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The South Carolina and American flags flying at half-mast behind the Confederate flag at the State Capitol building in Columbia, South Carolina on Friday. Photo: AFP
Charleston:Â The mass killing in a church at the heart of African American history has reignited an old and bitter debate over the place of Confederate flag in the South.
Shortly after news broke that a young white man had killed eight people at prayer as well as their pastor, the state senator Reverend Clementa Pinckney, South Carolina's conservative governor, Nikki Haley, issued a Facebook statement saying, "While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know now that we'll never understand what motivates anyone to enter into one of our places of worship and take the life of another."
Thousands of people hold hands and sing during a prayer vigil for the nine victims. Photo: AFP
Given the history of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, this was considered an insult by some.
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Better known as Mother Emanuel, the church lies just five minutes walk from the site of Gadsden's Wharf, where 100,000 enslaved Africans who were brought to America were disembarked and sold.
And it lies at the heart of African America. It is the oldest black church in the South and ever since it was founded in 1816 it has been at the centre of the fight for freedom. Activists from this church fought for emancipation, against segregation and for civil rights.
Barbara Lloyd of Charleston cries during the singing of 'We Shall Overcome' at a memorial service for the victims. Photo: AP
And by the time Governor Haley had issued her statement it had already been widely reported that the accused had sat and prayed with the victims for an hour before declaring, "You rape our women and you're taking over our country" and gunning them down.
Photographs of the young man had been published of him wearing white supremacist symbols on his jacket, and posing with a Confederate flag on a car licence plate.
That flag, and South Carolina's long and stubborn history with it, has become part of this story.
The men of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity lead a crowd of people in prayer outside the Emanuel AME Church on Friday. Photo: AP
The flag had largely disappeared from public view until the rise of the civil rights movement, when it was first flown at the top of the State Capitol Building in 1962 in an act of defiance at those would enforce desegregation.
After another long battle it was finally removed from the dome and placed atop a nearby memorial.
Asked after the shooting why it should not be removed entirely, Governor Haley had trouble finding words.
"I think that conversation will probably come back up again," she said. "And you what we hope that we do things the way South Carolinians do. Which is have the conversation, allow some thoughtful words to be exchanged, be kind about it. Come together on what we're trying to achieve and how we're trying to do it."
Standing outside Mother Emanuel on Friday night Cal Morrison, who grew up, as he puts it, riding the back of the bus in segregated Charleston, told Fairfax Media that many African Americans compared the Confederate flag with the Swastika. He does not suggest that the flag prompted the shooting, but he does believe that in flying it the state is contributing to an environment of hatred.
Mother Emanuel remains a crime scene, the uprights of its front fence threaded with black and yellow police tape.
Friday's memorial service was held at a nearby basketball arena. Those who attended seemed to have little doubt the Confederate flag should go.
When the Reverend Nelson Rivers introduced Charleston's white mayor, Joseph P Riley jnr, as the man who had once led a march 160 kilometres to the state capital to protest the flying of the flag the crowd of some few thousand – more white than black – leapt to its feet and cheered.
Mr Riley spoke in a direct and easy manner, and he did not shy away from America's dark history or its current torment. Nor did he ever name the 21-year-old suspect in the shooting.
"This bad person lived a hundred-plus miles away. He was not a Charlestonian, he was not of the low country. Whatever fostered that hatred did not come from us," he said.
"But … we must acknowledge that he was not an alien. He did not come from out of space. He was living in our country, living in our state and somehow his mind was filled with racial hatred, so one way to respond is, we need to seek to understand where this is coming from … we just have to be honest in this discussion, we must encourage a national discussion, there has got to be a better way."
He suggested that discussion should also include the availability of guns.
"We don't want to live in a country where you need a security guard for Bible study. We don't want to live that way."
Reverend Rivers said that it had crossed his mind that in living to the age of 41 Reverend Pinckney had lasted two years longer than Reverend Martin Luther King, who was assassinated by a racist at the age of 39, and Medgar Evers, who was shot dead at 37, and Malcolm X, 39.
He called for a new move to remove the flag from the grounds of the state house in the names of the nine dead.
Again the crowd rose and clapped, cheered and wept.