Remembering the Mother Emanuel Church Shooting 10 Years Later

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2 days ago

Tim Grant is comforted during a prayer vigil on June 22, 2015 at the Charleston Southern University for the victims of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church mass shooting where nine people were killed, including two of Grant's cousins. Credit - Joe Raedle—Getty Images
Ten years ago this month, a 21-year-old misfit who imagined himself a white supremacist zealot walked casually through the unlocked door of the oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church in the South. Without hesitation, he was invited into a basement fellowship hall to join 12 African American worshippers at their weekly Bible study.
After roughly 45 minutes, once the congregants had closed their eyes in benediction, the young man removed a .45 caliber Glock from his waist pack and began to methodically assassinate nine men and women, ranging in age from 26 to 87. Three were on the ministerial staff, including the pastor, who also was serving his fourth term in the state senate. Each was shot at least five times, with the oldest, church matriarch Susie Jackson, shredded by ten hollow-point bullets. The survivors reported that the shooter made his racist intentions explicit as he fired, and he eagerly confirmed his sickening purpose to investigators after being captured the next day.
As a journalist who had chronicled progress and regress in my native South across four decades, I was deeply affected by the murders on June 17, 2015, at Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, S.C.—Mother Emanuel, as it is known. It was a blunt force reminder of the persistence of racial violence despite our fitful progress on civil rights. The timing toward the end of Barack Obama's second term seemed a pointed rebuke to any who still saw in his elections the heralding of a 'post-racial' America.
Two days later, I was, like so many, simultaneously awed and befuddled by the scene at Dylann Roof's televised bond hearing, when five victims' family members rose one after the next to offer some measure of forgiveness to the remorseless killer. 'I will never talk to her again, I will never be able to hold her again,' wailed Nadine Collier, the now motherless daughter of church sexton Ethel Lance. 'But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul.' Even to the faithful, it seemed among the purest expressions of Christianity ever witnessed, and it inspired Obama to deliver a stirring eulogy that, while remembered for his warbling of 'Amazing Grace,' also was his most searing and authentic effort at grappling with race.
But what did the extension of grace really mean in the context of this tragedy? What did it mean, for that matter, in the context of 400 years of Black suffering, oppression, and injustice? Was it as simple as 'forgive us our trespasses' and 'forgive them, for they know not what they do?' Or were those Scriptural entreaties the foundation for something more self-protective that had evolved from centuries of systemic victimization?
While writing a book about Mother Emanuel, I devoted much of the next decade to exploring those questions, convinced that answers might be found through a deeper study of the backstories of the congregation and its denomination. Where better to search for the intersections of history and theology, I figured, than in Charleston, the steepled Holy City, where nearly half of all enslaved Africans disembarked in North America and where the Civil War began? As I came to better understand the subversive role played by the Black church in resisting oppression, it grew clearer that forgiveness was not always for the forgiven.
Read More: How Do You Forgive a Murder?
Black Charlestonians, as it ends up, have had a lot to forgive. The intensity of their suffering, and of their resistance to it, reverberates through the now 207-year story of Mother Emanuel and its predecessor congregation. When that body formed in 1818 after a bold walkout from white Methodist churches, it prompted an immediate and ruthless response. Congregants were arrested in mass and ministers jailed. Four years later, a purported slave insurrection plot was uncovered before it matured, and city authorities sourced its incubation in part to the church. Thirty-five men were led to the gallows, 17 with ties to the congregation. By order of the authorities, the sanctuary was dismantled board by board, and church leaders were forced into exile.
What followed was a vicious legislative crackdown on the already limited rights of both enslaved and free Black Carolinians; then the broken promises of Reconstruction; then the lynchings and beatings and Klan intimidation; then the incessant indignities and denial of rights of the Jim Crow era; then the jailings of peaceful civil rights demonstrators, including Emanuel's pastor; then the flying of an offensive Confederate flag over the State Capitol; and then, in 2015, the fatal shooting of an unarmed Black man by a white policeman, followed 74 days later by the murders of nine churchgoers by a young neo-Nazi.
