Charleston: Southerners rail against racist stereotype

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.

Roof, a 21-year-old white man who went to high school in this Southern town near the state capital, has been charged with murdering nine African-Americans on Wednesday at a church in Charleston, 160km away.

Many people in Lexington, as in towns across South Carolina, struggled to come to grips with one of their own being charged with such a heinous crime. In interviews this week, they also worried that Roof, a high school dropout who embraced racist symbolism and carried a handgun, will reinforce a pervasive and unflattering stereotype of white Southern males as a group of poorly educated, gun-toting racists.

“They think we’re all like that young man, waving the Confederate flag with hate and racism,” said lifelong resident Letha Drafts, 72, who attends a church in Lexington that has a mixed race congregation.

Samantha Evans, at the downtown restaurant Creekside at the Old Mill, said she knows exactly the image the world has of them, “We’re all racist hillbillies,” she said. “But that couldn’t be further from the truth. We’re full of hospitality no matter what your race is.”

Negative perceptions of Southerners were widely expressed on social media after the Charleston killings.

“So either these dumb rednecks are in tune with the universe and everyone else is wrong or they are just really racist,” one person posted to Twitter.

On Saturday, a website emerged in which Roof appears to have written a racist manifesto and posed in photographs with a handgun and standing in front of a Confederate military museum and plantation slave houses.

Earlier this week, there were other suggestions in his online postings that he embraced racism. His Facebook page shows him wearing a black jacket that prominently features the flags of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and apartheid-era South Africa — two African countries once ruled by the white minorities.

Another photo on Facebook, published by a friend, shows Roof sitting on the hood of a black car with a license plate that says “Confederate States of America”.