UN Ambassador Nikki Haley told her staff that recent violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, brought her back to the “sad days dealing with the Charleston tragedy in 2015,” when she was South Carolina’s governor.
In an email obtained by CNN’s Elise Labott for a profile in STATE Magazine, Haley called the events in Virginia “horrible acts.”
“We must denounce them at every turn, and make them feel like they are on an island and isolate them the same way they wish to isolate others,” Haley said in the email, which was sent the Thursday after the violence.
Last month, demonstrators took to the streets of Charlottesville to protest the removal of a Gen. Robert E. Lee statue. Multiple people were injured and one woman was killed when a car drove through a crowd of counterprotesters.
President Donald Trump received significant backlash for his response to the incident, in which he equated the actions of white supremacists with those protesting them.
Haley told CNN’s “New Day” after the incident that she had a “personal conversation” with Trump about his comments, but said she would “leave it at that.”
While Haley was South Carolina governor in June 2015, a gunman opened fire on a Bible study group at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest AME church in the South, killing nine people.
The gunman, Dylan Roof, is the first federal hate crime defendant sentenced to death.
Following the attack, Haley called for the removal of the Confederate flag on the South Carolina State House grounds.
“Those who march spewing hate are few, but loud,” Haley wrote in the email about Charlottesville.
