Dylann Roof’s Racist Roots

White Supremacy and anti-Semitism Combine to Make a Mass Murderer 

The cold eyes of a racist murderer

"The Scottsboro Boys" meet with their attorney Samuel Leibowitz

This is a report from the Deep South Daily.  It shows how the local white political establishment is still in bed with out and out racists, who now go by the title of Council of Conservative Citizens.  Dylann Roof has issued a deeply racist and anti-Semitic manifesto:

Members of the South Carolina Council of Conservative Citizens protesting in 1999. Kim Truett/AP

But Europe is the homeland of White people, and in many ways the situation is even worse there. From here I found out about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race, and I can say today that I am completely racially aware.

…

The other reason is the Jewish agitation of the black race.

…

Jews

Unlike many White naitonalists, I am of the opinion that the majority of American and European jews are White. In my opinion the issues with jews is not their blood, but their identity. I think that if we could somehow destroy the jewish identity, then they wouldnt cause much of a problem. The problem is that Jews look White, and in many cases are White, yet they see themselves as minorities. Just like niggers, most jews are always thinking about the fact that they are jewish. The other issue is that they network. If we could somehow turn every jew blue for 24 hours, I think there would be a mass awakening, because people would be able to see plainly what is going on.

I dont pretend to understand why jews do what they do. They are enigma.

…

 How about we protect the White race and stop fighting for the jews. 

John Hill, with the South Carolina Council of Conservative Citizens, speaks during a news conference

Lovely stuff.  Historically the white supremacists were also anti-Semitic and that persisted up to and including the time of Joe McCarthy. 

Jews were prominent in support of Black civil rights.  In the seminal case of the Scottsborough Boys when 9 Black teenagers were charged with raping two white   women, it as the Communist Party which sent Samuel Leibowitz, a Jewish attorney, down to Alabama to defend them. 

Dylann Roof, the Charleston gunman whose racist ideology was influenced by the Council of Conservative Citizens

It was only gradually, as the same racists became Zionists, that they played down their anti-Semitism in support of Israel – because, like our own home-grown racists, they came to understand that there was no more racist state than Israel when it came to dealing with Arabs and Blacks (there is a particular hatred in Israel for Black asylum seekers, who have been incarcerated in a desert prison camp, and for the Falashas, the Black Ethiopian Jews).

"The Scottsboro Boys"

But even today, prominent Southern racists like the President of Christians United for Israel John Hagee are out and out anti-Semites.  Hagee is notorious for having said that god sent Hitler to drive the Jews to Israel and that Hitler was nothing more than god’s hunter.

"Then god sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says -- Jeremiah writing -- 'They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks,' meaning there's no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don't let your heart be offended. I didn't write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel." 

Tony Greenstein

Report: Many Mississippi politicians tied to group that radicalized Dylann Roof

Ashton Pittman

June 20, 2015

Racist mob during 'trial'

Mississippi Republican leaders attend a rally in Blackhawk, Mississippi in July 2003. The rally was put on by the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist organization. The event was attended by over 500 people, including a former GOP National Chairman. From left-to-right: MS GOP campaign strategist Chip Reynolds, former state senator Robert Huggins, Ray Martin, then-Republican gubernatorial candidate Haley Barbour, John Thompson, and CCC Senior Co-ordinator Bill Lord.

Mississippi Republican leaders attend a rally in Blackhawk, Mississippi in July 2003. The rally was put on by the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist organization. The event was attended by over 500 people, including a former GOP National Chairman. From left-to-right: MS GOP campaign strategist Chip Reynolds, former state senator Robert Huggins, Ray Martin, then-Republican gubernatorial candidate Haley Barbour, John Thompson, and CCC Senior Co-ordinator Bill Lord.

A surprising number Mississippi politicians have ties to the white supremacist organization that radicalized Dylann Roof, the gunman who killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina on Wednesday night. A list of state leaders with ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) includes U.S. Senator Roger Wicker and former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.

The Council describes itself as a group organizing for “the interests of European-Americans” and describes black people as a retrograde species.

“Mississippi is toting a load of fat blacks on welfare,” the Council’s website once read. “Though disgust is a natural reaction when some blubbery welfare queens buys her pork chops and cream pies with food stamps, remember that the government is subsidizing this gluttony.”

On another occasion, the CCC railed against gay people in an editorial.

“If the South seizes upon queer marriage and beheads that serpent, then a new era for States Rights will commence,” the Council wrote. “By the Grace of God, queer marriage may be the petard upon which Brown v. Topeka (the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision that desegregated public schools), and all other pernicious civil rights regulations, will be blasted down the memory hole.”

While both of those quotes were reported on in 2004, the CCC continues to use similar rhetoric today. The blog for the Mississippi Council of Conservative Citizens includes headlines from this decade such as, “Niggers Stir Up Racism in Pearl High School,” “Blacks fluck [sic] or have to cheat to pass test,” and “Military Homos” (in response to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell).

Constant headlines from CCC websites led gunman Dylann Roof to commit the Charleston church massacre, he revealed in a manifesto:

“[The Trayvon Martin case] prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?”

