One reason you saw a mostly peaceful reaction in Charleston, I can say from my years there, is that the indigenous black and white populations – and I mean those folks with multiple generations of residence – share deep a sense of place and of history that somehow transcends the usual national PC dialogue.  It is hard to put a finger on it, but the dynamic between white and black in historical Charleston is somehow differentiated and communal, compared to, say, relationships between the races in your average Ferguson, Missouri, or in most other cities – especially Northern – where I have had long enough stays to generate an opinion.

From an outsider’s perspective, and especially that of liberal commentators, Charleston would seem to represent the mother lode: a place where the worst of the worst in race relations was common – plantations, slave markets, and worse, oh my! – and therefore a place where any relationship between the races should be permanently poisoned. 

While I would not say that, as between themselves, white and black Charlestonians are uniformly courtly and friendly all the times, I can and will say this: try them as a group from the outside, and see what happens.  They will stop their internal bickering, turn and face you, and say, in effect: “Don’t be fooled – you are a ‘come here,’ and we are ‘been heres,’ and as between ‘come heres’ and ‘been heres,’ the latter is the highest category of human on this planet – regardless of race!”

To me, that is one of the many things that makes Charleston so fascinating and engaging as a culture.

So it’s a shared sense of the importance of the history in this special community that somehow goes beyond the PC version of what should have happened after that God-awful act by a deranged and pathetic lunatic.  Charlestonians have fallen back on their shared sense of history, and upon their commonly-held values, driven home for decades by great leaders like Joe Riley and Jim Clyburn and many others, and they did not fall into the Ferguson trap.  Instead, they made this a unifying call for humanity. 

You have to admire that.