Blood at the Root

In the aftermath of the Emanuel Nine.

In the winter of 2008, Barack Obama was in no way guaranteed the African-American vote in the Democratic primaries. He had split the opening contests, Iowa and New Hampshire, with Hillary Clinton, and had narrowly won more delegates in Nevada, yet the black voters of South Carolina, particularly the middle-aged and graying churchgoers who come out to the polls in great numbers, were torn. At first, some knew so little about him that they were not sure he was black. Others, following the lead of well-known figures in the old civil-rights establishment, felt warmly toward the Clintons and saw no reason to break with them. There was also a more visceral concern: many African-American voters told Obama’s volunteers in South Carolina that they could not shake the memory of the many black leaders over the decades who had met a violent end. When they looked at Barack Obama, hope and change was not the only future they could imagine.

Anton Gunn, a self-confident young community organizer, told Obama’s campaign chiefs in Chicago that if they wanted to win the state they needed to hire him and follow his advice. The Clintons had already enlisted many black leaders in South Carolina—politicians, pastors, downtown business people—but the Obama campaign could still win, Gunn said, by targetting the “Miss Mary”s, older women who were centers of good will and polite gossip in the black churches, who had a hand in every charity event and Bible-study group. To win the younger black vote, Gunn told the campaign chiefs, they should, in classic hip-hop fashion, distribute free mixtapes of Obama’s best stump performances. Obama, who had to erase any lingering impression that he was a callow newcomer, came to Sumter County and, echoing the language of Malcolm X as portrayed by Denzel Washington, told an enthusiastic crowd, “Don’t let people turn you around, because they’re just making stuff up. That’s what they do. They try to bamboozle you, hoodwink you.”

But that was not quite enough. A CBS poll before the primary said that forty per cent of the black voters in the state believed that the country was not ready to elect an African-American President. The campaign planned an event that was intended to resonate more deeply with black South Carolina, particularly with its Miss Marys. The event was to take place in the town of Orangeburg. In 1968, after protests against a segregated bowling alley, police shot into a crowd of black college students, killing three and injuring dozens more. This became known as the Orangeburg Massacre. Michelle Obama went to Orangeburg as her husband’s surrogate. Born on the South Side of Chicago, she was descended from Low Country slaves who worked in the rice fields around Georgetown, South Carolina. At the rally, she assured the crowd that her husband was “running to be the President who finally lifts up the poor and forgotten,” and gently prodded her listeners to tear away the “veil of impossibility . . . that keeps us waiting and hoping for a turn that may never come.” She ended on a note of solidarity and daring: “Imagine our family on that inaugural platform. America will look at itself differently.”

On January 26th, Obama crushed Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in South Carolina, sweeping the black vote and winning fifty-five per cent of the vote over all. The victory secured the black vote for Obama during the rest of the campaign and a lead in the primaries that he never lost. At the victory celebration in Columbia, Obama told his volunteers that they had assembled “the most diverse coalition of Americans that we’ve seen in a long, long time.”

The crowd answered Obama in full-throated euphoria: “Race doesn’t matter! Race doesn’t matter!”

At around nine-thirty on the morning of April 4, 2015, midway through Obama’s second term as President, Michael Slager, a white police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina, shot and killed a Coast Guard veteran and forklift operator, a black man of fifty named Walter Scott. Slager had pulled Scott over and told him that one of his brake lights was out of commission. He took Scott’s license and walked back to his squad car. Scott, who had a series of arrests on his record, mainly for non-payment of child support, left his car and began to lumber away. There was a brief struggle as Slager tried to zap Scott with his Taser. Scott escaped at a heavy-legged trot. Slager unholstered his gun and, from a distance of no more than twenty feet, shot at Scott eight times, killing him as calmly as a hunter puts down a hobbled deer.

There were no uprisings in North Charleston, as there were in Ferguson and Baltimore, no public displays of mass outrage. Race, it turned out, had not ceased to matter, but forgiveness and forbearance, a spiritual tradition and a temperament rooted in the black church, the most powerful of all African-American institutions, prevailed. Clementa C. Pinckney, a Democrat in the state senate and the pastor of Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston—the oldest historically black church in the state—led a rally in North Charleston and campaigned to have police wear body cameras. He also showed an almost unfathomable degree of empathy, and not only with the victims. “Our hearts go out to the Scott family, and our hearts go out to the Slager family,” Pinckney said. “Because the Lord teaches us to love all.”

