"I have taught in South Carolina and lectured in the state numerous times. I have unfailingly been treated with courtesy and respect. Roof does not speak for all the white people in the state. Nonetheless, South Carolina has never really come to terms with its tortured history. Here are a few highlights of the state's extreme pro-slavery, white-supremacist past. In 1776, South Carolina delegates to the Continental Congress forced Thomas Jefferson to remove a clause condemning slavery from the Declaration of Independence. In 1787, South Carolinians were primarily responsible for the constitution's fugitive slave clause and provision allowing the importation of slaves from abroad to continue for twenty additional years. Until 1860, a tight-knit coterie of plantation owners controlled the state; they did not even allow the white citizens to vote in presidential elections, the legislature chose the state's members of the Electoral College. Before the Civil War, South Carolina was one of two states, along with Mississippi, where nearly a majority of white families owned slaves, and had the largest black majority in its population, nearly 60 percent in 1860. This combination produced a unique brand of extremism in defense of slavery. The state was the birthplace of nullification, the first to secede, and the site of the first shot of the Civil War. During Reconstruction, black Carolinians enjoyed a brief moment of civil equality and genuine political power, but this ended with a violent 'Redemption', followed by decades of Jim Crow. More recently, South Carolina led the southern walk-out from the 1948 Democratic National Convention to protest a civil-rights plank in the party's platform, and supported its native son, Strom Thurmond, who ran as the 'Dixiecrat' candidate for president."