Church shooting: Charleston reels in shock as city mourns and prays

Charleston, United States: A racially motivated hate crime? Another example of America’s epidemic of gun violence? The work of the devil in a “sinful world”? Charleston, a genteel southern city of 128,000 that was once the US capital of the transatlantic slave trade, was in a stunned state of grief Thursday, a day after a young white man gunned down nine people in a historic African-American church. When police reopened the street that runs past the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a white 19th century gothic building with a towering steeple, Joyce Gilliard rushed down to pay her respects. “I have a family friend who said that three of her family members were killed,” said the 22-year-old African-American film industry hair stylist, whose grandmother’s house is around the corner from the church. [caption id=“attachment_2302992” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Charleston prays for the victims of the racial crime. AP[/caption] “Everyone’s numb, everyone’s still in a state of shock,” Gilliard, seeking relief from the sun in a broad rim hat, told AFP when asked to describe the mood in her home city. Flowers and prayer  When Gilliard got to the church, she found an ever-growing cluster of flowers and shiny helium balloons left by anonymous mourners – and a white family on a week’s holiday from Delaware, their heads bowed in prayer. She immediately joined the Johnsons – mother Rhonda, 50, and daughters Madison, 16, and Lauren, 21 – and embraced them as news photographers jostled to capture the scene. “I feel it was the devil” who carried out the massacre, the elder Johnson – who described herself and her family as devout Christians – said afterwards, dabbing back tears. Police arrested the alleged gunman, suspected white supremacist 21-year-old Dylann Roof, in North Carolina earlier Thursday, in what they called a hate crime. Asked how God could have allowed such a tragedy, Johnson said: “God was there, but we live in a sinful world. I don’t have all the answers, but God will come down and he will heal.” On the sidewalk across the street, Daron-Lee Calhoun II, a 27-year-old African American, saw the slaughter as evidence of “festering white supremacy and racism,” especially in the southern United States.  Not a surprise “Am I shocked that it happened? Yes. Am I hurt by what happened? Yes. But surprised? It’s hard to say that I’m surprised,” he told AFP. “This was a domestic terrorist. This is a man who completed a terrorist plot on American soil,” added Calhoun, a researcher at a local African-American studies center. Nearby, in shorts and sandals in the mid-afternoon heat and humidity, 19-year-old Valentino Fazi mourned one of the victims, Sharonda Singleton, 45, an assistant pastor who he fondly remembered as his vocal teacher at school. “She was a very peaceful woman. I can’t believe this happened to her,” the automotive technician, a white Charleston native, told AFP. He said he had “no idea” about the gunman’s motivations, adding that in his own experience, attending an integrated high school, racism was no longer a Charleston thing. “This would be the first time I’ve ever seen anything like that happen, if there was racism (at work) here,” he said. At the corner of Marion Park, a refreshing oasis of green a block away from Emanuel church, grassroots South Carolina gun safety campaigner Jack Logan, 56, said the shooting only hardened his opposition to firearms. Second thoughts on Second Amendment During the overnight drive from the inland South Carolina city of Greenville, Logan lost faith in the Second Amendment, which gives Americans a constitutional right “to keep and bear arms,” he told AFP. It was no coincidence, said the black founder of Put Down The Guns Now Young People Organization, that one of the victims, senior pastor and lawmaker Clementa Pinckney, 41, pressed for sweeping background checks for gun buyers. “I look at this as this preacher being a state senator and his stance on guns and gun control,” he told AFP. “I look at this as a terrorist attack as well. We worry about Iraq, Afghanistan and those places, but we’ve got it right here in America. We have it here in our own back yard, terrorism, and that is exactly what is going on.” AFP