Two months later, on the steamy evening of June 17th, Dylann Roof, a twenty-one-year-old ninth-grade dropout, his imagination roiling with Confederate romance and a demented determination to spark a race war, slipped through a side entrance at Emanuel A.M.E. carrying a .45-calibre Glock semiautomatic that he had bought with his birthday money and eight magazines filled with hollow-point bullets. Roof sat down in a Bible-study class with a dozen congregants, putting himself near the teacher, Clementa Pinckney. Roof seemed to listen as Pinckney led a discussion of the parable of the sower, in the Gospel of Mark, but he was gathering his nerve. Writing on a Web site called “The Last Rhodesian,” Roof had portrayed himself as a lonely soldier of racial purity forced to take solitary action: “We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

Finally, Roof, a slouchy, slender blond boy with a bowl haircut, stood up from his chair and fired repeatedly. “We were just about to say the prayer to be released,” Felicia Sanders, who survived, along with her eleven-year-old granddaughter and her friend Polly Sheppard, told a reporter for NBC. “He caught us with our eyes closed.” After the firing began, Sanders lay on the floor and clutched and covered her granddaughter with such force that she feared she would smother her. She could not protect her twenty-six-year-old son, Tywanza, who was shot several times.

As he lay bleeding on the floor, Tywanza said to Roof, “Why are you doing this?”

“Y’all are raping our women and taking over the country,” Roof answered.

Sanders watched her son die shortly afterward. One surviving witness recalled that Roof said, “You want something to pray about? I’ll give you something to pray about.” After firing more than seventy times—“I heard every shot,” Felicia Sanders said—Roof pointed the gun at his own head only to discover that he had not left a bullet for himself. As he was leaving the room, he saw Polly Sheppard, hiding under a table and praying.

“Shut up,” he said. “Did I shoot you yet?”

“No,” she replied.

“I’m going to let you live so you can tell the story of what happened.”

Roof killed nine people, including Clementa Pinckney. In the weeks since the massacre, the Mother Emanuel church, white, angular, and as elegant as an origami crane, has become at once a shrine and a morbid tourist attraction. Small clutches of visitors stand outside the church and stare up at its doors, as if to summon a greater understanding of what took place behind them. They lay carnations next to moldering wreaths and write messages of condolence on placards, a fire hydrant, the narrow trunk of a tree. They stay a few minutes, then trail off to other sites. A block away, in Marion Square, they encounter a statue of John C. Calhoun, the outspoken proponent of states’ rights, secession, and slavery. They take the ferry to Fort Sumter. They visit the city market on Meeting Street and the Old Slave Mart Museum, on Chalmers Street. They shop. They have a beer at Closed for Business and the bacon corn bread at Husk.

Inside Emanuel, a pastor in his mid-sixties named Norvel Goff, Sr., now presides where Pinckney once did. Goff may be the weariest-looking man I’ve ever seen, with hooded eyes, worry creases in his forehead, an excruciating slowness in his movements. Charged with healing Emanuel’s collective wound, he has preached every Sunday since the massacre that parishioners must show the world “the resiliency of faith”—a refusal to answer hate with hate.

Early in the Sunday service I attended recently, Goff stood near the choir receiving visitors from out of town. First came an executive from a private consulting group bearing a check for a hundred thousand dollars. Then came the principal of a high school in Liberty City, a predominantly black neighborhood in Miami, along with a busload of his most promising students. Goff listened to their messages of condolence with patience and gravity but also a glint of detachment, even dark humor. He bore the responsibility of graciousness not with churchy formality but with what James Baldwin called the “ironic tenacity” of the blues singer. Goff didn’t need to be told that no check, no embrace, was going to heal Mother Emanuel. The principal told Goff that he and his students had driven from Miami “just to let you know that love is greater than hate.” Goff smiled approvingly for the principal, though it seemed to require a measure of wincing discomfort to do so, and, with a slight fluttering wave, summoned the students to join him up front. Then he turned to his parishioners and said, “I want the world to know we are not in this struggle by ourselves. Praise God.”

