? There's some analyses that would say he did. And even if it's not unqualified, we have to grapple with the question of whether or not that is true.

A (33:09)

Even so, the Charleston massacre did lead to positive change. It not only contributed to the removal of the Confederate flag from the statehouse, it also kicked off a national reckoning with Confederate symbols throughout the South. In 2018, Charleston City Council voted to apologize for the city's role in slavery, acknowledging that over 40% of enslaved Africans who disembarked in North America arrived through Charleston Harbor. On the fifth anniversary of the tragedy, just days after George Floyd was killed, the mayor of Charleston announced that the statue of John C. Calhoun would finally be taken down after 133 years. A week later, a crew worked through the night to cut the bronze statue free. Around dawn, a crane lifted it off its 100 foot pedestal as onlookers from the neighborhood cheered. If you have information, story tips or feedback you'd like to share with the Gone south team, please email us@gonesouthpodcastmail.com that's gone southpodcastmail.com for bonus content, you can follow us on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram at Gone south podcast. You can also sign up for our newsletter on substack at Gone south with Jed Lipinski Gone south is an Odyssey original podcast. It's created, written and narrated by me, Jed Lipinski. Our executive producers are Leo Rees, Dennis, Maddy Sprung Keyser and Lloyd Lockridge. Our story editor is Katie Mingle. Gone south is edited, mixed and mastered by Chris Basil. Production support for from Ian Mont and Sean Cherry. Special thanks to Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney and Hilary Schuff. Thank you for listening to Gone South.

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