CHARLESTON: President Barack Obama sang a hymn of hope and spoke with the fervor of a preacher as he eulogized a pastor and eight parishioners gunned down at a historic black church in an apparent hate crime — and he minced no words in calling for an end to racial injustice and gun violence in the United States.

In his eulogy for the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Obama suddenly began singing “Amazing Grace,” quickly joined by ministers and some of the thousands who packed into the arena at the College of Charleston in South Carolina.


The nation’s first black president called for gun control and efforts to eliminate poverty and job discrimination, and said the Confederate battle flag — long a symbol of Southern US pride — must be removed from places of honor.

“For many — black and white — that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation. We see that now,” he said.

The president came to eulogize the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a state senator and pastor of Emanuel, a church founded by the leader of a failed slave revolt and burned to the ground by angry whites in 1822. After the American Civil War, the church led efforts to expand equal rights in the South, hosting civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. during campaigns in South Carolina.

The church will be the site of two more funerals for three other victims on Saturday.

“We do not know whether the killer of Rev. Pinckney and eight others knew all of this history,” the president said. “But he surely sensed the meaning of his violent act. It was an act that drew on a long history of bombs and arsons and shots fired at churches; not random, but as a means of control, a way to terrorize and oppress.”