WATCH ABOVE: There were some remarkable moments in South Carolina when the families of those gunned down in a church. They found it in their hearts to forgive the man accused of murdering nine people at the Emanuel AME church Wednesday night. As Jackson Proskow reports, the families said hate will not win.
CHARLESTON, S.C. – The people of Charleston built a memorial and planned a vigil Friday to repudiate whatever a gunman would hope to accomplish by killing nine black community leaders inside one of the nation’s most important African-American churches.
“A hateful person came to this community with some crazy idea he’d be able to divide, but all he did was unite us and make us love each other even more,” Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. said as he described plans for an evening vigil at a sports arena near the church.
READ MORE: Is Dylann Roof a domestic terrorist?
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said the state will “absolutely” want the death penalty for Dylann Storm Roof, who allegedly opened fire after sitting through a Wednesday night Bible study session inside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
WATCH: Charleston church shooting suspect Dylann Roof appeared via video screen Friday afternoon during his first court hearing on nine charges of murder.
A steady stream of people brought flowers and notes and shared sombre thoughts at a growing memorial in front of the church, which President Barack Obama called “a sacred place in the history of Charleston and in the history of America.”
“This was an act of racial terrorism and must be treated as such,” the Rev. Cornell William Brooks, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said Friday in Charleston.
Roof, 21, had complained while getting drunk on vodka recently that “blacks were taking over the world” and that “someone needed to do something about it for the white race,” according to Joey Meek, who tipped the FBI when he saw his friend on surveillance images.
Brooks said hate crimes take aim at collective values, but “we have never allowed ourselves to be victims, we have never capitulated, we have never laid prostate before the demagogue of racism in this country.”
“This is a moment in which we say to them, the white nationalists movement, those purveyors of hate, we as Americans will not subscribe to that philosophy. We will not give up, we will not give in,” he said.
WATCH ABOVE: More details emerge about Charleston church shooting suspect Roof
Roof was arrested in North Carolina after an alert motorist recognized him, and returned in shackles to a county jail where he was being held next to the cell of Michael Slager, the white former police officer charged with fatally shooting black motorist Walter Scott in neighbouring North Charleston.
He appeared Friday for an initial bond hearing held by video link to the courthouse. In addition to the nine murder counts, Roof is charged with possessing a weapon during the commission of a violent crime – a common charge in South Carolina when a gun is involved, whether legally owned or not.
Meek said Roof told him he used birthday money from his parents to buy a .45 Glock pistol before the attack.
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The victims included Clementa Pinckney, a state senator who doubled as the church’s lead pastor, and eight others who each played multiple roles in their communities and families: ministers and coaches, teachers and a librarian, counsellors and choir singers and the church sexton who kept the historic building clean.
“The suspect entered the group and was accepted by them, as they believed that he wanted to join them in this Bible study,” Charleston County Coroner Rae Wilson said. Then, “he became very aggressive and violent.”
The Justice Department is investigating whether to file federal hate crime charges, although Attorney General Loretta Lynch said state prosecutions are sometimes more appropriate. Obama pointed to lax gun controls as a factor, and complained that Washington politics have shut down efforts to require universal background checks for gun purchases.
Most of the presidential candidates avoided mentioning guns at all.
On his Facebook page, Roof displayed the flags of defeated white-ruled regimes, posing with a Confederate flags plate on his car and wearing a jacket with stitched-on flag patches from apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia, which is now black-led Zimbabwe.
READ MORE: What we know about Charleston church shooting suspect Dylann Roof
The postings make him seem to be a “disaffected white supremacist,” said Richard Cohen, president of Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.
Police reports from Columbia, S.C., explain the misdemeanour charges on his record.
Roof was arrested in February after workers said he appeared dressed entirely in black and asking strange questions at the Columbiana shopping mall. He was charged with possessing suboxone, a drug typically used to treat heroin addiction. A trespassing charge was added after he showed up again in April, prompting a three-year ban from the mall.
WATCH: Details of Charleston victims as nation mourns church shooting
Spilling blood inside the “Mother Emanuel” church, founded in 1816, evoked painful memories nationwide that black churches have so often suffered from racist violence.
White landowners burned the church in 1822 after one of its founders, Denmark Vesey, tried to organize a slave revolt. Parishioners worshipped underground until after the Civil War, then rebuilt and grew stronger, eventually winning campaigns for voting rights and political representation.
READ MORE: What is the historical significance of the church at the centre of the Charleston shooting?
“We don’t see ourselves as just a place where we come to worship, but as a beacon and as a bearer of the culture,” Pinckney said in 2013.
“What the church is all about,” Pinckney said, is the “freedom to be fully what God intends us to be and have equality in the sight of God. And sometimes you got to make noise to do that. Sometimes you may have to die like Denmark Vesey to do that.”
WATCH: Who is Dylann Roof? CBS News’ Adriana Diaz looks into Roof’s background and what drove him to commit the shooting in Charleston.
Pinckney, 41, was a married father of two and a Democrat who spent 19 years in the South Carolina legislature. The other victims were Cynthia Hurd, 54; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Myra Thompson, 59; Ethel Lance, 70; Susie Jackson, 87; and the reverends DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49; Sharonda Singleton, 45; and Daniel Simmons Sr., 74.
The mayor said a Mother Emanuel Hope Fund has been set up at Wells Fargo bank to help pay for funerals and other family expenses, and help the church continue its work.
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Contributors include Russ Bynum, Alex Sanz, Meg Kinnard, David Goldman and Jacob Jordan in Charleston, South Carolina; Mitch Weiss in Columbia, South Carolina; Jay Reeves in Birmingham, Alabama; Eric Tucker in Washington.
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