Ten years after tragedy, a historic Black church lives on

Boston Globe

2 days ago

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 26 episode of the 'Say More' podcast.
James Dao:
I'm Jim Dao. Welcome to 'Say More.'
Kevin Sack is a longtime reporter who spent much of his award-winning career writing investigative and long-term narrative pieces for The New York Times.
Then in 2015, he helped cover one of the most horrific massacres in recent US history, the killing of nine parishioners who were attending Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
The story launched Sack on what would turn into a 10 year project to document the history of Mother Emanuel, one of the oldest and most influential black churches in America.
The book, which is out now, explores stories of the enslaved and emancipated black people who created and sustained the church against all odds in a bastion of the confederacy. It is also an extraordinarily detailed history of black Charleston from before the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement.
The book also grapples with eternal questions of forgiveness and resilience a decade after this terrible tragedy. I'll just note here that Kevin and I are old friends from our days at the New York Times.
Kevin Sack, welcome to 'Say More.'
So your book opens almost exactly a decade ago on June 17th, 2015, with a mass shooting at a church. Tell us about that church and what happened that night.
Kevin Sack:
The church is Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. It is the oldest AME church in the Southern United States, and has a remarkable history that goes back over 200 years.
Now, it was first started in around 1817-1818 after really a subversive act, a withdrawal of thousands of African American Methodist from white-controlled, white-governed Methodist churches in Charleston to form something known as the African Church, which was somewhat short-lived. Then it reformed as Emanuel in 1865 when AME missionaries followed Union troops into Charleston as the Civil War was closing and started this church back up.
It's called Mother Emanuel because it then seeded churches all over South Carolina and eventually the South.
On the night of June 17th, 2015, 14 individuals, most of them adults but several children, were at Bible study. It was a Wednesday night. That's when bible study always takes place.
This night, the Bible study was delayed by an hour or so because there had been a business meeting beforehand called a quarterly conference.
Because it's going late, a lot of folks actually left before the Bible study. This could have been a much more horrific incident, but 14 remained, most of them in the fellowship hall itself, where the Bible study was taking place. At some point, the door opens up and a man named Dylann Roof, 21 years old, walks in. He's got a waist pack around his midsection.
And, he's invited in, welcomed by the ministers and takes a seat. He is handed a study guide and a Bible and sits silently for roughly 45 minutes through the Bible study until everyone's eyes are closed in benediction, at which point he unzips the waist pack, removes a Glock and starts firing somewhat indiscriminately.
He starts with the pastor, shoots him multiple times and then proceeds to walk around the room as old church ladies are diving under tables and assassinates them one by one. There winds up being several survivors. One of them, Polly Sheppard, is confronted by the killer. She's under a table and she looks up and sees the barrel of his gun.
Pointing at her face, she's praying. He asks her if he has shot her yet. She answers 'No' and he says, 'Well, I'm going to leave you here to tell the story.' The other adult survivor in the room was Felicia Sanders, who was there with her granddaughter and her son. Her son was in his mid twenties, a recent college graduate.
He's already been shot, and she is hugging the granddaughter so tightly under the table that she thinks she might suffocate the child.
Dao:
Wow. These were eventually categorized as hate crimes. Do I have that right?
Sack:
That's right.
Dao:
This person, Dylann Roof, self-described as a white supremacist and quite proud of that.
Sack:
Correct. This was his intent. He made it exceedingly clear, both as he was firing and in his initial interview with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after he was arrested the next day, that his purpose was to incite racial strife. What he really wanted was to incite some sort of race war.
Dao:
Did you ever talk to him or have any sort of significant contact with him and did you learn anything more about him as a person?
Sack:
Yeah, well, I covered his trial which was immensely frustrating for those of us who had hoped that it might provide some insight into who he was and how he had developed his white supremacist views.
And it was deeply unsatisfying in that way because Roof, you may remember, wound up hijacking his own defense. He was intent on demonstrating that he was purposeful that night, that this had been premeditated and planned, that he wanted it to be known that he was a zealot, not a lunatic.
And so he took over his own defense for the explicit purpose of denying his own lawyers the opportunity to present psychiatric evidence that might persuade even a single juror that he did not deserve the death penalty.
In addition to watching the trial and getting some sense of him there, we also exchanged a few letters. He was on death row at this point, as he remains in Terre Haute, Indiana, at a federal penitentiary. He's now one of three federal death row inmates along with the Boston Marathon bomber and the Tree of Life Synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh.
In these letters, I was seeking very specific answers to specific questions about the timeline of the evening, about his preparation, about what he understood about Emanuel and its history going in.