The weight of it all, the duration of it all, can take your breath away. And for many, forgiveness might seem an inadequate response, given available options like anger, bitterness, hatred, revenge, retribution. A more natural one, perhaps a more human one, might even be 'Where was God?' But this presupposes that the forgiveness expressed toward Dylann Roof was for Dylann Roof. That, I concluded after interviewing survivors, family members, and theologians, likely misinterprets its intent and misunderstands the distinctive role that grace plays in the African American church.
Each of the forgiving family members explained that they acted not out of concern for Roof's physical or spiritual welfare, but for their own. No slate had been wiped. Some did not care much whether Roof lived or died. (He remains on federal death row in Indiana, one of three inmates whose sentences were not commuted to life in prison by President Biden at the close of his term.) Survivor Felicia Sanders, who had witnessed the executions of her son and her aunt, wished God's mercy upon Roof at his bond hearing, but damned him 'to the pit of hell' at his trial.
Those who forgave depicted the moment in mystical terms—unpremeditated, unexpected, the words just flowed. It was God talking, and they were mere vessels. But each also recognized in their act a timeworn survival mechanism, a tactic that had helped African Americans withstand enslavement, forced migration, captivity, indentured servitude, segregation, discrimination, denial of citizenship, and the constant threat of racial and sexual violence with their souls still, somehow, intact.
Distilled over the centuries from pulpits and prayer meetings, it had become almost learned behavior, church elders told me, allowing Black Christians to purge themselves of self-destructive toxins. It served as an unburdening, not an undoing, a means not only of moral practice but of emotional self-preservation. Because the choice to forgive was one dignity that could not be taken away, it also served as a path to empowerment. It might be mistaken for submission, but in Charleston it reflected a resolve to leave the killer to the courts and to God. In that way, forgiveness resurrected agency for victims who had been robbed of it.
'He's not a part of my life anymore,' Rev. Anthony Thompson said to me of his slain wife's killer. 'Forgiveness has freed me of that, of him, completely. I'm not going to make him a lifetime partner.'
Read More: Searching for Signs of a Change in Charleston
Telling this history—the history of white supremacy and of Black suffering and resistance—matters now more than ever. It explains our past. It gives needed context to our present. It is a prerequisite to a just and empathetic future, ideals that have somehow fallen from fashion. Yet, we now confront a campaign to banish this history, to deny it and erase it, for crassly transparent political purposes. The telling of the entire story of America, after all, calls into question the greatness that Donald Trump pledges to restore, and agitates a base that remains threatened and excitable by our multicultural reality.
Ten years ago, Roof's self-identification with the Confederate battle flag prompted the Republican leadership of South Carolina to remove it from the state Capitol grounds after more than fifty years of affront to a fourth of the population. A wildfire movement to eradicate Confederate symbolism swept the South, and Charleston's mayor and council used the fifth anniversary of the Emanuel tragedy, three weeks after the killing of George Floyd, to remove a statue of slavery defender John C. Calhoun from the city's central square.
Today, we move in the opposite direction. Personnel and educational policies that recognize the value of diversity and acknowledge past injustices are under withering assault. Within the first three months of this administration, books about racism had been banned from the U.S. Naval Academy library, and a National Park Service webpage had been scrubbed of references to Harriet Tubman (decisions that were eventually reversed in part after public outcry). Pete Hegseth's Pentagon restored the names of Forts Benning and Bragg, asserting that they now honored soldiers who happened to have the same surnames as their former Confederate namesakes. A presidential executive order in March required the removal of "improper, divisive or anti-American ideology" from the Smithsonian Institution and the restoration of monuments and memorials that had been removed 'to perpetuate a false revision of history.' The Orwellian language only reinforced the point.
Read More: The Battle for Our Memory Is the Battle for Our Country
But debasing our history through censorship and ideological cherry-picking insults the memory of the nine saints who were murdered at Mother Emanuel, desecrating its sacred space all over again. In whitewashing the inglorious chapters of America's past, we leave a void in 'these truths' that may not prove forgivable.
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