Night of SC killings started with prayers and a plot against humanity - Washington Post

” Thirteen people accepted the invitation to the whitewashed landmark in historic Charleston on Wednesday evening. Clementa Pinckney, who was also a state senator, had arrived late, having left the Capitol complex in Columbia at 5 p. m. He had a two-hour drive back to his church to lead the Bible study. Dylann Storm Roof — 21, unemployed, using hard drugs, a white kid who made unsettling racist remarks to his friends — woke up Tuesday morning in his car, parked outside his friend Joey Meek’s house in Lexington, a suburb of Columbia, about 120... “He told me the black people was taking over the country and he wanted it to be segregation,” Meek recalled. “He was drunk one night, and he was just talking about him wanting to hurt a whole bunch of people. Whenever he’d say he wanted to do something crazy, I just blew it off and didn’t really pay attention to him because he was intoxicated. Throughout the bloody history of slavery, Jim Crow and white supremacism in America, the black church has been a consistent target, singled out expressly because it served as a pulpit for those who called for justice, expressly because it... Through the decades, those who sought second-class status for black Americans have assassinated religious leaders, attacked children in houses of worship, burned churches to the. Source: www.washingtonpost.com