On June 17, 2015, a mass shooting took place at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, S.C.
During a Bible study, a man opened fire with a handgun and killed nine people.
That man was Dylann Roof, who at the time was unemployed and living in a part of Charleston that’s predominantly African-American. Roof was later captured in a traffic stop on June 18 in Shelby, N.C., about 250 miles from the site of the shooting.
Roof then confessed to committing the attack at the Sheriff Al Cannon Detention Center in North Charleston. He’s scheduled to reappear in court on Oct. 23, 2015, and Feb. 5, 2016. His bond has been set at $1 million.
Roof had a “Confederate States of America” decoration on the bumper of the Hyundai Elantra he was driving at the time he was stopped.
This senseless tragedy has caused waves of emotion to wash over the country.
Nowhere was this more on display than in Fort Smith, Ark., which is where your current sports editor lived and worked in 2013 and early 2014.
I was a copy editor for the Times Record, building sports pages for the newspaper.
See, a Fort Smith school board committee passed a motion on Tuesday to ban the “Dixie” song during the 2015-16 academic year.
In addition, all Fort Smith Southside teams will no longer be called the Rebels as of 2016-17.
This motion was passed unanimously.
A school board member openly admitted the decision to remove the Rebel mascot stemmed from the mass shooting in South Carolina. Read more of this column in the weekend Bowie News.

Editor’s Note: The Storm Center column is the expressed written views of sports editor Eric Viccaro and not The Bowie News.

The sports editor wonders if this mascot offends you, the reader? This is Fort Smith Southside’s mascot. Let him know at: bnewssports@gmail.com. We appreciate feedback. (Logo provided by the Fort Smith (Ark.) School District, no copyright infringement inferred)