Workers Solidarity Movement

The terrorist white supremacist suspect behind the Charleston murders has been identified as Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old from Lexington County, S.C. In this photo he is wearing the apartheid-era South African flag and the flag of the racist Rhodesian state on his jacket. Another photos shows that his car had a 'Confederate States of America' racist flag license plate.

The murders were carried out almost on the anniversary of June 16, 1822. That was the date in 1822 when Denmark Vesey planned a slave revolt in Charleston in order to liberate those enslaved, and sail to the black revolutionary republic of Haiti. Vesey was one of the founders of the church where yesterdays murders took place. The revolt was originally planned for July 14th, the anniversary of the storming of the bastille during the French revolution but was brought forward because of a fear of informers.

Vasey and 34 other Black people were hanged for their opposition to White Supremacy despite the fact that not one white person was killed or injured. There was a joke of a trial in which witnesses testified under threat of death or torture, the proceedings were held in secret, and defendants were unable to confront their accusers or hear what the testimony against them was. Charleston officials ordered the large congregation to be dispersed and the church was burnt down.

Despite this as recently as 2010 one local white Charleston columnist penned an article headed 'Denmark Vesey Was a Terrorist' in opposition to a statue being erected for Vesey. Charleston is covered with statues of racist white men holding guns who fought to maintain slavery, perhaps he hadn't noticed.

The pattern with white supremacist attacks in the US is that they are passed off at the work of lone mad men, somehow separated from this brutal racist history and current practise of the USA. This reflects the need to pretend that racism is something in the distant past, to be gotten over and forgotten rather than a systematic part of the present that continues to be reproduced through the mass incarceration of Black men and routine police shootings now being highlighted by the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

Our solidarity greetings to all fighting white supremacism in the US today in all its forms from police killings to terrorist gunmen to mass incarceration.

18th June

WORDS: Andrew Flood (Follow Andrew on Twitter )