The thunder of gunfire in a historic Charleston church is echoing throughout Bermuda today. So are the howls of anguish and grief and disbelief.

On Wednesday night, a heavily armed white supremacist opened fire on the congregation at that South Carolina city’s Emanuel AME Church, killing nine, in one of the most deadly hate crimes in modern American history.

Charleston is a sister community to Bermuda and there are centuries-old family, cultural and historical ties between the two localities.

The city’s earliest inhabitants were Bermudians, both black and white, who settled the area in 1670. Some of its oldest buildings are constructed from pink-hued Bermuda stone carried as ballast in the ships which regularly plied the seas between the Island and Charleston during its formative years. And Denmark Vesey — the one-time slave of a Bermudian sea captain who spent time on the Island as a young man — was a founder of Emanuel AME Church, plotting his famously aborted insurrection against South Carolina slaveholders with fellow congregants.

“It’s not just a church. It’s also a symbol … of black freedom,” Robert Greene, who studies the 20th century South at the University of South Carolina, told the Washington Post yesterday. “That’s why so many folks are so upset.

“It’s a church that represents so much about the rich history and tradition of African Americans in Charleston.”

But the attack on a church held other, more recent associations.

For those who are old enough to remember, the atrocity couldn’t help but stir memories of Civil Rights-era outrages — most obviously the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 which killed four little girls and maimed dozens of other worshippers and passers-by.

Indeed, it’s likely the perpetrator, a 21-year-old petty criminal, chose his target precisely because of the emotional and cultural resonances an attack on a predominantly black church would produce in an era of increasing racial tensions in the US. Coming as it does on the heels of the “Black Lives Matter” campaign — prompted by the killings of unarmed black men throughout the US by police officers who neither protected nor served whole sections of their communities — the Charleston tragedy will only further polarise the American racial landscape.

And it would be self-deluding in the extreme to pretend the recent exacerbation of racial divisions in the US hasn’t also made its impact felt in Bermuda.

So the short-term repercussions of the South Carolina massacre, cultural and political, can only be grim. But it seems likely the killer’s guiding star wasn’t white supremacism at all but rather that true All-American fixation: instant notoriety.

Like many disturbed personalities who attach themselves to political causes, he appears to be one of those suggestible creatures who believed by immersing himself in a movement he thought to be greater than himself — even a movement as vile and utterly depraved as white supremacism — he could compensate for his own manifest inadequacies.

If this is in fact the case, then it would be catastrophic to permit revulsion at the actions of such a homicidal misfit to drive increasing numbers of white and black Americans — or Bermudians, for that matter — into opposing camps of distrust and mutual suspicion.

Progress cannot be allowed to become collateral damage of his rampage.

The reality is that as chaotic and imperfect as it’s been, progress has been made — and continues to be made — in terms of racial equality and social justice both in the US and Bermuda.

For more than 60 years largely peaceful revolutions have been under way in both countries to overcome the unhappy legacies of oppression and division. As has been said, men without hope, resigned to despair and despondency, do not make revolutions.

“It is only when expectation replaces submission, when despair is touched with the awareness of possibility, that the forces of human desire and the passion of justice are unloosed,” then US Attorney General Robert Kennedy commented at the height of the Civil Rights movement.

The onus is on all of us to continue these fits-and-starts revolutions, to channel the frustration and fury we feel after tragedies like the one which unfolded in Charleston this week into constructive outlets.

The South Carolina gunman may have been a lone nut, a freakish statistical anomaly. But even if he was exploiting the bankrupt dogma and absurd language of white supremacism for reasons of personal fame and recognition, his actions point to a deeper malaise.

Numerous examples of the more insidious but equally dehumanising effects of systematised racism in recent months underscore the need for all of us to continue dismantling the barriers which separate black from white with fear, hatred and mistrust.

History runs by its own clock and is not always responsive to the accelerated timetables we would sometimes like to impose on it. But just because the future lies over the horizon does not mean it is something which lies beyond our ability to influence.

It certainly lies within our power to take the type of routinely constructive actions which will validate the expectation that each passing year will bring with it greater opportunity and fewer limitations than the last.

Hope, the type of hope which inspires expectation, the awareness of possibility and the passion for justice, was wounded in Charleston. It is now incumbent upon all of us to ensure it doesn’t expire.

Bermuda offers condolences, page 11

Gunman arrested, page 44