5 years after Emanuel AME massacre, what’s really changed in South Carolina?
Five years ago in the sacred heart of Charleston, inside a house of worship revered as a sanctuary of civil rights, nine Black lives were stolen.
South Carolina’s collective heart broke for Clementa Pinckney, Sharonda Singleton, Daniel Simmons Sr., Cynthia Hurd, Tywanza Sanders, Myra Thompson, Ethel Lance, Susie Jackson and DePayne Middleton-Doctor, who were shot and killed by a white supremacist in an act of racist terror at the historic “Mother” Emanuel AME Church.
The state and the nation mourned in unity and, spurred by pain and the incredible forgiveness the victims’ families offered the killer, rallied behind a historic act — the removal of the Confederate flag from the S.C. State House grounds.
That moment, though largely symbolic, was supposed to represent a change: a reconciliation and acknowledgment that racial inequality and white supremacy still existed in the United States.
“It felt like a unique moment in our country, that finally we were confessing our sins about racial injustice … the dangers of white supremacy and what that can lead to,” said Bobby Donaldson, a professor of African American and Southern history at the University of South Carolina and the head of USC’s Center for Civil Rights History and Research.
But in the five years since the Emanuel massacre, many of the causes taken up after the shooting remain incomplete in South Carolina.
Monuments and statues to slave owners and notorious racists still stand on the State House grounds, their names still honored by college buildings and highway signs. Policing standards still disproportionately oppress people of color. Activists are still calling for racial equality in education, income, housing, criminal justice and economic achievement.
Today, South Carolinians have joined the nation in a new cultural reckoning on race and justice, this time catalyzed by the death of George Floyd, a Black Minnesota man who died in May after a white police officer knelt on his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds.
The movement is stoking familiar calls for action, undeniably similar to racial reform movements of generations past. Floyd’s death has sparked protests across the country, including in Columbia and across South Carolina, where protesters both young and old, Black and white, men and women have called for equal justice for Black Americans and an end to police brutality.
“Right now, it feels more urgent,” said Theodore Johnson, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. “Not that Charleston doesn’t matter; it was critical to building the momentum that created our current moment. I don’t know where we are today without Charleston, and not just the event, but the response to the event.”
“This feels like another transformative moment in our history. I see it, and I’m very cautious,” Donaldson said. “Is it a transformative moment that will lead to enduring change, or will it be replaced by another headline?”
Pain that moved people
Terror filled the basement of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Mother Emanuel, in downtown Charleston that Wednesday night, June 17, 2015.
A few of the church’s most faithful congregants had gathered for a regular weekly Bible study and prayer meeting with their pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was the “conscience of the Senate” while a state senator, said state Sen. Gerald Malloy, D-Darlington, Pinckney’s office roommate. Earlier in the day, Pinckney had attended a Senate Finance Committee meeting and a caucus lunch, but told Senate Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman, R-Florence, he had to go back to Charleston.
It was the “last time I ever saw him,” Leatherman recalled on Tuesday.
Weeks before, Pinckney had given a rousing, passionate speech from the Senate floor about the death of Walter Scott, a Black man from North Charleston who was shot in the back by Michael Slager, a white police officer who is serving out a prison sentence.
“You’re sitting with this great guy and friend one minute, and then in the next few hours you’re being woken up in the middle of the night by your wife because (former state Sen.) Joel Lourie is calling me telling me what was going on,” said state Sen. Vincent Sheheen, D-Kershaw. “It seems unbelievable. It’s really still surreal, truthfully.”
In the fellowship hall that night, the Emanuel parishioners, with characteristically loving arms, welcomed a stranger among them; their hospitality was met with hate.
Dylann Roof, a white nationalist from the Columbia area, shot and killed the nine, proclaiming “I have to do it” because of their race. Six people in the church, including Pinckney’s wife and two daughters, survived the terror of that night as Roof fled the Holy City.
The next day, he was captured in North Carolina.
Later, some of his victims’ families would look into his face and say they forgave him.
Alana Grant, whose grandfather the Rev. Daniel Simmons was killed, said she was as shocked as the rest of the nation to hear those words of forgiveness spoken to the killer. She, too, stood and spoke during Roof’s bond hearing on June 19.
“I was compelled by what the other families did,” she said. “So what I stated was that ... my grandfather died at the hands of hate, but his legacy was love. ... So hate won’t win.”
Her words took off, and she turned them into an online movement, “Hate Won’t Win,” to spread grace, good news and good deeds in the spirit of the Emanuel Nine and their surviving families.
In 2017, Roof was sentenced to death.