Goff had news. Denise Quarles, who had not been in church since her mother, Myra Thompson, was shot to death in Bible class, was here today, and he asked Sister Denise to stand. A prim, handsome woman, she wore a large metallic button emblazoned with a photo of her mother. Someone handed her a microphone. “My heart grieves every day,” she managed to say. “When I see you, I see courage. When I see you, I see faith.” There was a silence, then an “Amen” from the back. “I’m sitting in the same pew, and I feel her presence when I come to Mother Emanuel,” she went on. She wanted everyone to know that “the prayers work—it’s the only reason I’m able to be here.”

The congregation sang a few verses of “I’ll Be All Right Someday,” and Goff came to the pulpit to preach. “Sometimes, I’m a little weary and worn,” he began. “Since June 17, 2015, many from around the country and in Charleston ask the question: ‘How are you? How is Mother Emanuel?’ My response is: ‘With your prayers and encouragement and with God guiding us, we’ll be all right.’ ” Goff made a distinction between the everyday spiritual condition of “joy”—an intense awareness of the gift of life, the fruit of hope, joy as the very condition of being alive—and the banality of “happiness.” There was no happiness. But “even in the midst of trials and tribulations we still have joy,” Goff said, his energy finally restored. “My good days outnumber my bad days, and I will not complain.”

 “Wake up, Larry—you’re missing the pregame.”

What Goff made clear was that members of the community were in a state of immense pain (“post-traumatic-stress syndrome” was the term they often used), but they were alive, and feeling joy in their pews—and at their jobs, and at their Bible classes and dinner tables and Sunday strolls—because of the depth of their spiritual lives. This was the way of a church that had been around since the days when enslaved black men and women, in a quest for safety, community, dignity, cohesion, empowerment, ritual, and peace, broke from white churches and built “invisible” institutions, sometimes called “hush harbors.” The black church, even as it has changed, aged, and, in some places, lost ground to mega-churches, remains a central institution of black life, and of black political influence.

Appalling as the massacre at Emanuel was, it was not the only event in Charleston that shocked the country. At Dylann Roof’s arraignment hearing, relatives of the Emanuel Nine, one after another, stepped up to forgive the man behind the massacre. “You took something very precious away from me,” Nadine Collier, the daughter of Ethel Lance, said, addressing the accused. “I will never get to talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you, and have mercy on your soul. You hurt me. You hurt a lot of people. But God forgives you and I forgive you.” Myra Thompson’s husband said, “I forgive you and my family forgives you. But we would like you to take this opportunity to repent. Repent. Confess. Give your life to the one who matters the most: Christ. So that he can change it, can change your ways, no matter what happens to you, and you’ll be O.K.” Felicia Sanders also forgave Roof and later told Jennifer Berry Hawes, of the Charleston Post & Courier, why. “I didn’t want any riots here,” she said. “Why do I need to get up there and cause chaos, and then other kids would get killed and the neighborhood would get hurt? Let the judicial system handle it.”

The tradition of forgiveness in the black church is long. In 1974, six years after Martin Luther King, Jr., was gunned down in Memphis, his mother, Alberta Williams King, was playing the organ at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, a hundred yards or so from her son’s grave, in downtown Atlanta, when a young man, firing two pistols, killed her and a church deacon. But, just as Martin Luther King, Sr., had forgiven his son’s assassin, Christine King Farris forgave her mother’s killer. “Hate won’t bring my mother or brother back,” she told the magazine Jet. “It would only destroy me.”

James H. Cone, an exponent of black-liberation theology whose books include “Martin & Malcolm & America” and “The Cross and the Lynching Tree,” grew up in rural Arkansas and in the A.M.E. Church. The forgiveness shown by the relatives of the Emanuel Nine was hard to understand for anyone “who hasn’t had to cope with that kind of powerlessness,” he said. “It’s victory out of defeat. It is the weak overcoming the strong. It’s ‘You can’t destroy my spirit. I have a forgiving spirit because that’s what God created me to be. You are not going to destroy that.’ When they forgive, it is a form of resistance, a kind of resilience. It is not bowing down. That is misunderstood by a lot of people, even black people, and even some black ministers. It’s part of that tragic experience of trying to express your humanity in the face of death and not having any power.”

