The mass murder of nine African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist has to be understood in relation to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the racist counter-movement spearheaded by police.

Dylann Roof’s action is part of that broader racist reaction. In an online post, Roof is alleged to have written: “The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case".

Martin was an unarmed Black teen shot dead in Florida three years ago by neighbourhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman. Martin's murder provoked protests across the country. Zimmerman was later acquitted, leading to more protests.

We may see more violent racist actions in opposition to the new Black movement, as we saw in the 1960s with murders, bombings and arson against the civil rights and Black liberation movements.

A church’s radical history

That the attack occurred in Charleston is telling. Earlier this year, according to a report in the New York Times, the website lastrhodesian.com was registered in the name of Roof. One of the passages from what is being described as Roof's "manifesto", logged on the day of the massacre, reads:

“I chose Charleston because it … at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

Roof’s choice of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church as the scene of his terrorist attack was political. It is one of the oldest Black churches in the South, having been established as a refuge for slaves in the early 1800s. Ever since, it has played an important role in the fight for Black rights.

One of the founders of the church was Denmark Vesey, a slave who had bought his freedom from his owner. Vesey was the leader of a planned armed slave revolt that was to have taken place in May 1822. The conspiracy was hatched in the church, where Blacks could meet out of the sight of whites, but was betrayed by a house slave.

As a result, 130 Blacks were charged and convicted of various crimes. Thirty-six, including Vesey, were hanged. Four whites were jailed for supporting the planned rebellion. The church was burned down, but the congregation survived and later rebuilt it.

The present church has a shrine dedicated to Vesey. During the Civil War, one of the first Black regiments in the Union army to fight the slavocracy was named after him.

All this history is well known in Charleston. The church, affectionately known as the “Mother Church” among Blacks, is a symbol for the Black struggle – supported by anti-racist whites and hated by racists.

An activist pastor

Roof entered the church ostensibly to join a bible study class (whites are welcomed in the church). A survivor reported that he asked to have the pastor, Clemens Pinckney, pointed out to him. Roof then sat down next to Pinckney, his central target.

Pinckney was well known in Charleston as an advocate for the Black community. He was also an elected member of the South Carolina state legislature. Roof looks to have singled him out for political assassination because of his record.

Pinckney and the Emanuel AME Church were involved in the Black Lives Matter protests, and Pinckney got through the state legislature a law to require cops to wear body cameras.

The police shooting of Walter Scott in North Charleston on 4 April in particular was a galvanising event for the Black movement and the racist counter-movement.

Scott, who was unarmed as in so many of these cases, was shot in the back as he ran from police. This was caught on video by a bystander, so the cops couldn’t cover it up (although they tried). The video was so damning that the cop has been charged with murder, unlike in so many of the other cases.

The fact that charges were brought at all infuriated racists, who were especially angry at Pinckney.

Racist paranoia

Roof’s reported statement in the church that he had decided to kill Black people because they “are taking over the country” is not isolated. This racist paranoia was also demonstrated in another recent case in Cleveland, Ohio. This stemmed from an earlier police shooting in November 2012. In that incident, two unarmed Blacks, Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, led police on a high-speed chase after police tried to stop Russell for a wrong turn.

Sixty police cars joined the chase, which ended in a hail of 137 shots, killing both. Officer Michael Brelo fired 49 of those bullets. When other cops stopped firing, Brelo jumped up on the hood of the stopped car and fired another 15 bullets through the windshield at the pair.

More than 60 cops were suspended, but Brelo was the only one criminally charged. He was found not guilty in May this year. After the ridiculous verdict, one of Brelo’s lawyers told the press: “We stood toe to toe with an oppressive government” and defeated it.

Where do the beliefs of the racist far right that they are the victims of an “oppressive government” or that “Blacks are taking over the country” come from?

Whites in the defeated South felt themselves victims after the Civil War. Such beliefs again came to the fore after the victory of the civil rights movement in overturning the system of legal segregation in the Jim Crow South in the 1960s, and of other gains won by the broader Black liberation movement. The federal government was forced by these struggles to codify these victories, and racist whites came to blame the government itself.

As a result of the victories, more Blacks (such as Clemens Pinckney) have been elected to office. A Black was even elected president! “They’re taking over!”

This is at the heart of the mantra of the right against “big government”. They are not against the bloated military, but against government programs they see as aiding Blacks and the most exploited workers.

With the rise of Blacks Lives Matter, the federal government has conducted investigations into many police departments and found gross racism and violence against Blacks, Latinos and others. One of these reports was about the Cleveland police, so the racist cop’s racist lawyer is proud that they won against the “oppressive government”.

It is farcical. The history of US capitalism is intertwined with the oppression and economic exploitation of Blacks, from slavery to the institutionalised national oppression of Blacks today.

Victories have been won, from the Civil War to the defeat of Jim Crow. But as Black Lives Matter has demonstrated, de facto segregation and oppression still exist. They are so engrained that even well-meaning people talk about “the Black community” without questioning why there is such a category at all, accepting segregation as almost a natural phenomenon.

Far from oppressing white racists, the government maintains this system of national oppression. It is this system that spawns the racism that is in the minds of the Dylann Roofs of this world.