In the aftermath of the Emanuel massacre, the forgiveness of the families, the grace of the people of Charleston and the strong leadership from public officials helped to lay a foundation for healing rather than violence, said Rob Godfrey, former spokesman and chief of staff for then-Gov. Nikki Haley.
“What happened in Charleston and Minneapolis are flashpoints in our history that are, in many ways, different,” Godfrey said. “But what these unspeakable tragedies have in common is that they brought clarity to each of us, and to many of public officials, that it is time to rethink what we do with divisive symbols of the past.”
From Charleston to the State House
The ensuing weeks brought one major, swift change: The divisive Confederate flag, long claimed as a symbol of racial oppression by some and Southern heritage by others, was furled and removed from the S.C. State House grounds on July 10, 2015.
The debate over the flag had stretched back years. It was placed on the State House dome in the 1960s and removed to the grounds in 2000 after a hard fought battle that ended in a compromise. The issue came up again in the state’s 2010 and 2014 gubernatorial campaigns.
“After the killing, the murders, the Lindsey Grahams and Nikki Haleys said it was too early to talk about this,” said Sheheen, a two-time former Democratic nominee for governor. Sheheen recalled that after dozens of conversations among lawmakers, they decided to start putting pressure on the governor and their colleagues.
Legislation to bring down the flag “almost seemed inevitable, but it was not,” Sheheen said.
Haley decided three days after the shooting, a Saturday, while talking to her husband, Michael Haley, that the flag must be removed, Godfrey said. It was a decision driven by what Haley saw and heard from the victims’ families and people across South Carolina, he added.
That Sunday, the Governor’s Office reached out to federal, state and local leaders asking them to join Haley that following Monday in Columbia at the State House when Haley would announce the flag must come down.
“For the governor, it came down to one simple thing — she couldn’t look her son or daughter in the face and justify that flag flying at the State House, which should be a place of unity for the people of our state,” Godfrey said.
State Sen. Malloy said it wasn’t that the state became brilliant overnight. Removing the flag could only do so much.
“I’ll give you that flag back if you can give me Clementa back,” he said.
The debate about change in South Carolina did not stop at the flag.
There were calls for introducing hate crimes legislation and revisiting the state’s Heritage Act — the law that protects Confederate, war time, Native American and African American statues, monuments and building and street names. Other lawmakers pushed for gun control measures, including closing what came to be known as the “Charleston Loophole,” a federal law that allowed Roof to buy a gun before a background check had been completed.
But those efforts all fell flat.
“We know that you have to use those moments to really create a movement for substantive change,” said Steve Benjamin, the first African American mayor of South Carolina’s capital city, which, unlike the state, has enacted several citywide gun reforms since 2015. Some of those local gun laws are now being challenged by S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson, who says they are unconstitutional.
“A number of folks didn’t see the substantive changes on the state or federal level that they thought they should see and, as a result, are frustrated and are demanding change,” Benjamin said.
What did come of the Emanuel tragedy seemed to be a lasting message of grace, forgiveness and reconciliation.
But pain and frustration lingered.
“My brother-in-law, his position, his faith and commitment to seeking forgiveness is the strongest I’ve ever seen any person,” state Rep. JA Moore, D-Berkeley, whose sister, Myra Thompson, was one of the victims. “But that was the narrative, that was the voice for how people felt, how the families felt. ... There’s a lot of pain and frustration on my part.”
The flag has been viewed as a proud moment for the state. But some, like Sheheen, say it shouldn’t be.
“It was not a proud moment that it took the murders of nine people for us to do the right thing,” Sheheen said. “That is not something to be proud of. I think it’s a shameful situation that it took nine people to be murdered to do the right thing.”
A question of ‘durable change’
The next four years were a departure from that sense of unity that seemed in some ways pervasive after the Emanuel massacre. Racial and political divisions and tensions grew on a national scale, Donaldson noted.
“There’s this question of what I say is durable change. Of course, the flag coming down was a historical moment and long overdue, but at that point the state had no choice,” he said. “Then we had these various moments of racial dialogue and reconciliation, and all that did take place, but it was a bandage.”
That bandage was ripped off not long after the Emanuel tragedy, and deep, festering wounds were exposed by the time of the 2016 election, Donaldson said.
“That was an awakening,” he said. “There was no pretending about a need for national unity, and President Trump has never made that an agenda item, from my perspective. … Whatever dramatic … moment we thought happened in 2015, it was a headline, but most people still found their lives compromised by social issues.”
A new spotlight is now being shone on racial biases, police brutality and social structures that have allowed or promoted the persistence of economic, educational, housing and other inequalities largely based on race.
