Charleston killings expose stains of racism, violence

Wednesday, June 17, 2015, will go down in history as a day of agonizing irony for race relations in this nation.

On Wednesday morning, Loretta Lynch placed her hands on the Bible of abolitionist Frederick Douglass to take the oath as this nation’s first black female attorney general with the first black president of the United States looking on.

On Wednesday night, nine African Americans were slaughtered in cold blood inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in a cowardly shooting attack by a demented young white man.

Within the span of 12 hours, the promise of accelerated progress in racial justice in this country quickly degenerated into a reality check that virulent strands of racial hatred remain a small but painfully real part of the American fabric of 2015.

The bloodbath inside the church sadly rekindles images of other acts of racial hatred over the decades, most notably the bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church in September 1963 that killed four innocent young black girls.

Between Birmingham and Charleston, our nation has slowly but steadily marched forward on a path of progress in racial harmony that has crystallized many of the noble visions of equality that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so poignantly dreamed of on another historic day in Washington, D.C., in August 1963.

Along the way, setbacks have slowed progress, but modern-day freedom fighters have refused to go backward.

To their credit, family and friends of victims of Wednesday’s attack plus Charleston residents of all racial backgrounds have acted likewise — repudiating the attack and vowing to move on.

“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 Friday.

PRESCRIPTION FOR RECOVERY

That same powerful mix of love, unity and fortitude will be needed in coming days and weeks as Charleston and the nation continue their healing.

Part of that healing, however, must include intense investigation of the hate crime, harsh punishment for the shooter and long-term strategies to lessen opportunities for such senseless violence.

As President Barack Obama said in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, “At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries,” Obama said.

He’s right, and he added, “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this.” He clearly was alluding to his oft-repeated call to use expanded background checks to lessen the likelihood of guns getting into the wrong hands.

While we always have staunchly defended Americans’ Second Amendment rights to bear arms, we recognize that with those rights come responsibilities. Most Americans agree. A full 75 percent of respondents to a recent Pew poll supported expansion of background checks.

But of course, even with the strictest background checks, some firearms will end up in irresponsible hands. That’s why it’s important for friends and family members of those with propensities toward violence work to ensure that firearms are securely locked. The state cannot and should not be expected to do it all.

By using the tragedy in Charleston as a starting point to personally commit to reducing gun violence in our own spheres of influence, some long-lasting good may result from the fleeting minutes of evil that ripped at the heart of Charleston and the nation this week.