그만큼 $ 88 million settlement announced Thursday with survivors and the families of nine people fatally shot in 2015 ...에서 a historically Black church in Charleston, 사우스 캐롤라이나, 이다 “big ‘F-you’ to White supremacists,” an attorney for the victims’ families said.
White supremacists have used the number “88” 가지고있다 hate symbol for decades, but on Thursday, that number was reflected in the millions of dollars that the Justice Department will pay over FBI lapses that allowed Dylann Roof, an avowed White supremacist, to buy the semi-automatic pistol used in the massacre.
“오늘, we get to give a big ‘F-you’ to the White supremacists and racists in this country by saying that we are taking this tragedy that they tried to tear our country apart with and build Black communities and generational wealth,” said Bakari Sellers, an attorney who helped broker the agreement and a CNN political commentator.
수 “88” has been used as a reference to “Heil Hitler” 때문에 “H” is the 8th letter in the alphabet, said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.
White supremacists use it as a part of their usernames online, to sign off on messages posted online, and some shout it to each other, 그는 덧붙였다.
“Plenty of people get tattoos, 보석류, insignia patches,” Pitcavage said. “It’s become one of the most common modern White supremacy symbols.”
에 2015, Roof took 88 bullets with him into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church where he killed nine people. He has since been convicted of federal murder and hate crimes charges and was sentenced to death in 2017. He has appealed his conviction.
The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
At his 2016 시도, Assistant US Attorney Jay Richardson said Roof had designed his own logo that included his initials, a swastika and the number 88.
“He created the symbol to reflect who he was, what he thought and what he had done,” Richardson said at the time.
A connection to the number “88” had previously surfaced in 2008, when two men were accused of plotting to assassinate President Barack Obama. It was alleged then that they were planning to kill 88 흑인, including schoolchildren, and wanted to behead 14.
And decades earlier, 데이비드 레인, a member of a White supremacist group known as “The Order” who was convicted of the 1984 murder of Jewish radio host Alan Berg at his home in Denver, wrote a list of statements titled “88 Precepts” on what he called “natural law,” 에 따르면 Southern Poverty Law Center.
There have been some attempts in the past to reclaim hate symbols, 포함 Pepe, a cartoon frog 그건 labeled a hate symbol by the ADL 에 2016. But Pitcavage said people don’t have a considerable attachment to numbers like they might have toward symbols.
Demonstrators gather outside of Emanuel AME Church on the fifth anniversary of the massacre in Charleston, 사우스 캐롤라이나, 6 월 17, 2020.
The settlement of $ 88 백만 — $ 25 million split among survivors and $ 63 million split among the families for those killed — was not intentionally chosen, Sellers told CNN. But its symbolic importance quickly became evident for the legal team representing the families and survivors.
“We’re gonna have to own this. It’s going to be intentional and purposeful that we’re going to have to use their racism and bigotry and their symbolism,” Sellers recalled telling another attorney in the case when they learned about the settlement amount.
The victims in the massacre, 판매자가 말했다, were killed because they were Black and now, the settlement can help a community deeply affected by violent racism take ownership of their own future and build wealth.
