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‘Unthinkable': The attack on Mother Emanuel left behind hurt, anger
Mother Emanuel had faced peril before.
In the summer of 1822, just a few years after it was formed, one of its founders was suspected of leading a rebellion of enslaved people; he was one of 35 people killed. The church was burned in a fire and later rebuilt, then an earthquake damaged the church in 1886. It was 129 years before trouble struck again.
'[In] 1963, I was 12 years old when they were doing the marches downtown on King Street to desegregate the lunch counters,' said Herb Frazier, a historian and Charleston journalist who grew up in the city. He remembers much of his life revolving around Mother Emanuel.
'I know that there were people families all through the city of Charleston who would walk from the north end of the city, and my cousins would come from the west side of the city, and we would all come and see each other on Sundays at Mother Emanuel,' Frazier said.
For him, like so many people in Charleston, the church and family are intertwined and inseparable.
'You know, when I walk into church, I immediately my mind and my heart is flooded with the thoughts and the memories. My grandmother, yes, who sang on the choir there, and my father,' Frazier said.
Mother Emanuel hosts Bible study for anyone with an open heart and the time to explore scripture. It was the same on June 17, 2015, and Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor was ready to go.
'She did come home before she went to church, and she asked us if we wanted to go with her to Bible study. I personally said no, because it was already late, my sister decided she wanted to go hang out with friends, and then my youngest sister had basketball,' said Kaylin Doctor-Stancil, Rev. DePayne's daughter.
Plenty of others went to the Bible study, all for the purpose of worship.
One gunman went, too, because he knew Charleston 'at one time had the highest ratio of Blacks to whites in the country.'
'Mother Emanuel was not a randomly selected church. It's amazing when you think about it, because, because the details show you how calculating the murderer who came here was. I mean, he originated from the area of the Midlands, and came down here, probably on Highway 26 which means that he passed many other Black churches along the way. It meant also that he passed HBCUs, Historically Black Colleges and Universities; South Carolina State, Claflin Allen in Columbia, Benedict in Columbia. And so he was bent and determined on coming to Mother Emanuel, and he also had a sense of how important that church and that congregation was for this community and for African Americans in the country,' said Dr. Bernard Powers, a historian in Charleston.
No one at the church that night could have known that he had written a manifesto referencing Nazis and talking about hsi hate for Black people and other races. So the ten members at the Bible study welcomed him in, and when they formed a prayer circle, he pulled his gun and opened fire.
'One of my daughters called me and said, 'Daddy, there's been a shooting at your church,' Frazier said. 'I'm thinking this must have been a shooting maybe outside the church. I didn't have a sense that this was a shooting in the church. The unthinkable; I mean, why would anybody be shooting in a church of all places, you know?' Frazier said.
'Watching the news, breaking news, shooting at Emmanuel AME Church, and I called Cynthia, because Cynthia was my touch point to all things Charleston, and obviously she didn't pick up the phone, and that's okay. She's trying to, you know, figure out what's going on herself. And about 45 minutes went past, the news story got worse and worse on all channels,' said Charlotte city councilmember Malcolm Graham.
Graham's sister, Cynthia Hurd, was one of the people in attendance that night.
'He said there's so much confusion happening in Charleston, but he was able to find out that from those who survived the shooting, they had identified Cynthia as being at the bible study at the church at the time of the shooting, and then from that moment on, you just got this gut feeling that she was involved in the most awful way and that she was at the church. Sometime later, I got a call that night from the coroner's office in Charleston asking me to describe Cynthia,' Graham said.
'We kind of already knew deep down that something tragic had happened,' Doctor-Stancil said.
Cynthia and DePayne were killed that night, in a place that felt like a second home to them.
Doctor-Stancil would have been there, but she and her sisters decided not to go to church that night. She was 16 at the time.
'How do you look back on that moment, deciding not to go?' Ken Lemon asked her.
'It hurts. It hurts a lot, sorry. It hurts a lot, because I know specifically for me, I didn't want to go because I was angry. I was angry that you decided to go get your certificate over and taking me to go get my license. You know, being a teenage girl, not realizing other things are important at the time. And I look back on it, because I'm just like, dang, I was, I was mad at my mom for wanting to do something that she'd already planned to accomplish, and I ended up losing her that night. And it was the moment that I could have had with her, and maybe that wouldn't have happened if I went and I something that I constantly ask myself and tell myself. And it's like, well, you didn't know that was going to happen, so you can't hold yourself accountable for it. But it does hurt. It does hurt because I wonder if that would have changed the course of events, if we all had went with her. I wonder if that had changed anything. But at the same time, it's also like, if we did go, will we still be here,' Doctor-Stancil said.
'How did you feel in that moment? Understanding the purpose wasn't a misunderstanding,' Lemon asked Graham.
'I was angry, I was done in the forgiving mood,' Graham said.
As Graham prepared to leave Charlotte headed to Charleston, we learned that the gunman was headed toward Charlotte.
(VIDEO: Supreme Court rejects appeal from Dylann Roof, who killed 9 at Charleston church)