Clementa Pinckney “combined the spirituality and the political challenge that black people face,” Cone said. “That church was a symbol of that. Black people are a small minority, and we can’t use physical violence. That’s not a possibility. It has to be a spiritual resistance, which is a different thing. And he represented that kind of spiritual—defiant but spiritual—resistance. I was not surprised by Charleston. White people have never regarded us as human beings. There is a deep fear in me still that when I walk out on the street I will end up dead. The power is still there. I have sons who don’t feel like that. They didn’t experience the violence that I knew was there in the South.”

The Reverend Joseph Darby, the former pastor of Morris Brown A.M.E. Church, in Charleston, and a leader of the state chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., is revered among the black-church elders of South Carolina. He is also the least restrained among them. He was sympathetic when the mayor and the governor led a peaceful march of solidarity after the massacre. He shed a tear when the Confederate flag outside the statehouse was lowered, having helped to lead the campaign against it in the first place. But Reverend Darby told me one morning recently at the Harbour Club, downtown, that all the “kumbaya stuff” will be meaningless without combatting the institutional racism that still defines the state “and the state of the union”: underfunded, segregated schools, neglected black towns, unjust voter-I.D. laws, gentrification and joblessness in the cities, outsized rates of African-Americans in prison. The surface tone of conciliation, Darby and many others believe, helps to smother the possibility of political change in places like Charleston.

“You have a city infected with raging politeness, relentlessly courteous to the point that no one’s doing much of anything,” he said. “This courtesy is hardwired into the American South, but it’s hypocritical. It’s a tradition draped in the antebellum lost-cause stuff, the old Southern chivalrous tradition, and it depends on an African-American population that has to go along to get along.” He went on, “We have never worked through the modern civil-rights era. Laws were passed, but the relationships behind those laws have not fully formed. It’s legal to go anywhere, but if you can’t get a job and haven’t been to the right schools you are still nowhere.”

A waitress, a wiry older woman in a pink blouse, greeted Reverend Darby and poured him some coffee. “I had no idea you were with us this morning!” she said.

Darby smiled and engaged her in chitchat about the heroic heat and humidity before he resumed: “Remember, there was not a trace of ambiguity about what happened here. They couldn’t pull out a rap sheet—these were nine people of impeccable character—and they were killed in a church by a white man who wanted to kill black people to start a race war! And he said so! So it flies in the face of any notion of post-racial America, an America so proud of itself because it elected an African-American President. Some of the reaction is driven by the need to say, ‘It’s not me, I’m not like that.’ Dylann Roof is not that extraordinary. He is kind of typical—extreme, but typical. If you build a politic, as we have done in America since Nixon and Reagan, in which election strategies are based on distrust of the other, well, some folks will react on a political level and vote based on racial fear. The truly unbalanced will do what this kid did.”

Darby, like others I talked with, was moved and encouraged by Obama’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney—and not only because of his rendition of “Amazing Grace.” The speech represented a greater willingness to condemn racial injustice, both historical and present-day. Darby recalled how he used to be in on conference calls with other black preachers and Joshua DuBois, Obama’s liaison to religious leaders. “We would tell Josh, ‘Let the President out of the cage! Let him be black!’ ” The preachers were frustrated that Obama’s focus was too often on pull-up-your-pants cultural issues—“almost Cosby-esque in his rhetoric”—but the Charleston speech “rounds it out by saying America is not a fair place.” Obama’s term is coming to an end, Darby said, with a sly, cockeyed smile, and “he no longer has to be the least threatening black man in America.”

The speech, though, will do little to change the political arrangements of Charleston. “I’ve been an American all my life and I’ve been black all my life, and there has never been a time in America when someone in power in America says, on his own, ‘Let’s take a different course,’ ” Darby said. “South Carolina has never done the right thing on its own. Slavery ended by federal intervention. Civil-rights laws passed by federal intervention. People change grudgingly.”

