Charleston, June 20 (RHC)-- The president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) says the recent shooting in South Carolina “was an act of racial terrorism.”

Cornell Brooks made the remarks during a news conference in downtown Charleston Friday, after nine African Americans were shot dead by a white man at a historic black church on Wednesday.

Brooks said America must examine the racial hate underlying the deadly incident at the African Methodist Episcopal church, adding that this wasn’t just a shooting, but a mass shooting. “This was a racial hate crime and must be confronted as such.”

“We have to ask ourselves the question of, is this a matter of a lone shooter with a singular hatred?” Brooks said. “Is the right terminology a lone shooter or a domestic terrorist?”

On Friday, Dylann Roof, 21, was charged with nine counts of murder for an attack that killed 9 black worshipers Charleston, with media reporting that he had hoped his actions would incite a race war in the United States.

The announcement was made by police a day after he was arrested in the neighboring state of North Carolina. Police arrested Roof at a traffic stop some 300 kilometers away from where the attack took place.

According to civil rights advocacy organization, nearly 20 known hate groups currently operate in South Carolina.

South Carolina is home to 19 known hate groups, including two factions of the Ku Klux Klan and four "white nationalist" organizations, NBC News reported Thursday, citing the Southern Poverty Law Center.

More than a dozen of the groups listed are explicitly based on racial hatred, the Southern Poverty Law Center said.

Two branches of the League of the South, which advocates for Southern U.S. states to secede from the country and "the advancement of Anglo-Celtic culture, are also located in South Carolina.