Five years ago at 8:16 p.m. in Charleston, South Carolina, a self-proclaimed white supremacist entered Emanuel AME Church, a storied African American…
Five years ago at 8:16 p.m. in Charleston, South Carolina, a self-proclaimed white supremacist entered Emanuel AME Church, a storied African American house of worship.
The 21-year-old came in through a side door and walked out the epitome of evil. Shouting racial epithets, he killed nine people assembled for Bible study before being apprehended by authorities the next day.
The world was shocked. But as many pause Wednesday to remember the Emanuel 9 – who ranged from 41-year-old pastor Clementa Pinckney to 87-year-old choir member Susie Jackson – Black Americans say the anniversary merely spotlights their weariness with the nation’s 401-year-old legacy of slavery that has claimed too many lives to count.
“When I speak with the members of Mother Emanuel, we call it a season of extended lament,” says the Rev. Eric S. C. Manning, who since 2016 has led the city’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, an institution whose origins date to 1787.
On Wednesday evening, a video tribute to the victims from family members and survivors will appear on the church’s Facebook page and YouTube channel, followed by a march for justice on Sunday and a prayer vigil on June 24.
Manning says each June 17, his flock feels “a sense of tension” borne out of reliving that tragic day in their community. But he adds that there is a glimmer of hope resulting from the national protests kindled by the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died when a white police officer in Minneapolis kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
“We are all encouraged that the issue of racial injustice is on the forefront,” Manning says. “Now, now it’s a matter of not just talking about it, but taking action.”
Charleston indeed took swift and historic action just weeks after the shooting at Mother Emanuel as lawmakers voted to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse in Columbia.
Five years later, other states and businesses are making moves to remove the flag, long a symbol of a Civil War South that fought to preserve slavery.
The city is embroiled now in a new controversy over a downtown statue of John C. Calhoun, a native son and former U. S. vice president who was strident in his defense of slavery. Similar statues have been the subject of both debate and vandalism around the country in recent days, from small Southern towns to Capitol Hill in Washington, D. C.
“I don’t believe in throwing history into the drink, so to speak, but you have to tell the whole story and sometimes with some statues there are more appropriate places for them than downtown,” says Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg, who was expected to make an announcement on the Calhoun statue Wednesday.
