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Members of Mother Emanuel fought Jim Crow and supported SEIU 1199's 1968 campaign to organize hospital workers, a church which protested the police shooting of 40 black students, killing two at Orangeburg State in the '60s, and the recent police shooting of Walter Scott in North Charleston.

The African American community in Charleston and all those who support racial equality, democracy and justice understand that the world is watching, and this is time to mobilize and step up the struggle to bring an end to racist terror and structural racism in general.

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Racist vigilantism is a logical course of action for those who think big government is the problem. It's like red meat for those who hate President Obama and want to "put black people in their place." Add the elements of the insane proliferation of guns (another GOP core issue), daily doses of racist propaganda on Fox, the crisis of mental health care, and it's clear that the threats of more shootings like Charleston continue to touch hundreds of communities.

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At the scene of the crime, when asked why he did what he did, Dylann Roof told the sole survivor, "You (Black people) rape our women and you're taking over our country." So he kills nine innocent people, including six women, and his actions were supposed to be a fight against the rape of women? The use of the rape charge to murder Black men is as old as racism and has cost thousands of innocent lives over the centuries.

In South Carolina, Republicans control both houses of the state legislature and they keep corporate profits high and wages and union organization low. Remember the Charleston 5 dock workers strike; the 2001 police frame up of 5 Black striking Charleston Longshore workers described in Tim Wheeler's article "Unite against Racist Terror." The GOP opposes gun control and pushes mass incarceration and racial profiling in policing, convictions and sentencing. African Americans are 28 percent of the state's population but are 62 percent of those in state prisons. Over 70 percent of those incarcerated in South Carolina are Black, Latino and Native American. They talk anti-crime but in reality they are conducting a war on the poor.

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