I think he saw the exchange more as an opportunity to exert power in a new relationship. There was lots of antagonistic banter back and forth. He did acknowledge once again that he was utterly remorseless.
Dao:
I wanted to get you to talk a little bit about the church's pastor, Clementa Pinckney, who did die. He sounded extraordinary and charismatic, both as a minister and a politician.
Sack:
He was a remarkable prodigy, both in the church and in politics.
He was called to preach at age 13 while walking through his childhood chapel in Ridgeland, South Carolina. He says he literally heard the voice of God calling him to preach, needless to say, took it quite seriously and acted upon it.
He was known as a kid for wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase to middle school. He was that much about business even at that age.
Then he winds up running for and winning office to the state legislature. He became the youngest African American to ever win election to South Carolina's legislature. And at the time of the shooting, he was serving his fourth term in the state senate as a Democrat in Republican, South Carolina.
Therefore, he didn't have huge influence in the general assembly, but certainly advocated with great vigor for his district, which was one of the most poverty stricken in the state.
Dao:
I'm gonna ask you to now jump back in time. This is a very old church, dates back to the heart of the Confederacy when Charleston was a key center for the slave trade.
The fact that free men and women, as well as I think slave parishioners could pull together the beginnings of this church back in that pre-war era is kind of a miracle in a way.
Sack:
It was just an incredibly bold act for the times, which again was around 1817 or 1818 when they withdrew from white Methodist churches and formed their own congregation.
The leadership of that effort was from free people of color, but the enslaved were the majority of the membership. And, so yes, when the church forms the white population of Charleston, the white leadership of Charleston instantly sees it as a threat.
There are mass arrests and jailings. The church's leaders are jailed and do some time. Then in 1822, there was an insurrection plot in Charleston. It's come to be known as the Denmark Vesey Conspiracy, named for the free person of color, a carpenter who actually had bought his way out of slavery after hitting the lottery.
And Vesey, extensively organizes this plot. It's uncovered before it happens, and scores of men are arrested. Thirty five wind up being led to the gallows after trial and hung and almost half of those, I think 17 of the 35 wind up having some sort of association with the church. So in my view, it almost felt like the church itself was on trial and that they were really the target of the investigation that the authorities initiated.
Because I think the place was seen as such a threat in the aftermath of all this. A month after the trials end, the church is dismantled board by board under order of the authorities and the leaders of the church are exiled under threat of criminal prosecution.
Dao:
Wow. So my sense is that the Denmark Vesey affair really kind of set the church back.
It was harshly repressed for years and then you have the Civil War which then is an opening, right? The church can really sort of emerge during Reconstruction. Is it then sort of like a steady path of growth toward the civil rights movement? And the church as you came to know it in 2015?
Sack:
Yeah, I think it's very much a two steps forward, one step back kind of progress. And when you look at the church's history over time, it is very much one of suppression and repression followed by resistance. We see that all the way through 2015 when this white supremacist walks in the door and takes out the church's leadership and response.
There has been resistance of various kinds both communal in terms of the way that the city responded and within the church and within the hearts of members, including any number who found a way to forgive this remorseless killer. And I argue in the book that that in itself is a form of resistance.
Dao:
We're gonna take a quick break and we'll be back with Kevin Sack.
Kevin, you just mentioned the theme of forgiveness. As you know, I was an editor on the National Desk of the New York Times at the time of the Mother Emanuel shootings and I remember being shocked when at a nationally televised bail hearing for Dylann Roof, several relatives of the victims said they forgave him for his despicable violence.
Tell us about your reaction to that stunning moment of grace and what did you learn about why those families said what they said?
Sack:
It really drove this whole exploration to some extent, what happened in the courtroom that day. Because yes, these five family members got up and expressed forgiveness of one form or another. They weren't all identical. Some went further than others.
And in fact, even the night before, there had been a memorial service for one of the victims, Sharonda Singleton, and afterwards her son, Chris Singleton, an incredibly impressive young man, was asked by a British TV reporter how he was feeling. And he's standing next to his sister Camryn at the moment, and he says that there's nothing but love from our family right now, and we've already forgiven him.
Now, none of the folks that spoke the next day had heard that or seen that, they didn't even know they were gonna be asked to speak at this bond hearing or afforded an opportunity by the judge to make a comment or two. And when I've interviewed all of them, they will tell you that it was utterly unpremeditated, unplanned, spontaneous.
They describe it in mystical terms. It was 'God talking.' They were merely the vessels.
