‘Mother Emanuel’ in Charleston: More than a Church, a Symbol

Did the perpetrator of the massacre on Wednesday, June 17 in Charleston, South Carolina know that he was taking aim at a symbol? The man who opened fire was reportedly arrested Thursday morning in Shelby, North Carolina, according to U.S. media. He was identified as 21-year-old Dylann Roof. The Emanuel Methodist Church, where the suspect was spotted by surveillance cameras, is a place of worship that is filled with history for African-Americans. Founded at the beginning of the 19th century by a black Methodist congregation in reaction to segregation, the church was immediately regarded with suspicion by whites in power.

A slave revolt at the instigation of one of the parishioners in 1822 resulted in the church’s destruction, according to the American press. The congregation went underground and participated in secret networks that provided fugitive slaves with access to the abolitionist northern states. It wasn’t until the end of the Civil War in 1865 that the building was rebuilt. The victim of an earthquake in 1886, it was again rebuilt in its present neo-Gothic form.

Martin Luther King Spoke There in 1962

The fight against slavery was supplanted by the fight for civil rights for the Methodist congregation. “Mother Emanuel,” the nickname given to the house of worship, thus welcomed Booker T. Washington in 1909. Born a slave, this figurehead of the American black community’s new struggle wasn’t the last to speak there. In 1962, Martin Luther King also came and spoke, as did Roy Wilkins, a pillar of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. A year after Martin Luther King’s death in 1968, his widow, Coretta Scott King, organized a march in support of a wage increase for black hospital employees, which began at the church.

Among those killed Wednesday was the church’s pastor, Clementa Pinckney. Also a Democratic member of the South Carolina Senate, he was active in campaigning for a bill that sought to equip police with cameras in the wake of the death of an African-American, Walter Scott, who was killed by a policeman after a routine traffic stop.