So who exactly are the Mississippi politicians who have ties to the white supremacist organization? The list of politicians in Mississippi who have participated in CCC events, compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2004, includes 23 Mississippi current and former Mississippi politicians. Of the 23 listed, 15 still hold elected office in Mississippi today.

Let’s start with the former governor.

During his first gubernatorial run in 2003, Haley Barbour spoke at the Blackhawk Rally in Blackhawk, Mississippi. The rally, held by Mississippi CCC Chairman Bill Lord, was to raise money to provide busing for white-only academies —like the Carroll Academy. The Southern Poverty Law Center goes into more detail on these fundraisers:

The CCC is the direct descendant of the segregationist White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s, having been largely built on the earlier councils’ mailing lists. The Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education, ordering desegregation of the nation’s public schools, sparked the growth of the White Citizens Councils, which declared, “We will not be integrated. We are proud of our white blood and our white heritage of sixty centuries.” The councils’ first order of business after the court decision was to create private, all-white schools that came to be known as segregation, or seg, academies. By 1975, at least a half million white students had withdrawn from public schools to avoid mandatory desegregation.

The Carroll and Calhoun academies, which both were founded in 1968 and offer classes from kindergarten through high school, are revered by the CCC. The CCC’s longtime national field coordinator, Bill Lord, who was president of Carroll Academy for 14 years in the 1980s and 1990s, called them “the miracle of the century.” In 2004, Lord wrote in the Citizens Informer that the academies create “an atmosphere free of social experiments” for those who want to “associate with persons of like persuasion,” presumably meaning other whites. According to his biographical profile, Lord helped organize both Carroll and Calhoun academies, as well as six others in Arkansas and Tennessee.

The CCC works hard to support the schools, holding barbecue fundraisers that bring in substantial donations. In 1999, for instance, the CCC reported that it had raised over $100,000 for Calhoun Academy. The group also prominently features activities taking place at the academies in its publications. The CCC’s April-June 2010 Citizens Informer, for example, ran a photo of the Carroll Academy Lady Rebels basketball team along with congratulations for having won a championship.

In February 2010, Carroll Academy hosted a CCC meeting that featured Jeppi Barbour, brother of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, describing a petition drive for a ballot proposal the would require voters to show ID before voting.

Kay Cobb, then a Mississippi Supreme Court presiding justice, also attended that rally.

In 2012, while Gov. Barbour was considering a run for the White House, he effectively derailed his ambitions when he made national headlines for praising the original White Citizen’s Council.

Another national figure, Senator Roger Wicker, was a Congressman when he spoke at a Council event in Byhalia, Mississippi in 2000. Present at that rally was CCC CEO Gordon Baum and President Tom Dover. Wicker refused to comment.

But most of the state leaders contacted by the SPLC about their associations with the CCC who did comment expressed bewilderment.

Rep. Gary Chism, who spoke at multiple CCC meetings from 2001-2003, said that he had never read the group’s materials; he thought the Council’s purpose was simply to “preserve some of the symbols” of the Old South.

Rep. Bill Denny was even more confused. He thought it was a “business group.”

Then Rep. Joey Fillingane, now a state senator, who attended a “Save Our Heritage Rally” in 2000, said at the time that he was not aware that the event was sponsored by the CCC. He was invited by a local preacher to what seemed to be “a revival meeting of sorts,” he said.

Rep. John Moore told the SPLC that they should investigate the NAACP instead, adding that he did not see the CCC as a “KKK-style organization.”

The other leaders contacted refused comment, including former Rep. Jack Gadd, who was the only Mississippi Democrat identified by the SPLC as a member of the Council.

Dylann Roof, the Charleston gunman whose racist ideology was influenced by the Council of Conservative Citizens.

These leaders shouldn’t have been so confused by the goals of the CCC. After all, Republicans had been making negative headlines for years for their associations with the group. A report in the Miami Herald in 1999 shocked political observers when it was revealed that 17 Mississippi lawmakers had attended Council events between 1997 and 1998.

The attempt to deny knowledge of the CCC’s racist leanings has been tried before. After then-U.S. Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi gave a speech to the Council’s national board, welcomed its leaders to Washington, and posed for photos with them, he claimed that he didn’t know what the Council was about.

After the SPLC published the report in 2004, the Council ceased to publish the names of its speakers and attendees to protect the identities of the politicians it associates with. But it has continued to tease events with state leaders, including an unnamed Mississippi Supreme Court Justice.

Today, a cached version for the official website of the Council shows a story at the top entitled, “CofCC deeply saddened by Charleston spree killing.” In that posting, the Council notes that notes that 25% of Roof’s Facebook friends were black and writes that “it is unclear what caused Roof to go on the shooting spree.”

Others recent stories on the CCC website include, “White females attacked with concrete block in racial hate crime,” “15 more black on white murders,” “Two black men execute white man while yelling racial slurs in residential Vancouver neighborhood,” “Another white baby murdered by black gangsters,” and “The Truth About Interracial Rape.”

Before opening fire, Dylann Roof told the congregation: “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country.”

Just as the Council was a mystery to the politicians who attended its events, the origin of Dylann Roof’s ideas remains a mystery to the Council.