South Carolina's governor said the Confederate flag should be removed from the Statehouse grounds after the fatal shooting at a historic black church.

Hundreds of people packed a sweltering Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston yesterday as it re-opened to worshippers just days after a 21-year-old white gunman shot dead nine black church members.

At Dooley’s Bait shop in Lexington, South Carolina, the talk around the worm bins and minnow tanks was dominated by one subject: Dylann Roof, a previously unremarkable local young man now accused of one of most shocking murders in state history.

Peniel E Joseph sets last week’s massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in the context of a climate of denial in America over national issues of racial inequality

Members of a historic black church worshipped at their sanctuary for the first time since a gunman opened fire at a Bible study meeting, killing nine people.

A historic black church in Charleston will hold its first service since nine members of its congregation were shot dead during a Bible study session.

A drinking buddy of the white man accused of killing nine people at a Charleston church says the suspect told him a week earlier that he planned to shoot up a college campus in the city.

FOR the last century or more America has been the world’s great and largely benign superpower. The country has afforded opportunity and protection to tens of millions of people, millions of them Irish, millions more destitute European economic or war refugees.

Relatives of the nine black community leaders shot down during a Bible study session confronted the shooting suspect today during his initial court hearing, and spoke of love.

21-year-old Dylann Roof has been charged with nine counts of murder in connection with an attack on an historic black South Carolina church.

A gunman who killed nine people during a shooting spree at a Charleston church should get the death penalty, South Carolina governor Nikki Haley has said.

America has to face “hard truths” about guns and race in the wake of the shooting at a historic black church in South Carolina that left nine dead, US presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has said.

A childhood friend of the man accused of shooting dead nine people inside a black church in South Carolina said he told him a few weeks ago he had “a plan”.

An intense manhunt is under way for a young white man who joined a prayer meeting and then opened fire inside a church, killing nine people.

Nine people have been killed in a mass shooting at America's largest black church and authorities are investigating the attack as a hate crime.