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.