Several Brooklyn elected officials and an ultra-Orthodox Jewish organization released statements, today in the aftermath of the brutal murders of nine parishioners including the pastor of a historic African-American Church in South Carolina that played a role in ending slavery and Jim Crow laws in the United States.
Six females and three males were shot to death inside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, during their Wednesday night Bible study. Among the dead was the honorable Reverend Clementa Pickney, the youngest African-American elected to the South Carolina State Senate, a devoted husband and the father of two children.
Following an intensive 14-hour manhunt, police nabbed the alleged cold-blooded and hateful killer, 21-year-old Dylan Storm Roof. Pictures in his social media accounts showed him wearing a jacket with white supremacist insignias.
“The apparent hate crime at Emanuel AME Church should shock the conscience of every American. This shooting serves as a painful reminder that the cancer of racial hatred continues to plague our country like a malignant tumor,” said Brooklyn Congressman Hakeem Jeffries. “The victims appear to have been targeted simply because they were God-fearing, church-going African-Americans. We have come a long way in America, but we still have a long way to go.”
President Barack Obama referred to the words Dr. Martin Luther King had once said following a bombing in a black church in North Carolina, “they lived meaningful lives and they died nobly. They say to each of us…black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely with who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murders…we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream…”
Central Brooklyn Congresswoman Yvette Clarke said for such an act of evil to have been committed in the church established by Denmark Vesey, the revolutionary abolitionist who fought to liberate his people from the bondage of slavery, recalls the worst racial violence of our nation’s history.
“This violent attack on the members of a historically African-American church who were attending Wednesday night bible study was an act of terrorism for which we must hold the perpetrator accountable to the full extent of the law,” Clarke said.
East Flatbush City Councilman Jumaane Williams noted, as did several of Brooklyn’s black intellectuals on social media, such as C. Zawadi Morris, the businesswoman and journalist that runs the Central Brooklyn news blog, BK Reader, that the media often portrays white killers – even those with extremely hateful motives – and black killers differently.
“Once he (Roof) is brought before the court, I’m sure our country will learn of his troubled childhood past and poor mental health that led to his actions, as opposed to the dismissive animal, barbarian or thug descriptors often used for shooters of a different hue,” said Williams.
Among the organizations condemning the murders as pure evil acts and renouncing any attitudes that would lead to such acts was the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Agudath Israel of America.
The deaths of nine people at the hand of a gunman at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is not only a personal tragedy for the relatives and friends of those who were killed, but yet another in the long list of murderous acts born of religious or racial hatred,” the organization said in a statement. “Ours is a community that has a long history of having suffered violence against worshippers. That makes us all the more sensitive to the pain that was caused in Charleston today.”
The briefing was convened to address the potential for copycat threats which could target area parishioners. Adams, a 22-year veteran of the NYPD, expressed the borough’s mourning for the victims of the Charleston attack and his resolute commitment to keeping all Brooklynites safe from terror.
