Police say two white men were caught on camera leaving confederate battle flags around the historic church where Martin Luther King, Jr., was baptized and eulogized.
Four Confederate battle flags were found placed on the grounds of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was baptized, had preached, and was eulogized. Police say two white men can be seen on surveillance video distributing the flags.
Rev. Raphael Warnock, the church’s senior pastor, called the act a “terroristic threat.”
“It is a hateful act,” he told reporters this morning. “I view it as an effort to intimidate us in some way, and we will not be intimidated.”
“Obviously this has gotten our attention, as it comes just a few short weeks after the massacre of nine innocent people in the Charleston church,” Warnock said, “An environment in which we have witnessed several church burnings, and at a time in which we are witnessing the killing of unarmed citizens by police and the response of the Black Lives Matter movement,” he observed.
“It was disturbing and sickening, but unfortunately not terribly surprising,” Warnock added. “We’ve seen this kind of ugliness before.”
Warnock labeled the perpetrators “cowardly and misguided” and the act “provocative.”
“This is the same as a swastika on the campus of a Jewish temple,” Warnock said. “This is an act of domestic terrorism.”
The New York Times reports that one of the flags “was placed on the ground near a bell tower and poster that said: ‘Black Lives Matter.'”
The church is part of a national park, The King Center, making the possibility of federal hate crime or terrorism charges greater, if the DOJ determines it to be so.
Atlanta police chief George Turner said he was not yet able to label the act a hate crime, but is working with federal officials to determine “appropriate charges.”
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Image: Screenshot via WSB-TV
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