The gentility of establishment politics in Charleston was performed one night at Mother Emanuel at a wake for Herbert Ulysses Gaillard Fielding. The scion of a prosperous funeral-home business, Fielding was among the first black politicians to win a seat in the South Carolina state legislature since Reconstruction. He was ninety-two when he died. Now he was laid out in a grand coffin flanked by wreaths of red roses and dozens of fraternity brothers wearing black suits and white gloves.

James Clyburn, a leader of the Democratic caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives and for many years the most powerful black politician in the state, spoke warmly of Fielding, even though he once ran against Fielding for Congress. The choir sang “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” Then a white funeral director got up and made what he considered a bold gesture of racial reconciliation. “In South Carolina,” he said, “there have traditionally been two funeral directors’ associations: one predominantly white, one predominantly African-American.” It was time, he said, to merge them. “We’re doing the right thing,” he said, over earnest applause. “Our hearts are in the right place.”

The last guest speaker was Joseph P. Riley, Jr., who has been the mayor of Charleston for forty years. Riley is white. (Charleston has never had a black mayor.) A diminutive man with hearing aids, horn-rimmed glasses, and a shock of snowy hair, Riley is seventy-two, and, by the standards of South Carolina, he has been on the right side of history where race is concerned. In 1982, he hired Reuben Greenberg, the city’s first African-American police chief, and kept him in the job until Greenberg retired, twenty-three years later. In 2000, Riley led a march from Charleston to Columbia to demand that the state legislature remove the Confederate flag from its grounds. The route was a hundred and twenty miles, and Riley, at Greenberg’s insistence, wore a bulletproof vest; he finished the march with bloody, bandaged feet. Riley has been a friend to downtown real-estate interests—and that has meant gentrification as well as development—but he also campaigned for the construction of an African-American history museum on Gadsden’s wharf, where tens of thousands of slaves arrived in Charleston from present-day Togo, Benin, Angola, and Nigeria. He is stepping down this year, after ten terms.

Riley was at ease in Emanuel, and he recalled the “seismic changes” of the civil-rights movement and praised Herbert Fielding as a man of conciliation. He said, “To many white people, uneasy with these changes, Herbert pushed too hard. He seemed like a radical to them. To some in the African-American community, Herbert’s easy grace caused some to call him an Uncle Tom. The radical charge hurt, though he wasn’t that. The Uncle Tom charge hurt him even more—and he wasn’t that, either.”

Fielding was a man of deliberation, of forbearance, of careful progress, and so are the black candidates who are hoping to succeed Riley. There are three, and the leading prospect is William Dudley Gregorie, a veteran city-council member and a trustee of Emanuel. He tried to beat Riley twice and failed. Robert Behre, who is covering the race for the Charleston Post & Courier, told me that Gregorie has “no real chance.” The favorite so far is Leon Stavrinakis, a lawyer and state lawmaker. Stavrinakis is white.

One afternoon, I met Gregorie at his modest headquarters, in a worn-down part of town. He slumped on a couch, looking nearly as weary as Pastor Goff. Coltrane and Monk were playing on a set of small speakers in the hallway. Gregorie is active at Emanuel; he knew every one of the victims, and attended all their funerals. Susie Jackson, who, at eighty-seven, was the oldest of them, sang in the Emanuel choir; she was a close relation of his. Every so often as we talked, he would cry or just stop talking. “I am very . . . tender,” he managed once, while recounting how, on the night of the killings, he waited at a hotel across the street from the church to hear who was alive and who was not. “It is so hard to talk about it.”

 “Could I please go back to the rack now?”

Although Gregorie had lost two earlier races for city hall, he feels that, after the Emanuel tragedy, he’s been “tested,” having been on “the national stage in terms of media.” He had given interviews to the national press, and he spoke briefly at Pinckney’s funeral, before Obama, and was determined “to keep a lid on Charleston,” to avoid any violence. This, he said, was part of his “branding” as a candidate. He said that he was introducing a resolution in the city council to plant nine oak trees in memory of the Emanuel Nine, but he saw no good reason to get rid of the statue of Calhoun down the street: “It would be too divisive.”

