Nashville hotel cancels reservations for hate group CCC, cited by Dylann Roof

A Nashville hotel canceled reservations for an annual conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) this week after learning of the group’s white supremacist beliefs.

The Guesthouse Inn disavowed the racist organization that has been cited as an inspiration for Dylann Roof, the man charged with murdering nine African-Americans at the historically black Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., in June.

Michelle Jameson, director of sales for the hotel, told The Tennessean that she thought “about four or five rooms” were booked for this weekend at a special price for the event.

She said they would not be able to tell whether other guests were connected to the group if they did not reserve their rooms using that rate.

“This is definitely not what the Guesthouse Inn represents,” Jameson said to the local paper. “The group will not be at our hotel, nor will they ever be at our hotel.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit dedicated to civil rights, says the CCC was founded in 1985 in St. Louis, Mo., from the ashes of old White Citizens Councils, which had fought against desegregation in the South.

Mark Potok, a senior fellow for the SPLC, said the CCC depicts any black violence against whites as racially motivated when only a small percentage of it actually is.

“They have been very tightly focused on black-on-white crime for quite a few years,” Potok said in an interview with Yahoo News. “It is an explicitly racist group. They say they oppose ‘all efforts to mix the races of mankind’ – that’s in their platform statement.”

The CCC recruited its first members from the mailing lists of the White Citizens Councils, making it their modern incarnation, Potok explained.

Red Lion Hotels Corporation, the hotel’s parent company, responded to a series of tweets from concerned citizens about the event – and confirmed that it was canceled.

Roof, 21, is believed to have written the racist manifesto that was posted to a hate website called “The Last Rhodesian,” which also includes dozens of photos showing the accused shooter burning the American flag, brandishing a gun and visiting Confederate monuments. He embraced racial hatred after learning about black-on-white crime on the CCC website, according to the screed.

“The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief,” the racist manifesto reads.

A board member for the group told The Tennessean that none of their members had ever heard of Roof and said that he alone is responsible for his actions.

The SLPC broke the news of the scheduled event after obtaining an email sent exclusively to CCC members. Roof’s racist manifesto brought the racist group under intense media scrutiny.

“The CCC apparently does not want to draw attention to this weekend’s gathering. The conference was not announced on its website, and major racist forums like Stormfront and VNN do not have any threads about the event,” the law center’s Hatewatch staff said in a blog post on Tuesday.

A Guesthouse Inn representative was not immediately available for comment when contacted by Yahoo News.