By Jack Bass | JUNE 22, 2015 | The only time I sat in what is known in Charleston as Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church was in the early nineteen-sixties, when Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered a sermon. I was a reporter at that time, and I remember King speaking not as a civil-rights leader but as a preacher, with call and response to his message coming back from the congregation.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Published originally by The New Yorker; republished with the permission of the author.
A few years ago, though, I met Mother Emanuel’s pastor, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney. Interested in getting to know him, I called one day to ask if we could meet, and he offered to come to my office. We visited for almost half an hour, talking about current issues before the state legislature. Pinckney was murdered at his church on Wednesday, along with eight members of his congregation. Now I regret not recalling more of our conversation.
For eighteen years, Pinckney was also a Democratic state senator, representing parts of five rural counties. He rarely spoke on the House floor in Columbia, but when he did, his tall stature and deep baritone voice were commanding. Pinckney’s service as a state representative wasn’t unique in the A.M.E. Church. During Reconstruction, Richard Cain, one of South Carolina’s eight black congressmen, served as pastor at Emanuel, and he established many A.M.E. churches in South Carolina. Today, there are five hundred and fifteen.
I learned about the murders at the church just before going to bed on Wednesday, when I got a late-night call from Cleveland Sellers, who was the third-ranking officer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the Civil Rights Era. The president of Voorhees College, a historically black institution affiliated with the Episcopal Church, and a long-time friend, he called and asked if I’d heard what had happened. My wife and I stayed glued to local TV coverage until 2 A.M., and learned that a memorial service would be held at noon the next day, at Morris Brown A.M.E. Church, about half a mile from Mother Emanuel, and a center for civil-rights activity since the nineteen-sixties.
More than five hundred people, roughly half white and half black, filled the church, with some standing behind the back pews. Several hundred more stood outside, on the sidewalk, in the ninety-nine-degree heat. They all sang “Amazing Grace.” Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr., who will retire in January after forty years in office, announced that the city of Charleston had created a Mother Emanuel Hope Fund to help the families of the victims. Congressman James Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat and the son of an evangelical minister, who was a congregant at Morris Brown decades ago, when he lived in Charleston, addressed the audience. “There is no more solid experience in this country than the black church,” he told us.
At Morris Brown, I sat next to a former colleague at the College of Charleston, who spoke about an event he had arranged this past spring, at which Pinckney spoke, at Charleston’s Hampton Park. It marked the hundred-and-fiftieth-anniversary commemoration of a ceremony in which African-American citizens of Charleston had reinterred more than two hundred Union dead previously buried in a mass grave.
Following a series of events and the singing of “America the Beautiful,” Pinckney had given a homily. He read from the nineteenth chapter of Second Samuel, in which King David mourns the death of Absalom, the son who rebelled against him. Pinckney urged the audience to not only remember the ultimate sacrifice of so many but also to honor their sacrifice, by continuing to work toward the “great task” described by Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address. “Together we come to bury racism, to bury bigotry, and to resurrect and revive love, compassion, and tenderness,” Pinckney said.
Noted historian Jack Bass, co-author of The Palmetto State and author of several award-winning histories, is a native of North, S.C., and now lives in Charleston. More: JackBass.com
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