And yet Gregorie was not all forgiveness. There was a fury in him, too. What had happened at Emanuel, he said, was “not something new” or completely unexpected. “How could it be? Particularly in a city that is a seat of the Confederacy, a city where there were slave owners, the butchering and murdering of slaves. . . . It was evil that came into our church. Pure evil. And the only way that you can fight evil is with good. I think our church has been chosen. Do we know what for yet? No, we don’t. It is an iconic church in terms of its contribution to American history.”

Mother Emanuel was founded in 1816. Six years later, one of its leaders, Denmark Vesey, a carpenter who bought his freedom with winnings from the East Bay Street lottery, organized what a biographer of his, David Robertson, called “the most elaborate and well-planned slave insurrection in the history of the United States.” Historians have debated the scale and the details of the plot; some say that Vesey secretly recruited thousands of slaves to kill the slave owners of Charleston, seize the arsenal in the city and the ships in the port, and then escape to Haiti, where bondage had been outlawed. The plot, whatever its actual dimensions, was uncovered, and Vesey, along with thirty-four alleged co-conspirators, was hanged. Emanuel was burned to the ground by whites shortly afterward, and was later banned until the end of the Civil War. An earthquake brought it down again in 1886; Grover Cleveland donated ten dollars toward its rebuilding. Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr., preached at Emanuel. The massacre this summer, Gregorie said, “is another part of its history. Where will it go?”

In 1955, after the conviction of Rosa Parks for violating segregation laws, and in the midst of a bus boycott, Dr. King had just minutes to prepare for a speech at Montgomery’s Holt Street Baptist Church. “How could I make a speech that would be militant enough to keep my people aroused to positive actions yet moderate enough to keep this fervor within controllable and Christian bounds?” he wondered, as he later recalled. “Could the militant and the moderate be combined in a single speech?”

Militancy with moderation and grace: it’s what’s behind the rhetoric of building bridges, the urge toward nonviolence and forgiveness, the refusal to surrender to hate. In the mid-sixties, younger voices in SNCC and the Black Power movement grew disillusioned with such tactics, and you see a similar disillusionment now among some of the city’s younger activists. They are wary of what they consider the conservatism, even accommodationism, of the black church.

One morning, I arranged to meet Muhiyidin d’Baha, one of the organizers of Black Lives Matter Charleston, at a Starbucks downtown. The venue was ill chosen. “This is anti-revolutionary, this place!” d’Baha said. Then he smiled and ordered a caramel macchiato.

D’Baha’s mother is Baha’i, and his father is a Muslim. The family moved to South Carolina from Poughkeepsie when d’Baha was thirteen. As a kid, he got in trouble for stealing cars, but then he straightened himself out and went to a good magnet school; in college, he studied psychology and played football. D’Baha is thirty, burly, and wears beaded dreads and a Black Lives Matter T-shirt. He shows great respect to the elders of the black-church community, but he also talks about the insufficiency of “respectability politics” and the barrier that it creates between “the power establishment and the revolutionaries and disgruntled masses.” The voices of forgiveness at Dylann Roof’s hearing struck d’Baha as understandable in the context of the black church and the legacy of civil-rights-era thinking but, at the same time, as a form of political masochism.

“That was Charleston,” he said. “That was accommodating white feelings and white superiority. It was ‘Yes, Massa, can I have another?’ But, at the same time, it was spiritual fortitude forged in a crucible of terrorism. It speaks of a spiritual level that I haven’t attained. What it also meant to Charleston was that, without the families’ backing, we couldn’t demonstrate at the pitch we wanted. Walter Scott’s mom said the same thing. When the families give these signals, and the pastors instill in the families a sense of grace and forgiveness, the anger never reverberates. No leadership arose demanding to have this pain recognized. Again, it’s let me accommodate you so you’re not scared, we’ll just get on the bridge and hold hands, Jesus is good, we’re over it. There has been an arrangement here, created over generations, to be able to endure terrorism. At this point, this is the way it is. We endure. We don’t ask for more.”

Black Lives Matter Charleston is small and unaffiliated with the national movement (which itself is more loosely organized than its impressive influence would suggest). Women in particular have drifted away from the local group, some convinced, as one Charleston activist told me, that the group is too narrow, too splintered, and fails to “advocate for women and queer and transgender people.”

