A Tennessee hotel canceled an event organized by a group whose work appears to have been cited by Dylann Roof, the man charged with murdering nine black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina in June.

The Guesthouse Inn in Nashville canceled a booking for the annual conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CoCC) and room reservations associated with it after learning about the nature of the group, an executive at the hotel said.

“The group will not be at our hotel, nor will they ever be at our hotel,” director of sales Michelle Jameson told the Tennessean. She said the inn canceled the reservations, for an event scheduled to take place this weekend, after “it was brought to our attention to what this group might possibly be”.

“This is definitely not what the Guesthouse Inn represents,” Jameson said.

The CoCC is a far-right group that espouses white supremacism. Its “statement of principles” includes opposition to “all efforts to mix the races of mankind” and “the massive immigration of non-European and non-Western peoples into the United States”.

Roof is believed to have authored an online manifesto that cites the CoCC as providing an introduction to racist ideas and the notion of “black-on-white crime”, a purported phenomenon to which the CoCC dedicates an entire section of its website.

“There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on white murders,” the manifesto says. “I was in disbelief. At this moment I realised that something was very wrong.”

The manifesto asserts that the notion of racial equality “is delusional”. In July, a grand jury indicted Roof with 33 hate crime charges, including for the nine murders.

Brad Griffin, a member of the CoCC who writes as “Hunter Wallace” on a “pro-white, pro-south, pro-independence” blog, blamed the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a hate-group watchdog, for the hotel’s action.

“The hotel folded under pressure from SJW harassment and death threats,” he wrote, using an abbreviation of “social justice warrior”, a pejorative used to describe supposedly fair-weather activists or hypocrites. Griffin said the SPLC leaked word of the conference to the press, and added that he felt compelled to contact the local paper as well.

“We can’t reserve a hotel conference room without groups organizing out there to make death threats to cancel the conference, certain protests and stuff,” Griffin told the Tennessean.

On the blog, he wrote: “There are several ways we can hold a conference in the future and avoid this problem. It won’t happen again.”

Griffin also disavowed Roof. “All he did was read our website,” he said. “I’m sure he watches television, he reads newspapers like I do.”

“The usual happened: we sent out a mailing to the membership about the conference, the SPLC was on the list, they got the mailing and wrote a story, which was picked up by the press, and the hotel folded under pressure from SJW harassment and death threats.”

In June, an investigation by the Guardian found that the leader of the CoCC, Earl Holt, gave $65,000 to Republican candidates in recent years. Four Republican candidates for president in 2016 returned the contributions or gave them to charity after the report.



In a statement published not long after the murders, Holt said it was “not surprising” that Roof was apparently informed by the CoCC, which he said reported race relations “accurately and honestly”.

Holt defended the organization, saying: “The CoCC is hardly responsible for the actions of this deranged individual merely because he gleaned accurate information from our website.”

The parent company of the Guesthouse Inn, Red Lion Hotels Corporation, tweeted in apparent solidarity with its hotel after several people raised concerns over the cancellation.

“This event has been canceled,” he company wrote. “Thank you for making us aware of the concerns with this group.”

When called by the Guardian, no hotel representative was available for comment.