Like everybody, I think I was simultaneously awestruck and befuddled by this. It seemed like the purest expression of Christianity that any of us had ever seen, much less imagined. I wanted to know where it came from.
I thought about it and spoke to theologians and pastors. It occurred to me that what was really going on here was a form of release, because when you think about it, how else can you avoid being eaten alive from the insides by the fury and the rage and the insult? And so in that way, it seemed to me that forgiveness really was its own form of resistance.
It was a way to reclaim agency by people who had been robbed of it, by this killer. The one thing that could not be taken from them was their ability to forgive.
Dao:
Talk a moment about the opposite view that you encountered in reporting out and researching this book.
Clearly there were people within the church, within families you pointed out, and certainly within the African American community around the country who were sort of shocked by this and maybe not pleased, I guess would be fair to say. Could you describe that?
Sack:
Yeah, there are plenty of folks, including some of our brightest writers who asked in columns and essays immediately after this happened. 'Why is it always on black people to forgive? Why is it on them? They're not the problem here.'
There certainly are family members who do not in any way forgive and would like to see Roof executed. And there are others who are frank about them being on a journey. And that path to forgiveness is not necessarily a direct one or an immediate one.
They'll tell you that it sure would've helped a lot if he had shown some remorse. But it's very difficult for many people, and I think I'm one of them, to relate to that kind of grant of forgiveness for somebody who's not asking for it.
Dao:
So obviously you spent a lot of time in Charleston and then eventually moved there. You live there now.
Could you talk a little bit about how the City of Charleston grappled with this in the aftermath and is it over this yet or is it still continuing to really shape that city now?
Sack:
Yeah, I don't think it'll ever get over it. It was a defining moment for the city in any number of ways, and what's happened in the last decade has been really interesting on a number of fronts. There were a variety of symbolic, but I would argue extremely meaningful, gestures made.
In the aftermath of the shootings, the one that everybody remembers is the Confederate flag, that had flown either above or outside the state capitol in Columbia, South Carolina since the early 1960s as a direct affront to the quarter of the state's population that's African American, that finally came down.
It took the assassination of a state senator to make it happen, but the Republican governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, at the time, and the Republican dominated legislature did finally move to bring the flag down. I think that mattered.
It also mattered that the statue of John C. Calhoun, the great slavery defender, which had towered over Marion Square, Charleston Central Plaza for generations, again, as very much as a felt insult to those who walked beneath it, that was brought down by order of the mayor and the city council.
On the fifth anniversary of the shootings, the city issued a resolution, apologizing for its role in slavery. Forty-six percent of all enslaved Africans who disembarked in North America, did so in the Port of Charleston. And interestingly, it was not a unanimous vote. There was considerable dissent.
There are two pieces of legislation put before the general assembly, and in Columbia, that have gone nowhere. One is a hate crimes law. South Carolina is now one of two states without a hate crimes law.
It was one of five at the time of the shootings. Bills have been introduced every year and have gone nowhere.
There was also legislation, and still is legislation, both on the federal level and the state level to close what became known as the Charleston Loophole, which was the short background check period for purchasing a weapon, which allowed Dylann Roof to buy his gun despite a prior drug arrest.
So those things have gone nowhere. I'm regularly asked whether I think Charleston is a different place now than it was before, and I do think there was a Charleston before 2015 and a Charleston after 2015, much the same way that there was a New York before and after 9/11, and I would assume a Boston before and after the marathon bombing.
And I think it's a softer place. I think it's more self-reflective about race in particular. And I think a lot of conversations have started, that would not have happened beforehand. I know that I've been part of many of them.
Dao:
So you made this transition from being a newspaper reporter to being a historian, from covering news stories to spending lots and lots of days in archives. And you've devoted 10 years to this project, which has a remarkable result.
What do you think you've taken away from this experience? And how are you thinking about things going forward from here?
Are you gonna remain a historian?
Sack:
It might be a slight overstatement to call me a historian at this point. I remain a journalist with an interest in history, but I've certainly gained a lot of respect and a certain amount of practice, I guess, at the historian's craft. It's very different from journalism.
I mean, yes, I spent lots of time in musty archives going through old bound volumes and, I think that we, as journalists, need to do more of this. I recognize that we don't often have the time or resources or capability to do it, and that's where nonfiction writers and historians do and should step in.
But it was remarkable to me, how much wrong history I found and yeah, obviously what happens is, it gets written and then it gets repeated and it eventually solidifies into fact, or perceived truth, whether it is actual truth or not.
Dao:
Kevin Sack is author of
Listen to more 'Say More' episodes at
Kara Mihm of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
James Dao can be reached at