Today, the Justice Department indicted Dylann Roof on 33 federal hate crime charges for the killings of nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. church in Charleston last month. This indictment is entirely unnecessary.
Hard as it may be for some to imagine now, there was a long time in this country when racially and politically motivated violence against blacks was not prosecuted by state and local authorities. Or sometimes, as in the case of Emmett Till—the young boy from Chicago who was lynched in Mississippi for allegedly being too forward with a white woman—prosecution was a farce and the perpetrators were acquitted.