I spoke to the media about Charleston because I believe that these are the times when our convictions are tested. We must stand firm and explain our principles to the public and tell them why our cause is moral and just:

““HORRIFYING”

Bradley Griffin, a Council board member, called the Charleston attack “horrifying,” And attempted to distance the organization from the killings. “No one in our group has ever said, ‘Go pick up a gun and shoot random people.’ I don’t know where this guy got that idea from,” he said in an interview.

But he also said he’s sympathetic to Roof’s anger. “If anyone touches a hair on a black person, it’s international news, whereas the most horrific crimes imaginable are inflicted on whites all the time, and I think the media kind of wants to downplay that,” he said. The Council’s website, which has since been taken down, described the group “as the only serious nationwide activist group that sticks up for white rights” and warned against “modern Negro thuggery.” …

Griffin, whose father-in-law founded the Council, frets about the tendency of younger people to keep their separatist beliefs private.

“They hide on the Internet. They don’t organize,” he said. Violence could be avoided, he added, if “people have older men above them to show them discipline like they used to.”

Asked how he formed his views, Griffin pointed to his childhood in Eufaula, Alabama, a short drive from the birthplace of George Wallace, a former Alabama governor who tried to block desegregation at the University of Alabama in 1963.

“The political, the cultural views that I have are not surprising at all considering where I’m from,” he said. “There’s a long history of this.”