A white nationalist group that may have influenced the suspected gunman in last week’s massacre at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina said Sunday in a statement that it believes he had “legitimate grievances” against black people.

The Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC) is a group that has long been tied to prominent Republican politicians in the American South and counts opposition to “all efforts to mix the races of mankind” among its stated principles. A spokesman for the group condemned the Charleston shooting while suggesting that the suspected gunman’s motives were still legitimate.

“The C of CC unequivocally condemns [Dylann] Roof’s murderous actions,” the spokesman, Jared Taylor (pictured), said in the statement posted on the group’s website. “However, the council stands unshakably behind the facts on its website, and points out the dangers of denying the extent of black-on-white crime.”

In a manifesto that surfaced Saturday and appeared to be written by Dylann Roof, the white, 21-year-old man who killed nine people Wednesday night at Emanuel AME in downtown Charleston, the Council of Conservative Citizens was credited with opening the author’s eyes to black-on-white crime in the wake of the 2012 Trayvon Martin shooting.

“The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens,” the manifesto read. “There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?”

The manifesto goes on to defend segregation and lament that white people are faulted for slavery and other “bad” acts that race has committed throughout history. In his statement, Taylor said the manifesto outlined “legitimate grievances” without specifying what those grievances were.

“In his manifesto, Roof outlines other grievances felt by many whites,” Taylor said. “Again, we utterly condemn Roof’s despicable killings, but they do not detract in the slightest from the legitimacy of some of the positions he has expressed. *Ignoring legitimate grievances is dangerous*.”

The president of the group, Earl Holt III, also issued a statement that disavowed Roof’s crime while asserting that the information Roof got from his organization was “accurate.”

Read both statements below in full: