“Hate crime,” as Charleston, South Carolina Police Chief Greg Mullin sheepishly called the Wednesday night massacre of nine black parishioners at the city’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, is the wrong word. Here are some more wrong words likely to be heard on CNN and other major news networks over the next several days: mental illness, troubled, disturbed, loner.
The answer to why these words are so inaccurate is another word: history. Because, by its nature, history is always messy, pluralistic and incomplete, there are a few different histories, all of them overlapping and intertwined, that are important to name when talking about what happened in Charleston this week.
As many have noted, Emanuel — the South’s oldest African Methodist Episcopal, or AME, church outside of Baltimore — has a storied history, both locally and nationally. Founded, in part, by a former slave named Denmark Vesey in 1816, the church has long been a symbol of black independence and resilience. By 1818, some 75 percent of Charleston’s black parishioners had left white churches for the AME, seeking refuge and community apart from slave masters and other toxic bits of white antebellum society.
June 16, 1822 — 193 years and one day before Wednesday night’s shooting — marked the anniversary of a failed slave uprising Vesey helped to plan, a plot for which he and 34 other black men were executed. Though it was burned to the ground around the time of his execution, and black church services without a white person present were banned, the church would outlive Vesey; its members continued to gather in secret before a new edifice was constructed in 1865 and again in 1886. Before, during and after this reconstruction, Emanuel AME — long a center for activism, from slavery through the civil rights era to the present — has been subject to frequent attacks from white mobs fearful of the possibility of an independent gathering of slaves and, eventually, free persons beyond their control.
Historian Peniel Joseph, Nation sportswriter Dave Zirin, as well as writers at The Atlantic, Slate, Washington Post and elsewhere, have all expertly documented parts of this history and more. Additional background on Emanuel and other parts of the black faith tradition can be found on the website for the PBS documentary “This Far by Faith.” As Joseph wrote, “The nation is, it seems, caught in a perpetual feedback loop — destined to repeat the tragic, unheeded lessons of a racial past that we refuse to acknowledge exists in our present.”
Another, related history to that of the church is the one undergirding gunman Dylann Roof: the history of violent, and deep-seated racism Roof was all too happy to espouse at the time of the shooting. “I have to do it,” he said. “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” A number of recent pictures of Roof surfaced hours after he was named as a suspect. In one, the 21-year old dons a patch from Rhodesia, the British colonial name of Zimbabwe — as Vox explains, “a cause célèbre for white supremacists in the 1960s and 1970s.” If there was any doubt about Roof’s intentions, he made clear to point out to a survivor of the attack that, “I’m here to kill black people.”
Complimenting this history is that of white erasure: rendering black lives invisible and expendable, while white lives — even those of the clearly culpable — are treated as objects of fascination, pity and sympathy. This is why news of the massacre of nine black lives took a full three hours to surface on cable news, and even then did not merit the round-the-clock, full-throated coverage that accompanied mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado and Sandy Hook, Connecticut, where the victims — of course — were not uniformly black. It’s why the media focuses on mental illness instead of race, when nine black lives are shot down by an avowed white supremacist.
It’s not just a history, but an ideology that condones, even promotes, South Carolina flying the same flag — at full mast — that hung over armies sent to die defending the Southern aristocracy’s right to enslave, torture and dehumanize an entire population based solely on the color of their skin.
Then there’s another history that’s too often forgotten: that of resistance — particularly, black resistance. This, like most deep histories — cannot be bound to any one city, institution or individual. It’s a history that’s found voice and life in Emanuel and the people, including the slain pastor, activist and State Congressmen Clementa Pinckney, who have coursed through it and given it life. It was in the vigils held Thursday in Florida, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Texas, San Francisco, New York and elsewhere, commemorating the lost — not to mention the one in Charleston that concluded with a haunting rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” It’s in those calling adamantly to, once and for all, tear down the Confederate flag responsible for so much bloodshed from the South Carolina statehouse. It’s in the Black Lives Matter leaders from around the United States who, for the first time, met in Detroit this week to discuss the future of the movement that has gripped the country these last several months, and the plans that continue to emerge under the same banner: More than a few would be surprised if this coming weekend passed quietly.
As rooted and entrenched as racism is in American history, there’s also a history of fighting back against it that’s every bit as winding.
I’ve marched in the Civil Rights Movement. For over half a century, I’ve written articles against racism and war. I was shocked and I grieved to see what happened at the Charleston Emanuel Church in June, 2015.
But, let’s be very clear: the Confederate flag is a side-issue, a “digression.”
Symbolism is always important, but this flag is not simply about racial hatred… and any attempt to drive it underground will only succeed in making it a more potent symbol of resistance. Resistance to the Federal Government, the consolidation of power, etc.
Ms. Aronoff wisely writes about “deep history,” and the way various histories intertwine. She is right about that; but she has not given sufficient thought to the “deep history” of the American Civil War.
That war was not about “liberating slaves”–and most Southerners are aware of that. Would there have been draft riots in New York if there was popular sentiment in the North for the liberation of Southern slaves?
The slave-trade had been very profitable to the North and South for several decades. When the North began to industrialize, the need for cheap labor became paramount in the North. Hmm…. Where might such cheap labor be found?
Also, there was that huge expanse of territory recently conquered from the democratic Republic of Mexico– taken by the imperialist US! What to do with that immense territory? Who would control it? Northern industrialists? Northern railroad men (and railroad lawyers like Lincoln)? Northern banks?
These are very serious issues, and they need to be thought through much more carefully. I’m glad to see this discussion here, and I honor the work that Waging Non-Violence does. But, let us not stir the cauldron until we understand boiling point of the ingredients… and lower the heat!
I’m wondering why the failed violent uprising by Denmark Vessey is being championed by Waging Nonviolence? How about some investigative reporting into the nonviolent resistance instead? And factcheck. Rhodesia was Zim and Zam. Zimbabwe did a violent revolution and is a disaster to this day. Zambia–the other nation-state to emerge from the racist Rhodesia–used only nonviolence and is in far better shape and tends to host all regional peace talks. Waging Nonviolence should not just be another leftist publication; you should focus on helping us understand nonviolence.
Tom, I’m sorry to see that you are basing your entire view of Waging Nonviolence on a single sentence — one that is stating a fact rather than taking a position. To say that this site is championing violence based on that is a bit ridiculous. You won’t find a single article on the entire site that does that. Also, we aren’t purposely ignoring any nonviolent histories here, regarding African countries. There’s only so much we can cover in a blog post about the Charleston shooting. As always, you are welcome to pitch stories if you see that we’re missing something on the site. No need to jump to drastic conclusions about the editorial direction of Waging Nonviolence.