The Nine of Mother Emanuel

At approximately eight o'clock on the evening of Wednesday, June seventeenth, twenty fifteen, a twenty-one-year-old man entered the fellowship hall of Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Calhoun Street in Charleston and joined a Bible study group already in progress. He sat for approximately an hour. He was white. Everyone else in the room was Black. He was welcomed, because that is what this congregation did.

Then he produced a handgun.

Nine people were killed. Their names are: Cynthia Hurd, fifty-four years old, a librarian. Susie Jackson, eighty-seven, a longtime church member who had been singing in the choir for more than thirty years. Ethel Lance, seventy, the church sexton. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, forty-nine, a pastor and a singer. Clementa Pinckney, forty-one, the church's senior pastor and a sitting member of the South Carolina State Senate. Tywanza Sanders, twenty-six, a recent college graduate. Daniel Simmons, seventy-four, a retired pastor. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, forty-five, a pastor, a speech therapist, and a track coach. Myra Thompson, fifty-nine, a Bible study teacher. Three people survived.

The bond hearing was held two days later, on June nineteenth. Several family members of the victims addressed the court and spoke directly to the shooter. Nadine Collier, whose mother Ethel Lance had been killed two days before, said: "I forgive you." Other family members made similar statements. Those statements were not a coordinated response. They were not a statement agreed on beforehand. They were individual, and they were real, and they reached a world that could not look away from this city's grief.

The church they were killed in was founded in eighteen sixteen by a congregation that included Denmark Vesey, the free Black carpenter and lay minister who would organize the largest documented slave conspiracy in American history six years later. The church was burned by authorities after Vesey's execution in eighteen twenty-two. It was rebuilt in secret. It has been rebuilt before and after more than anyone should have to rebuild. It remains an active congregation. Services were held the following Sunday.