Despite the modest scale of Black Lives Matter Charleston, the group, along with some other small activist organizations, held a demonstration just after the massacre at Mother Emanuel called “Burying White Supremacy,” near the statue of Calhoun in Marion Square. They began by incinerating a Confederate flag, but then someone set alight a Stars and Stripes. Word got around town, and it was not considered, in all, a helpful gesture. The attempt to “shift the narrative” from conciliation to something more insistent stalled.

There are boundaries in Charleston. When d’Baha speaks in churches, he gets the sense that people are unnerved. “They don’t want us to start a riot,” he says, echoing Felicia Sanders. His local goals are in line with those of the black ministers—greater police oversight, greater attention to black schools and black neighborhoods. But his kinship is less with the civil-rights ethos of nonviolence (passive resistance, he says, was “silly” and “dehumanizing”) than with the militant tradition of SNCC, Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers.

When James Cone was developing his ideas about black-liberation theology, part of his project was to find a common home for the followers of both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. But he still sees the differences in spiritual temperament and tactical thinking between those two poles. “Those young people today have the Internet to organize themselves, and a fierce spirituality that is not necessarily connected to the church,” he said. “The language of the Black Lives Matter movement is connected to the black body. They want society to acknowledge the threat to the black body. They are not saying these lives matter to God. They are saying that they matter to the world. They are not passive in any sense.”

Last year, after years of debate, Charleston erected a statue of Denmark Vesey in Hampton Park. It had been a struggle. When the city first agreed to put a portrait of Vesey in Gaillard Municipal Auditorium, in 1976, vandals stole it. After the portrait was recovered, it was bolted to the wall.

“Dylann Roof was striking at black resistance, and Denmark Vesey and the A.M.E. Church represent black resistance that is rooted in the nineteenth century,” Cone said. “The fact that there is now a statue of Denmark Vesey means they affirm that resistance. That resistance, any form of it, when I grew up, is what white people disliked. Deference is expected of you. Denmark Vesey would not give that deference, and that church represented a refusal to give it.”

James Campbell is one of the oldest activists in town. He is ninety, and grew up in segregated Charleston. As a young man, he knew Malcolm X and Amiri Baraka, and taught black studies in Harlem and African literature in Tanzania. In his view, the young activists in the country, though they lack distinct memories of the segregated facilities and the lynchings of Jim Crow, are in possession of a clear sense of purpose. They are, he said, helping “to fulfill” the American Revolution. After the slaughter at Emanuel, he told me, he sent “as a homework assignment” to some young activists in Charleston a copy of a speech that W. E. B. Du Bois delivered in 1946, in Columbia, South Carolina: “Behold the Land,” an address before the Southern Negro Youth Congress. Du Bois was seventy-eight, and assured the assembled:

You do not stand alone. It may seem like a failing fight when the newspapers ignore you; when every effort is made by white people in the South to count you out of citizenship, to act as though you did not exist as human beings, while all the time they are profiting by your labor; gleaning wealth from your sacrifices and trying to build a nation and a civilization upon your gradation. You must remember that, despite all this, you have allies and allies even in the white South.

Campbell sees the massacre as a dark chapter in the late stages of a civilizational struggle, from oppression to liberation. When he was a boy, he told me, his grandmother took him to a “serious Baptist shouting church” in rural South Carolina, where nearly everyone in the pews had been born into bondage. She would tell him about life on the cotton plantation, the hideous work under the sun and the lash, the sundering of families, the humiliation and the fear. When rumors reached the plantation that the Union Army was sweeping across the South, the slaves thought that Biblical end-times were upon them. They knew nothing of liberation, only the stories of men in blue burning down the cities of the South. Freedom was beyond imagining.

“That memory is almost genetic, the DNA of the community, and I don’t think it manifests itself in rage,” Campbell said. “It manifests itself in the resolute patience of a long-suffering people. And their determination is expressed through the permanency of the church. That may wear thin with some of the younger people, but it will be a while before you see it change.”

 Letter From Charleston

BY DAVID REMNICK