“You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go.” --The Terrorist (who shall go un-named by me)
The terrorist hate crime that was committed Wednesday night against a group of black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina was many things: horrific, unforgivable, heinous, repulsive, and heart-breaking. No, that last one is too weak, too small. Not heart-breaking…heart-rending. There are many things it was not: new, random, unimaginable, or senseless.
This terrorist attack against a black congregation was anything but new. If you have even the most basic understanding of American history in general, much less the history of the American South in particular, you know that crimes like this have happened before. Indeed, they have happened at the very church that was attacked on Wednesday night: Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church. To use the word “historic” in reference to Emanuel A.M.E. is a vast understatement. Emanuel houses the oldest black congregation south of Baltimore, MD. As one historian put it,
“This church is much more than a place where people sing gospel. It’s tethered to the deep unconscious of the black community.”Congressman James Clyburn (D – SC) stated things beautifully when he said:
“Emanuel A.M.E. Church is the rock upon which the A.M.E. Church throughout the South is built.”
The significance of Emanuel A.M.E., as is the case of so many things that are vastly important to the black community in the South, is written in our history books with blood and flame.
One of the founders of the church was Denmark Vessey, a former slave who was executed in 1822 after being convicted (in a secret proceeding) of planning a slave revolt in which Vesey and his followers were supposedly going to kill slaveholders in Charleston, liberate the slaves, and then sail to Haiti for refuge. Not only were Vesey and thirty-four others executed, Emanuel A.M.E. was burned to the ground. After that fire, the congregation met in secret until the end of the civil war, with the church being rebuilt at its present location using plans created by Robert Vesey, Denmark’s son.
The history cited above may seem distant, even irrelevant, to some, but it is directly related to Wednesday’s massacre. While Denmark Vesey’s original plan in 1822 was to stage the slave revolt on July 14, Bastille Day, the possibility that the plan might have been compromised prompted him to move the date up to June 17, exactly 193 years before the terror attack against Emanuel A.M.E. It seems highly unlikely that the correlation between those dates is a coincidence.
The white supremacist who committed the murders is known to have displayed historically-based white power symbols such as the Apartheid-era flag of South Africa and the flag of Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was known when it was still under the control of its white minority). (NOTE: I will not dignify this terrorist or his views by writing his name or posting his image). It does not take any imagination at all to see that a white power fanatic who sports the symbols of bygone days of Caucasian control selected an historically important black church as his target and attacked it on what would have been the anniversary of a major slave revolt, and he did so specifically because of that history. There was nothing random about this attack.
Wednesday night’s racist massacre was not, in any way, unimaginable. It has strong parallels to one of the worst hate crimes of the civil rights era: The 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four little girls were murdered that day in Birmingham, struck down as they were changing into their choir robes. Nine congregants were killed Wednesday night in Charleston as they conducted a prayer service. The 16th Street Baptist Church was a focal point for civil rights activists in Birmingham. Emanuel A.M.E. was similarly important to Charleston’s civil rights activists. As a nation, we have been here before. We have witnessed this suffering. We need not imagine anything, we need only to remember.
The killings at Emanuel A.M.E. were not senseless. There is a difference between an act being senseless and an act being indefensible. It is perfectly easy to make sense of what that white supremacist did: He acted on his racial hatred. He acted on the lessons he's been taught by white American culture. His crime is entirely consistent with American history, PARTICULARLY the history of the South and ESPECIALLY that of South Carolina (which is where the Civil War started). As one web commentator wrote, [The TERRORIST] Is America.
In the face of all of this, it seems especially difficult to maintain any sense of hopefulness regarding the future of race relations in this country. This year alone has seen repeated cases of unarmed black people being killed by police, of racial slurs being brazenly hurled at black children, of public school teachers pining for the days of segregation. My white brothers and sisters have been sadly predictable in their responses to Wednesday’s terror attack, calling it “extraordinary” to refer to it as a hate crime; describing the terrorist as ”a quiet, shy boy who mostly kept to himself”; leaving the Confederate Flag” at full mast in Charleston; attributing the attack to mental illness”; and saying that the terror attack cannot be blamed on structural racism, because that no longer exists. Meanwhile the terrorist has already confessed, and stated that <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/19/us/charleston-church-shooting-main/">he wanted to start a race war</a>, and my fellow Caucasians continue to express doubt that this is "about" race.We are nothing if not consistent in our blindness.
I have spent several decades as a white man living in close connection to the black community. I’ve seen things ebb and flow between the races, and inevitably been caught in the middle. This aspect of our culture has always been very immediate and present in my life, and I cannot recall any time when things were this bad. We have spent too much time as a nation avoiding any real and honest understanding of our history, and refusing to address the cancer of structural, institutional, cultural racism. We have allowed this open wound to fester, and gangrene is setting in.
So how can we “keep hope alive” when things are so fraught with anxiety and danger? Before I answer that rhetorical question, let me just say that I am no one’s idea of an optimist. I don’t just assume “it will be OK,” because that statement is demonstrably untrue. It MAY be OK. It COULD. But I never, EVER say that it WILL. And yet…I am not without hope. Things can get better, even at times when it seems least likely that they will.
I’ve seen examples of this in my own family history. My grandparents, much as I loved them, were all products of white Southern culture in the early 20th century. Which is to say, they were racists. Not to the same extent, not with the same behavior as a result, but yes, all racists. In that they were hardly unique. By all rights, my parents, who grew up in segregated New Orleans in the forties and fifties, should have followed in the footsteps of their parents. In the vast majority of cases, that’s what happens. And yet…it didn’t. Instead, my parents went in the complete opposite direction.
My father was the pastor of a very small church in rural South Carolina from 1973 to 1975. He made his deacons angry when they found out he’d been teaching an elderly black man to read. They got even angrier when my parents sent my siblings to the newly-integrated schools. They were the first white parents in the community to do so. When we moved back to New Orleans from South Carolina, my parents bought a house in an integrated neighborhood, sent us to schools with a lot of diversity and never, EVER, taught us to judge or hate anyone based on skin color (or anything else, for that matter). The difference between how my grandparents saw the world, and how my parents see it is dramatic, even startling. I remain in awe of my parents to this day because of their break from tradition. I asked my father one day how that difference came about, and he told me, quite simply, that when they sang the old church song that Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, he believed it. He acted on it.
My parents have many, many admirable qualities (not the least of which is having excellent taste in youngest children), but they are not super-human. They aren’t heroes, and they’ve never been activists. They are regular people who made a series of choices that radically altered how they related to people of other races. They did so in the course of mundane events, quietly, with firm convictions but far more reticence than one might expect from people who had jumped so far away from what their own parents had taught them. My family is as Southern as they come. I literally cannot find any record of an ancestor of mine living further north than South Carolina. I know for a fact that at least two of my ancestors were Confederate soldiers. We had every reason to continue to live in the same way, generation after generation, seeing the world through the lens of racism. But we didn’t, because of my parents.
I not only grew up seeing mixed-race neighborhoods and mixed-race schools as the norm, I forged most of my lasting friendships in the black community, and I married a black woman. My grandmother did not approve of my choice, but would not honestly say why (she claimed it was my age, though I was older than anyone else in my family who had gotten married). Years later I found out that my mother had told her that if she didn't go to my wedding she would be disowned.
Things got better, not through momentous events but through daily living. That gives me hope. If my parents could do what they did, in the South, in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, than surely others could do the same. Others have DONE the same. People can make dramatic changes, and they sometimes do. Sometimes they live up to more than our expectations. Knowing that helps me keep hope alive. And in times like these hope is the ONE thing we cannot do without.
Peace,
One-Drop.
