The MLK Center for Nonviolent Social Change and the Ebenezer Baptist Church were surrounded by four Confederate flags early in the morning Thursday and authorities are working to find the culprits.
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Reverend Raphael Warnock, a senior pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, called the act a “terroristic threat”.
Surveillance footage taken from both the original church where King and his father used to preach and the new church sanctuary opposite shows the men walking around the grounds. The superintendent of the Martin Luther King Historic Site, which includes Ebenezer Baptist, says they received a threatening call a day before the shooting.
The Park Service did not say whether they believe the threats were connected to Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old white Columbia, South Carolina resident, who gunned down nine churchgoers during a bible study meeting at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston on June 17.
Confederate flags have been placed at the King Center before.
Police identify the two white males in the video as persons of interest, and said they were present around the time flags were placed on the property.
The latest victim: Ebenezer… the holy ground of Martin Luther King Jr’s home church.
The controversial flag went up on South Carolina’s State House more than half a century ago at the height of the US civil rights movement.
Confederate flags sit in the back of a police vehicle as tourists walk by Ebenezer Baptist Church on July 30, 2015, in Atlanta.
Longtime member Azuria Beeks stood outside the church Thursday morning watching police search the area, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
One of the flags was placed underneath a sign in the window that reads “Black Lives Matter”.
Police told AJC that the church had security cameras, but it was not immediately clear whether they captured anything pertinent.
Even though this incident wasn’t surprising it surely was disturbing & sickening. He said: “We’ve seen this kind of ugliness before”.
“It is a hateful act”, he said.
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And just as it’s illegal to display a swastika in Germany, there are those who believe that the Confederate emblem should also be forbidden to fly in public anywhere in the US.
