As S. Carolina honors victims of shooting, Alabama lowers flags

Associated Press

COLUMBIA, S.C.

State senator and pastor Clementa Pinckney was carried Wednesday into the Statehouse where he served the people for nearly 20 years, becoming the first African-American since Reconstruction to rest in honor in the South Carolina Rotunda. Hours later, his congregation returned to the scene of a massacre, keeping up his work of saving souls.

Meeting for Wednesday night Bible study exactly one week after Pinckney and eight others were fatally shot, a crowd of people packed the basement of Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Church where the shootings took place to show their faith and restore their sanctuary.

“Because of our faith, we have shown up once more again to declare that Jesus lives and because he lives, we can face tomorrow,” interim pastor Norvel Goff intoned before a gathering that included several family members of shooting victim Myra Thompson.

The killings appear to be creating waves of soul-searching that are reverberating far beyond the historic black church and the state Capitol where Pinckney’s widow and two young daughters met his horse-drawn carriage, evoking memories of black and white images of other slain civil-rights figures five decades earlier.

In state after state, the Confederate symbols embraced by the shooting suspect have suddenly come under official disrepute. Gov. Nikki Haley started the groundswell Monday by calling on South Carolina lawmakers to debate taking down the Confederate battle flag flying in front of the Statehouse. But Alabama’s governor was able to act much more swiftly, issuing an executive order that brought down four secessionist flags Wednesday.

In Montgomery, where the Confederacy was formed 154 years ago and where Jefferson Davis was elected president, Gov. Robert Bentley, a conservative Republican, compared the banner to the universally shunned symbols of Nazi Germany.