Mother Emanuel, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, lifts its white steeple in front of you, one of the oldest and most historically significant Black churches in the South. It was founded in 1816 by Denmark Vesey, a formerly enslaved man who had purchased his freedom, as part of the free Black AME movement. After Vesey's planned slave rebellion was betrayed in 1822, white authorities burned the church and hanged Vesey and thirty-four co-conspirators.
The congregation rebuilt, was suppressed again before the Civil War, and rebuilt again. For two centuries, this church was a sanctuary, a community center, and an anchor of Black life in Charleston. On the evening of June 17, 2015, a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist named Dylann Roof sat in a Bible study group here for nearly an hour before opening fire.
He killed nine people, including the senior pastor and state senator Reverend Clementa Pinckney. In the days that followed, the families of the victims made statements of forgiveness that stunned the nation. The shooting accelerated the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House grounds.
Mother Emanuel remains an active congregation. The white steeple rising before you has witnessed the full arc of African American history in Charleston — the resistance, the suppression, the survival, and the grief that has not ended.