During the second debate of the 2012 Presidential campaign, Mitt Romney repeated the frequently levelled Republican charge that it had taken Barack Obama many days to refer to the attack upon the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi as terrorism. Obama disputed that, and the two men argued back and forth until the moderator, Candy Crowley, intervened to say that the President had in fact referred to the incident as an “act of terror” the day after it happened. In the ensuing partisan scrum, conservatives and liberals debated the nuances between an “act of terror” and “terrorism,” proper. Beneath this philological fracas lay a truth evident to political speechwriters, eulogists, and news anchors: in times of tragedy, language matters.
The Charleston police were quick to label what happened in the sanctuary of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church last Wednesday night a “hate crime.” Many crimes are motivated by hatred, yet we reserve the term “hate crime” for an act motivated by an animus that has been extrapolated beyond any single individual and applied to an entire segment of the populace. The murder of nine black churchgoers during Bible study is an act so heinous as to be immediately recognizable as a hate crime. But it was not simply this. We should, for all the worst reasons, be adept by now at recognizing terrorism when we see it, and what happened in Charleston was nothing less than an act of terror.
Yet the term was missing from early descriptions of the incident. Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, in his initial assessment, said, “I just think he was one of these whacked-out kids. I don’t think it’s anything broader than that.” On Thursday, Governor Nikki Haley posted a statement on Facebook noting that “while we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another.” As a matter of morality, the actions of Dylann Roof, who confessed to the murders, may be a conundrum, but his motivations are far from inscrutable.
The Patriot Act defines “domestic terrorism” as activities that:
At a minimum, the murders were intended to intimidate and coerce the black civilian population of Charleston, and beyond. A friend of Roof’s said that he had talked about wanting to start a “race war”—something that Roof also reportedly confessed to investigators. And he apparently based his acts on vintage rationalizations for terrorist violence in American history.
When Tywanza Sanders, a twenty-six-year-old man who was in the church, urged Roof to spare the lives of the congregants, Roof stated that his actions were necessary. “You are raping our women and taking over the country,” he reportedly told Sanders, before killing him. A century ago, the film “The Birth of a Nation” exalted the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror during Reconstruction as the necessary deeds of men committed to defending white women from the sexual menace of newly emancipated black men. American anti-terrorism law has its legislative roots in the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which broadly empowered President Ulysses S. Grant to prosecute Klan members for abrogating federal law regarding black rights. Nine counties in South Carolina were so deeply suffused with Klan influence that they were placed under martial law. The Klan emerged not solely as an expression of concern for women but also in response to the growing political power of blacks in the postbellum South—people who, from the Klan’s vantage point, were taking over the country. In “The Prostrate State: South Carolina Under Negro Government,” published in 1873, the journalist James Shepherd Pike described a set of circumstances in which the white population was imperilled by the presence of black elected officials in the state legislature. The practice of lynching—there were more than a hundred and fifty lynchings in South Carolina between 1877 and 1950—facilitated the disenfranchisement of blacks and the retention of political power in white hands.
Twenty years ago, when Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, in Oklahoma City, killing a hundred and sixty-eight people, the act was quickly understood as terrorism. We tend not to recall, however, that McVeigh was trying to realize the plot of “The Turner Diaries,” an apocalyptic novel that details a white man’s war against a federal government under the control of minorities and their white enablers. The F.B.I. Web page on the Murrah bombing lists it as “the worst act of homegrown terrorism in the nation’s history.” That designation overlooks the Tulsa riots of 1921, in which a white mob, enraged by a spurious allegation that a black teen-ager had attempted to assault a young white woman, was deputized and given carte blanche to attack the city’s prosperous black Greenwood section, resulting in as many as three hundred black fatalities. From one perspective, the Murrah bombing was the worst act of domestic terrorism in our history, but, as the descendants of the Greenwood survivors know, it was likely not even the worst incident in Oklahoma’s history.
Another word has remained absent from the discussion of the events in Charleston: Obama. The President is an unnamed but implicit factor in the paranoid assertion—attributed to Roof but certainly not limited to him—that blacks are taking over the country. In January, 2008, Barack Obama won the South Carolina Democratic primary, largely on the strength of African-American votes; a state in the Deep South gave a black candidate a crucial push in his campaign for the White House. The recalcitrant pledges to “take our country back” that began after the Inauguration were simply more genteel expressions of the sentiments that Roof articulated.
The fact that Roof appears to have acted without accomplices will inevitably be taken as solace. He will be dismissed as a deranged loner, connected to nothing broader. This is untrue. Even if he acted by himself, he was not alone. ♦
