Ebenezer Pastor Calls Confederate Flags Left Near Church A “Terroristic Threat”

ATLANTA (AP) — Police worked Thursday to identify two white males who were caught on surveillance camera laying Confederate battle flags neatly on the ground near the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s church.

Warnock said he had gathered Wednesday at the church with black ministers from across the nation to talk about mass incarceration in the United States.

Dylann Roof, the white man who fatally shot nine parishioners at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, posted photos online posing with Confederate flags.

A call for comment to the Martin Luther King Jr. It has also been used by white supremacists and is seen by many African-Americans and as a symbol of oppression.

Atlanta police Chief George Turner hinted investigators have “good, strong physical evidence”, including images of the perpetrators captured on the church’s surveillance video system. National Historic Site Visitor Center, police said Thursday morning.

Reverend Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, said that the placing of the flags around the church and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ebenezer Baptist Church is on the same block as The King Center on historic Auburn Avenue. Center in Atlanta a “hateful act”, and police say they aren’t ruling out a hate crime.

Another angle shows them moving about the church grounds leaving the flags behind.

A Confederate battle flag flies at the grave of L.S. Axson, a soldier in the Confederate States Army in the U.S. Civil War, in Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina on June 22, 2015.

King once preached at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church.

“We will not be shaken by this”, he said at the news conference.

Turner called the placing of the flags disgusting but not surprising. “It was treason that they were trying to do; and if any other group or ethnicity of people would have done this, they would either have been lynched at that time or they would’ve been deported from this country”.

“It was disturbing and sickening”, said Rev. Warnock “This act by a cowardly and misguided individual is provocative to say the least. We have to push against it by condemning this act, and we have to push against it by making sure that people have voting rights”.