Charleston massacre exposes hate crimes and their tools

• I have no patience for the lame argument that the Confederate flag denotes proud history.
• In the 1950s%2C it was unfurled anew as a rallying tool for resistance to civil rights in the South.
• It stopped being about the Civil War long ago.

I have walked down the avenues of Charleston in South Carolina, and admired the gleaming Emanuel AME Church that stands resolutely on Calhoun Street.

This hallowed sanctuary, where the savage murder of nine worshipers exploded on June 17, is in the central district of what locals call the Holy City. They call it that because there are churches all around the beautiful town.

There are other landmarks, too. Some speak to old divisions in Charleston's history — ranging from servitude and discrimination to enlightenment and high culture. Less visible, there is the residue of hate and intolerance, resentment and fear. This is true across our South.

A short distance to the south of Emanuel Church is the Old Slave Mart, now a museum. A few blocks to the west is the campus of the College of Charleston. Out in the harbor, sitting just on the horizon, is Fort Sumter, where in 1861 Americans went to war with themselves. This city was Ground Zero.

The nine cold-blooded murders this month were a monstrous crime, in no small part because of where the heinous thing happened. The twisted man who pulled the trigger had invaded a sanctuary, a weekly Bible study, and brazenly sat among people of peace.

On this Sunday, in Tennessee as surely as in South Carolina, we are all left to ponder many questions:

Is this how we live now? Must even a church be watchful, in the way we must in our airports since 9/11?

Must we tolerate even more of the unhelpful, political blather of gun zealots who blame the victims for failing to arm themselves?

Will the South ever fully heal?

I have no patience for the lame argument that the Confederate flag denotes proud history. It stopped being about the Civil War long ago. Much more recently, in the 1950s, it was unfurled anew as a rallying tool for resistance to civil rights in the South.

On the flag issue, the response of some politicians over the past week has been welcome. So be it. Let the overdue cleansing of the public symbols of subjugation and defiance be done. Surely now this symbol can go away, at least from our public institutions. If you want to honor Southern history, plant a magnolia, not a battle flag.

So should the public likenesses of Nathan Bedford Forrest be gone now. If you hear anyone defend his honor, ask if they know what happened at Fort Pillow, in West Tennessee.

And what of that gunman who took nine lives in Charleston?

His crime was about hatred, not history, though the flag and its meaning for him may have contributed to his premeditated violence. Don't blame it on "mental illness" or insanity, at least not until a court determines it was. Don't excuse a mass execution that easily. It appears this man's motive was more sinister, less human.

His crime was not just about one loser with a .45 in his belt who planned to sneak up on good people and shoot them. It's also about crimes that erupt in a saturated gun culture. (In 2012, the U.S. had less than 5 percent of the world's population but 42 percent of the world's civilian weapons.) It's about elected leaders who won't do anything substantive about this danger to innocents.

It's about how all of that mixes somewhere in a festering dark room, and suddenly the devil walks out the door and disaster follows.

Like my father and his father, I am a son of the South, and like them I have been a hunter. Like them and most outdoorsmen, I don't shoot people or hate any man. But I realize now that in my life I have been too tolerant of the historical symbols of oppression, too oblivious to how they can encourage a mean spirit, and of how the glut of guns makes crime too easy and fear too prevalent.

When all the news conferences about flags and statues are done, may these same politicians show courage to deal with the other sources of hate and the tools that facilitate it in our culture.

This is no longer about the past. No way. It's about the present now, and our children's lives.

Keel Hunt is a Tennessean columnist and the author of "Coup: The Day the Democrats Ousted Their Governor." Reach him at Keel@TSGNashville.com.