Guest Editorial…Forgiveness should not be acquiescence

The grace and beauty grieving relatives showed to an accused killer was noble and inspiring. Families of victims of a massacre in a Charleston, S.C., church faced Dylann Roof, a reed-thin White man, with hardly a hair on his face, on the other side of a video screen in a detention center in South Carolina on June 19.
Roof, the 21-year-old who sat in a bible study meeting for an hour last week before allegedly opening fire and killing nine people, including Emanuel AME Church pastor Rev. Clementa Pinckney, returned a blank stare as one relative after another spoke, many through tears, about their loss and their faith. Published reports said he told investigators he almost didn’t do it because everyone had been so nice to him at the church.
Few may ever know the strength it takes to face evil as the families did hours after Roof was captured the day after the shootings. But all who were paying attention can bear witness to what happened when a few brave souls summoned that strength.
“I won’t move past this, but I will forgive you,” said Arthur Hurd, the husband of victim Cynthia Hurd. “But I hope for the rest of your life, however long or short that may be, you stop and play that tape over and over and over again in your head and see the sheer terror and pain you put purely innocent people through. I would love to hate you, but hate’s not in me. If I hate you I’m no better than you.”
But we all can’t let the Roofs of the world get off that easily. He surely seems to be headed to a southern deathrow, but he’s not in this alone.
Roof planted racist manifestos on the Internet and it seems clear he has studied his twisted brand of hatred and bigotry. It surely wasn’t hurt by the fact the Confederate battle flag has flown over the South Carolina state capitol for decades.
The state’s governor, Nikki Haley, called for the flag to be taken down Monday after mounting pressure from inside and and outside her state.
But that’s not enough.
The movement led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was also steeped in the Christian tradition of forgiveness and molded in the traditions of the South.
But it didn’t acquiesce. It didn’t forget. And it rarely missed a chance to force change.
Reprinted from the Philadelphia Tribune