Charleston, United States - A racially motivated hate crime? Another example of America's epidemic of gun violence? The work of the devil in a "sinful world"?
Charleston, a genteel southern city of 128,000 that was once the US capital of the transatlantic slave trade, was in a stunned state of grief Thursday, a day after a young white man gunned down nine people in a historic African-American church.
When police reopened the street that runs past the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a white 19th century gothic building with a towering steeple, Joyce Gilliard rushed down to pay her respects.
"I have a family friend who said that three of her family members were killed," said the 22-year-old African-American film industry hair stylist, whose grandmother's house is around the corner from the church.
"Everyone's numb, everyone's still in a state of shock," Gilliard, seeking relief from the sun in a broad rim hat, told AFP when asked to describe the mood in her home city.
- Flowers and prayer -
When Gilliard got to the church, she found an ever-growing cluster of flowers and shiny helium balloons left by anonymous mourners -- and a white family on a week's holiday from Delaware, their heads bowed in prayer.
She immediately joined the Johnsons -- mother Rhonda, 50, and daughters Madison, 16, and Lauren, 21 -- and embraced them as news photographers jostled to capture the scene.
"I feel it was the devil" who carried out the massacre, the elder Johnson -- who described herself and her family as devout Christians -- said afterwards, dabbing back tears.
Police arrested the alleged gunman, suspected white supremacist 21-year-old Dylann Roof, in North Carolina earlier Thursday, in what they called a hate crime.
Asked how God could have allowed such a tragedy, Johnson said: "God was there, but we live in a sinful world. I don't have all the answers, but God will come down and he will heal."
On the sidewalk across the street, Daron-Lee Calhoun II, a 27-year-old African American, saw the slaughter as evidence of "festering white supremacy and racism," especially in the southern United States.
AFP
