Charleston mourns after US church killings

A racially motivated hate crime? Another example of America's epidemic of gun violence? Or the work of the devil in a "sinful world"?

Charleston, a genteel southern city of 128,000 that was once the US capital of the transatlantic slave trade, is in a stunned state of grief, after a young white man gunned down nine people in a historic African-American church.

When police reopened the street that runs past the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a white 19th century gothic building with a towering steeple, Joyce Gilliard rushed down to pay her respects.

"I have a family friend who said that three of her family members were killed," the 22-year-old said.

"Everyone's numb, everyone's still in a state of shock."

When Gilliard got to the church, she found an growing cluster of flowers and shiny helium balloons left by anonymous mourners - and a white family on a week's holiday from Delaware, their heads bowed in prayer.

She immediately joined the Johnsons - mother Rhonda, 50, and daughters Madison, 16, and Lauren, 21 - and embraced them as news photographers jostled to capture the scene.

"I feel it was the devil," said Rhonda Johnson - who described herself and her family as devout Christians.

Asked how God could have allowed such a tragedy, Johnson said: "God was there, but we live in a sinful world. I don't have all the answers, but God will come down and he will heal."

Daron-Lee Calhoun II, a 27-year-old African American, saw the slaughter as evidence of "festering white supremacy and racism", especially in the southern United States.

"Am I shocked that it happened? Yes. Am I hurt by what happened? Yes. But surprised? It's hard to say that I'm surprised," he said.

"This is a man who completed a terrorist plot on American soil," added Calhoun, a researcher at a local African-American studies centre.

Nearby, Valentino Fazi mourned one of the victims, Sharonda Singleton, 45, an assistant pastor who he fondly remembered as his vocal teacher at school.

"She was a very peaceful woman. I can't believe this happened to her," the 19-year-old white Charleston native said.

Grassroots South Carolina gun safety campaigner Jack Logan, 56, said the shooting only hardened his opposition to firearms.

It was no coincidence, said the black founder of Put Down The Guns Now Young People Organization, that one of the victims, senior pastor and lawmaker Clementa Pinckney, pressed for sweeping background checks for gun buyers.

"I look at this as this preacher being a state senator and his stance on guns and gun control," he said.

"I look at this as a terrorist attack as well. We worry about Iraq, Afghanistan and those places, but we've got it right here in America. We have it here in our own back yard, terrorism, and that is exactly what is going on."