At Dooley's Bait shop in Lexington, South Carolina, the talk around the worm bins and minnow tanks was dominated by one subject: Dylann Roof, a previously unremarkable local young man now accused of one of most shocking murders in state history.

Roof, a 21-year-old white man who went to high school in this Southern town near the state capital, has been charged with murdering nine blacks in cold blood on Wednesday at a landmark church in Charleston, about 100 miles (160 km) away.

Many people in Lexington, as in towns across South Carolina, struggled to come to grips with one of their own being charged with such a heinous crime. In interviews this past week, they also worried that Roof, a high school dropout who embraced racist symbolism and carried a handgun, will reinforce a pervasive and unflattering stereotype of white Southern males as a group of poorly educated, gun-toting racists.