CHARLESTON, S.C. (Tribune News Service) — A website possibly created by Dylann Roof, who is charged with killing nine people at a church in Charleston on Wednesday, contains a racist message that a hate group expert said is largely copied from the website of a white nationalist organization active in South Carolina.
“To take a saying from my favorite film, ‘Even if my life is worth less than a speck of dirt, I want to use it for the good of society,’” says the text on the website, titled LastRhodesian.com. Also on the site is the widely circulated Facebook photo showing Roof wearing a jacket with a patch of the flag of Rhodesia, the former name of the African nation Zimbabwe when it was run by a white minority government.
“We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet,” the website text says. “Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”
Roof, 21, is in jail facing nine murder charges from the Wednesday night shooting at Emanuel AME church, one of the oldest and most prominent black churches in the South. According to the charging documents, the six women and three men were shot with a Glock .45-caliber handgun.
A report from DomainTools.com, which tracks ownership of Internet domains, says LastRhodesian.com was registered in February in Roof’s name, using his address in Eastover, S.C. The author of the text is not identified and the message is not signed.
The FBI is reviewing the website, a law enforcement source said.
Roof reportedly took a recent turn into virulent racism. In addition to the message, the site also had a file with 60 photos, most of them appearing to be of Roof. One shows him holding a Confederate flag in his bedroom, and others show him at a Confederate history museum. In one photo he is holding a burning American flag.
Another shows a Glock and seven bullets.
In the letter, the writer says he was not raised “in a racist home or environment.”
“Growing up, in school, the white and black kids would make racial jokes toward each other, but they were all jokes,” the message says. “The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case.”
Martin, an unarmed black teenager, was shot to death on Feb. 26, 2012, in Sanford, Fla., by George Zimmerman, who identified as Latino. Zimmerman, a former neighborhood watch volunteer, was acquitted of second-degree murder in July 2013.
The text said the writer went to the website of a white nationalist hate group called the Council of Conservative Citizens and “realized that something was very wrong,” because black-on-white crime was being ignored.
Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, said in an interview Saturday that most of the manifesto is material lifted from the CCC, which he called a “modern reincarnation” of the old White Citizens Councils that in the 1950s and ’60s resisted school desegregation in the South.
“The CCC is very active in Roof’s home state of South Carolina,” Cohen said. “It seems the CCC media strategy was successful in recruiting Roof into the radical right.”
He identified the CCC’s webmaster as white nationalist Kyle Rogers, based near Charleston. He said Rogers has been pushing to bring attention to what he calls black-on-white crime and has written “article after article” on the CCC website about such crime. He said Rogers was particularly active in making statements after the Trayvon Martin shooting.
“It’s a staple of Rogers and the CCC’s media plan,” Cohen said.
Rogers also manages a flag store, which sells the flag of the government of Rhodesia — the same flag sewn on the jacket worn by Roof in his Facebook profile, Cohen said.
The text, which also attacks Jews and Latinos, is studded with racial epithets and ideology, and a sense that whites are being treated unfairly.
“And who is fighting for him? Who is fighting for these White people forced by economic circumstances to live among negroes? No one, but someone has to.”
The writer concludes by apologizing for typing errorss, saying he’s in a hurry.
“Unfortunately at the time of writing I am in a great hurry and some of my best thoughts, actually many of them have been to be left out and lost forever.”
––––
(Serrano reported from Washington.)
———
©2015 Los Angeles Times
Visit the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Show Comments