Sadness,Rage and resilience in Charleston,US church Massacre as suspect charged to court.

Twenty-one year old Dylann Roof was yesterday charged with nine counts of murder in connection with the Thursday attack on a historic black South Carolina church, police said and media reports said he had hoped to incite a race war in the United States.

Residents of Charleston flocked to the nearly-200-year-old Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church as they struggled to comprehend how the suspect could sit with worshippers for an hour of Bible study before allegedly opening fire , killing nine black people and fleeing into the night, triggering a 14-hour manhunt.

“This was not merely a mass shooting, not merely a matter of gun violence, this was a racial hate crime and must be confronted as such,” said Cornell William Brooks, president of the NAACP. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in 1909 to confront lynchings in the United States.

The attack came in a year that has seen waves of protest across the United States over police killings of unarmed black men in cities including New York, Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, sparking some of the largest race riots the nation has seen since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

From U.S. President Barack Obama, who said the attack stirred memories of “a dark past,” to residents on the streets of Charleston, Americans expressed outrage at an act intended to provoke a “race war” in the United States.

“I grew up when racism was just a way of life,” said Mary Meynardie, 90, who is white, as she stopped by the police tape that still surrounded the church known as “Mother Emanuel.” “I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was somebody 60, 70 years old who had that much hate, but where does this hate come from?”

The latest in a series of mass shootings that have rocked the United States also illustrated some of the risks posed by the nation’s liberal gun laws, which gun-rights supporters say are protected by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Roof confessed to the attack and said he intended to set off new racial confrontations, CNN reported, citing a law enforcement source. He sat with parishioners for an hour before opening fire and almost did not go through with the attack because he had been welcomed, NBC News reported, citing a law enforcement source.