Dylann Roof Photos and a Manifesto Are Posted on Website
Photo
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Dylann Roof spat on and burned the American flag, but waved the Confederate.
He
posed for pictures wearing a No. 88 T-shirt, had 88 Facebook friends
and wrote that number — white supremacist code for “Heil Hitler”— in the
South Carolina sand.
A
website discovered Saturday appears to offer the first serious look at
Mr. Roof’s thinking, including how the case of Trayvon Martin, the black
Florida teenager shot to death in 2012 by George Zimmerman, a
neighborhood watch volunteer, triggered his racist rage. The site shows a
stash of 60 photographs of Mr. Roof, many at Confederate heritage sites
or slavery museums, and includes a racist manifesto in which the author
criticized blacks as being inferior while lamenting the cowardice of
white flight.
“I
have no choice,” it reads. “I am not in the position to, alone, go into
the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic
city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to
Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing
anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the
bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”
The
website was first registered on Feb. 9 in the name of Dylann Roof, the
21-year-old man charged with entering a black church in Charleston
Wednesday night, attending a prayer meeting for an hour and then
murdering nine parishioners. The day after the site was registered, the
registration information was intentionally masked.
It
is not clear whether the manifesto was written by Mr. Roof or if he had
control of it. Nor is it clear whether he took the pictures with a
timer, or if someone else took them. The F.B.I. and Charleston police
officials say they are examining the site.
But
if it is genuine, as his friends seem to think, the tourist sites he
visited, the pictures that were posted and the hate-filled words filling
the site offered a chilling glimpse into the interests of an unemployed
high school dropout said to have a fixation on race and a murderous
rage.
“This
whole racist thing came into him within the past five years,” said
Caleb Brown, a childhood friend of Mr. Roof’s who is half-black. “He was
never really popular; he accepted that. He wasn’t like, ‘When I grow up
I am going to show all these kids.’ He accepted who he was, and who he
was changed, obviously.”
Mr.
Roof, who is accused of being the lone gunman who entered the Emanuel
A.M.E. Church Wednesday night and unleashing a murderous rampage with a
.45 handgun, has been charged with nine counts of murder in connection
with the killings. Victims included the Rev. Clementa C, Pinckney, who
was both the church pastor and a state senator.
Mr.
Roof, who was first identified by surveillance footage released the
morning after the killings, is being held at the Charleston County jail,
along with a North Charleston police officer charged with shooting an
unarmed African-American motorist in the back in April.
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Mr.
Roof’s friends say that he only spoke of his racist leanings once —
when he recently warned that he planned to do something crazy with the
gun he had purchased with the money he got from his parents for his 21st
birthday. But they say he was bothered by the uproar surrounding the
Trayvon Martin case.
Victims’ Families Address Dylann Roof
Family members of those killed Wednesday
at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.,
addressed the shooting suspect, Dylann Roof, in court.
By Associated Press on Publish Date June 19, 2015.
Photo by Pool photo.
The website, the lastrhodesian.com,
features a photo of a bloodied dead white man on the floor. The picture
appears to be a shot from “Romper Stomper,” an Australian movie about
neo-Nazis. It was first discovered by a blogger who goes by the pen name
Emma Quangel.
The blogger was inspired by another Twitter user to pay $49 for a reverse domain search that turned up the site.
According
to web server logs, the manifesto was last modified at 4:44 p.m.
Eastern time on Wednesday, the day of the Charleston shootings, and the
essays notes: “at the time of writing I am in a great hurry.”
The
manifesto says: “The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon
Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I
decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I
was unable to understand what the big deal was,” the essay says. “It was
obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this
prompted me to type in the words ‘black on White crime’ into Google, and
I have never been the same since that day.”
Violent History: Attacks on Black Churches
The killing of nine people at the Emanuel African
Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., is among a long list of
attacks targeting predominantly black churches in the United States.
The account cites the website of the far-right Council of Conservative Citizens as a site he learned from.
A
friend of Mr. Roof’s, Jacob Meek, 15, said the references to the
Trayvon Martin case made it clear that Mr. Roof had written the essay.
“That’s his website,” he said. “He wrote it, and I just can tell.”
Watchdog
groups that track right-wing extremism say the manifesto reflects the
language found in white supremacist forums online and dovetails with
what has been said about Mr. Roof thus far — that he had
self-radicalized, and that he did not belong to a particular hate group.
“It’s clear that he was extremely receptive to those ideas,” said Mark
Pitcavage, the director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on
Extremism. “At the same time, he does not have a sophisticated knowledge
of white supremacy.”
In
one picture, Mr. Roof is shown posing with wax figures of slaves. In
others, he posed with a handgun that appears to be a .45-caliber Glock.
He had a .45-caliber Glock in his car when he was arrested Thursday, the
police said.
Mr.
Roof is alone in all the photos, which show a slave plantation;
Sullivan’s Island, S.C.; and the Museum and Library of Confederate
History in Greenville, S.C. He sports the same gloomy look in many of
the photos, but others depict nature scenes and vacation photographs.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s glossary of racist skinhead terms,
“Fourteen stands for the ‘14 words’ slogan coined by David Lane,” who
died in 2007 while serving a 190-year sentence for his part in the
assassination of a Jewish talk show host. The slogan, according to the
center, is “‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for
white children.” The letter H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, so
88 is a known code for “Heil, Hitler.” The website’s links contain
several passages of long racist rants, saying Hispanics are enemies and
“Negroes” have lower I.Q.s and low impulse control. The writings are not
signed.
Mr. Roof’s Tumblr had contained photos that matched his Facebook page, but both were taken down after the killings.
The
manifesto discovered Saturday uses defamatory terms for blacks, whom he
accused of being “stupid and violent” with “the capacity to be very
slick.” It laments white flight, and suggested that the whites should
instead stay behind in cities and fight.
Criticisms
are levied at Hispanics and Jews, but Asians are praised for being
racists and potential allies. Whites are unfairly portrayed as all
having been slave owners, the essay says. In reality, the author wrote,
slavery was not that bad.
Mr. Brown said his friend’s transformation appeared to have occurred after he transferred to a new high school in Lexington.
“He wasn’t putting on Facebook ‘I hate black people. I am going to shoot up a church,” Mr. Brown said.
