Roof fused Orthodox Christian iconography into a white supremacist logo.

Evidence

Roof also seemingly spent hours designing his own personal logo, which appears multiple times throughout his journal. The most notable feature of his design is that the anchoring image in the center of the logo is a cross. Specifically, it is a variant of the cross developed and used most by the Russian Orthodox Church, which contains two additional small horizontal bars representing the inscription above the head of Jesus and the footrest to which his feet were nailed at his crucifixion. In the four quadrants created by the main bars of the cross, Roof placed four white supremacist symbols (from top left, going clockwise): (1) “14”: a reference to the “14 words,” a popular white supremacist slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”; (2) “88”: a coded reference to “Heil Hitler” (Roof predicts in the journal that Hitler will one day be declared a Christian saint); (3) a swastika; and (4) a “life rune” image, an icon appropriated by the Nazis to refer to an ideal Aryan/Norse heritage. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, 404

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: why did a Lutheran killer adopt an Eastern Orthodox cross form as his anchor? What pathways led him there?
• XREF: connects to: Roof’s Christianity was integral to, not incidental to, his violence. — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 408