A group of young adults burned three black churches in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1996. Officials later labelled this incident a hate crime. In 2015, a white supremacist gunman Dylann Roof opened fire on a prayer group at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina killing nine black people. Nearly 200 years before, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church's predecessor had been burned to the ground in 1822 by Charleston's white leaders, who feared an insurrection by the city's enslaved residents. In 2016, a man in Mississippi pleaded guilty to arson for setting fire to a black church. He had attempted to disguise the arson as a hate crime.