Fifty-two years ago, the great Gene Patterson wrote in these pages of another assault on the sanctity of a black church.
Patterson, then the editor of The Constitution, issued a searing indictment for the bombing at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, which claimed the lives of four innocent girls.
He described a mother, clutching the shoe of her dead daughter and weeping.
“Every one of us in the white South holds that small shoe in his hand,” Patterson wrote. “It is too late to blame the sick criminals who handled the dynamite. The FBI and the police can deal with that kind.
“Only we can trace the truth, Southerner — you and I. We broke those children’s bodies.”
He observed that the men who murdered them sprang from a poisoned well of hatred and division that civil people had tolerated in silence far too long.
Dylann Storm Roof descends from the men who murdered those children. It is a straight line. And our society bears no less responsibility.
“We watched the stage set without staying it,” Patterson wrote. “We listened to the prologue unbestirred. We saw the curtain opening with disinterest. We have heard the play. We — who go on electing politicians who heat the kettles of hate.”
As Patterson noted about the bombers, Roof didn’t seem to know any better.
By acknowledging that, we can in no way absolve him. Roof carries the burden of his actions.
But he didn’t act alone. A national toxic cynicism abetted him. We all stand alongside Dylann Storm Roof as accessories.
We – who tolerate virulent partisanship on all sides, willful misbelief, easily swallowed half-truths or outright lies. Once-innocuous adjectives like “liberal” or “conservative” have become curses, spat out to extinguish conversation, honest debate or inquiry.
We – who disdain, dismiss and condemn those having different experiences or beliefs, no matter how sincerely held. We ignore history. Worse yet, we routinely twist it far beyond factual recognition to suit our own prejudices.
For much of his adult life, Roof has lived in a world where respected men and women portray our country as having been conquered by an alien force and in need of liberation – by force if necessary.
Since Roof was a teen, a mixed-race man has been president of the United States, his election portrayed as the ultimate closing of our racial divide. But soon after that election, how often would Roof have heard from people vested with authority that the president was an African-born impostor plotting to undermine American society? How often has he heard urgent pleas from respected men and women to take back our country, to in fact arm ourselves to do so? How often has he heard the exaggerated tales of black people getting special favors at the expense of whites?
The answers to these questions surely will emerge, but there is no mystery about what drove Roof to strike at the heart of the African-American church. He made it clear to his friends and even as he opened fire that he believed the moment had come to retake his country with violence.
Yet, let’s not let Roof become our convenient scapegoat.
That would be insufficient tribute to the nine innocent people he murdered Wednesday night even as they attempted to share with him their joy of Scripture.
In these dark days we should listen to their joy. How would they - the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Ethel Lee Lance, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Tywanza Sanders, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Susie Jackson, Cynthia Hurd, Daniel L. Simmons Sr. and Myra Thompson - counsel us?
First, of course, should come love. Then justice.
To obtain justice and sufficiently honor their sacrifice, we must reach deeply inside and confront our own culpability. Then we must change. They believed sacrifice can be accepted because of it offers redemption.
Roof didn’t know any better, but we do.
In 1963, Patterson wrote: “We know better. We created the day. We bear the judgment.”
We must sit in the awful silence of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church - a silence that seconds earlier had been filled with prayer. We must all swear an oath to love the truth. We, all of us who know better, must vow to break the line from church bomber to mass murderer.
We have dug nine graves. We all must now plant flowers to honor the innocents and tend to the work they bequeathed us.
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