White Supremacist Dylann Roof Murders Nine Black Worshippers at Historic Charleston Church - Confederate Flag Controversy Exposes South Carolina's Institutional Racism

On June 17, 2015, white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine Black worshippers during a Bible study session at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in a racially motivated terrorist attack that exposed the state’s ongoing institutional embrace of Confederate symbolism and white supremacy. Among the victims was the church’s senior pastor, South Carolina State Senator Clementa C. Pinckney, making this both a hate crime and an assassination of a sitting state legislator.

Emanuel AME Church, founded in 1816, is the oldest Black church in the Southern United States and has long served as a center of Black community organizing and civil rights activism. Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, deliberately targeted the church because of this history and its symbolic importance to the Black community. He attended the Bible study for approximately an hour before opening fire on the congregation.

Following the massacre, investigators discovered Roof’s website “The Last Rhodesian” (registered February 9, 2015), which contained a manifesto articulating his white supremacist ideology and numerous photographs showing Roof posing with a Confederate battle flag, a handgun, and other symbols of white supremacy and racial violence. The website revealed Roof’s radicalization through online white supremacist content and his deliberate choice to attack a historic Black church to spark a “race war.”

The massacre immediately reignited long-simmering controversy over South Carolina’s official display of the Confederate battle flag on the grounds of the State House. On June 18, the day after the shooting, Governor Nikki Haley ordered flags at the State House flown at half-staff to honor the victims. However, the Confederate battle flag flying over the South Carolina Confederate Monument near the state house could not be lowered because South Carolina law prohibited any alteration of the flag without the consent of two-thirds of the state legislature. Additionally, the flagpole lacked a pulley system, meaning the flag could not be lowered to half-staff but only removed entirely.

This created a stark and widely publicized image: the state’s official flags honoring the massacre victims flew at half-staff while the Confederate flag—a symbol embraced by the white supremacist murderer—remained at full height, protected by state law. The contrast crystallized how South Carolina’s government institutionally prioritized Confederate symbolism over both the victims of racist violence and basic norms of respect for the dead.

On June 20, 2015, several thousand demonstrators gathered at the statehouse to protest government displays of the Confederate flag. The same day, major retailers including Walmart and Amazon announced they would cease sales of Confederate flag merchandise. Governor Haley, who had previously defended the flag’s presence, publicly reversed her position and called for its removal, stating the flag had been “hijacked” by Roof.

However, the legislative battle revealed deep resistance within South Carolina’s government to removing Confederate symbolism. On July 6, 2015, the South Carolina Senate voted to remove the flag. The House of Representatives held 13 hours of debate before finally passing the removal bill with a two-thirds majority (94-20) on July 9. Governor Haley signed the bill the same day, using nine pens that were given to the families of the nine victims.

On July 10, 2015, the Confederate flag was finally removed from the State House grounds and placed in storage until it could be displayed in a museum. The removal came 23 days after the massacre and only after sustained national pressure, mass protests, and economic threats from businesses reconsidering operations in South Carolina.

The legislative resistance to flag removal—requiring 13 hours of House debate and occurring only under extraordinary pressure after a mass murder—demonstrated how deeply Confederate ideology and white supremacist symbolism had been embedded in South Carolina’s governmental institutions. The state law requiring a two-thirds legislative supermajority to alter the flag’s display represented a form of structural protection for Confederate symbols that exceeded protections for most other policy decisions.

The broader impact extended beyond South Carolina. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, more than 300 Confederate symbols were removed in the six years following the Charleston massacre, including 170 monuments. The attack and its aftermath revealed how state governments’ maintenance of Confederate symbolism provided ideological legitimacy and encouragement to white supremacist violence.

In December 2016, Roof was convicted of 33 federal hate crime and murder charges. On January 10, 2017, he was sentenced to death, becoming the first person sentenced to death for federal hate crimes. Roof’s explicit embrace of Confederate symbolism and his targeting of a historic Black church for white supremacist terrorism made undeniable the connection between state-sanctioned Confederate symbols and ongoing racial violence.

Governor Nikki Haley’s later revisionist comments—claiming in December 2019 that the Confederate flag had represented “service, and sacrifice and heritage” before Roof “hijacked” it—demonstrated how quickly officials sought to rehabilitate Confederate symbolism even after its role in inspiring mass murder. This rehabilitation effort revealed that institutional commitment to white supremacist mythology remained strong in South Carolina politics despite the temporary flag removal.

The Charleston church massacre exposed a fundamental truth about institutional racism: when state governments officially honor symbols of slavery and racial terrorism, they create an environment that validates and encourages white supremacist violence against Black communities. The 23-day delay before flag removal and the fierce legislative resistance demonstrated that even mass murder of Black worshippers and a sitting Black state senator was insufficient to prompt immediate rejection of Confederate symbolism by South Carolina’s government.