If we’re lucky, we’ll have heard the last of Dylann Storm Roof after his sentencing next month for the June 2015 slaying of nine black parishioners who had the temerity to want to study the Bible unmolested in a historic church in Charleston, S.C.
File him away with the Bull Connors and the Byron De La Beckwiths and those other relics of another era when Americans – actual persons born in the most prosperous and opportunistic country on Earth – believed it was just good sport to bother, maim and kill people because of their skin color.
Roof, in his internet-filled delusion, said he felt compelled to act because of the way blacks treated whites.
The young white supremacist apparently didn’t get out much. If he searched a little, but only a little, he could see not only blacks treating whites badly but also blacks treating blacks badly, whites treating whites badly and whites treating blacks badly. And that doesn’t include the browns, yellows and reds. Lord knows, there’s enough hate to go around.
We’d hoped some of that hate might lessen when the last Confederate flag was lowered at the South Carolina statehouse last year. And some wanted to take the symbolism even further, to remove every vestige of every person who served on the Confederate side of the Civil War, and to denigrate even the presidents of the United States who once owned slaves.