“A lot of people are asking, ‘Where do we go from here? How did we get here? How do we get to a better place?’” Grant said. “To be frank, not a lot has changed, and it didn’t just start with Mother Emanuel. It’s not just starting with George Floyd. This has been America for a long time.”
Protests have rocked the nation over the past three weeks with no signs of abating. These demonstrations and cries for justice and change are strikingly reminiscent of the civil rights movements of the mid-1900s.
“There were people that fought for us (in the past) that thought it would be the last time, and it simply was not,” said Lyric Swinton, a 22-year-old Columbia native and recent graduate of the University of South Carolina who has participated in some of the recent local Black Lives Matter protests. “If I can do anything in my part to make sure as I march that that’s the last time that anyone from my lineage will do that, I’ll do it. … I don’t want (others) to grow up in this world thinking that their dreams have limits.”
Last Sunday, Donaldson stood with his 9-year-old son at the corner of Gervais and Sumter streets in downtown Columbia, outside the S.C. Supreme Court, as the Million Man March moved toward them.
“I can’t tell you what it meant to me to look down the road and over a crest and see thousands of Black men coming up Gervais, following a path that thousands of Black men traveled a generation ago,” he said.
State Sen. Marlon Kimpson, D-Charleston, said he’s encouraged by the protests.
“We can write the legislation, but what we need is those young brothers and sisters from all walks of life, who are showing us the way, to descend on the House where the law is made and that’s at the General Assembly,” Kimpson said.
A new movement. New results?
The Emanuel massacre was the start of a transformative period in Swinton’s life, as she became a first-generation college student awakening to injustice and the power of public policy for the first time.
She spent two spring breaks studying civil rights with Donaldson, and she became involved with USC’s student congressional advisory board. Over the course of those years, her personal goals shifted from getting out of South Carolina as quickly as possible to “I will not leave until I feel like I’ve made this place better for people who look like me and come from places that I come from,” she said.
Straight out of college, she’s now working as a leader in two organizations, City Bright LLC and Secure the Ballot, that are focused on training and organizing people to influence policymakers as part of political campaigns and on mobilizing voters — particularly young, minority, and rural — to affect policies with their ballots.
“I do think that the problem that we’re facing here in all this is systemic racism, and systemic racism is not going to be dismantled just by protesting. But it’s also not going to be dismantled just by policy,” Swinton said. “You’re going to need both. … Everybody is going to have to do their little bit, their part to dismantle this system that has been around for over 400 years.”
The current coronavirus pandemic — the way it has slowed down daily life, forced isolation, stripped away regular distractions — is forcing people to look at what’s happening in the nation, Swinton said. People now cannot take their eyes away from the cultural movement even if they wanted to, she said, so they must act.
“There’s nowhere to turn. So when people are hurting, you’re going to see their anguish. You’re going to feel their pain,” she said. “It’s everywhere. It’s consuming.”
One of the questions that could determine whether this cultural moment forces change in a way 2015 did not, Donaldson said, is whether people take their pain to the ballot box.
“It’s one thing to be dissatisfied. It’s another for people to show up at the polls,” he said. “I’m hopeful it will inspire people to be engaged citizens and to elect people who represent their values.”
Since Floyd’s death, lawmakers have called to remove statues of white supremacists and slave owners from the state Capitol grounds.
Universities are taking steps to scrape off the names of renowned racists and controversial figures from their buildings.
And, once again, the state Legislature is being asked whether this is the time to amend, or strike down, the 20-year-old Heritage Act.
Sen. Kimpson said a number of senators are “having those conversations as we speak.”
But Mayor Benjamin warned real change can’t just come at the government level. Look at what happened to the country just years after the radical 13th, 14th and 15th constitutional amendments were passed following the Civil War, he said — “We were back into hell because we changed the law, but we didn’t change our culture.”
“We’re talking about a cultural shift that begins to value life so much that we’re willing to constantly invest in preserving life and raising our quality of life,” Benjamin said. “The answer’s never going to be just a government solution. It’s going to require all of us deciding how we’re going to step up to change the world we’re living in.”
State Sen. Malloy, who has stayed close with Pinckney’s family, sees a seismic shift since the death of Floyd.
“Black folk are tired,” Malloy said. “Black people are tired.”
The Emanuel victims faced hate with courage that night in the fellowship hall, said Grant, who started the “Hate Won’t Win” movement after her grandfather’s murder. That courage, she said, can be channeled into today’s movement to spur progress.
“It’s about everyone taking that courageous step, everyone being sacrificial, everyone being gracious so that we can move forward as a nation,” Grant said. “More than enough people have died behind the hands of racism, and the only way we we’re going to be able to stop it is if we can work together on this.”
This story was originally published June 17, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "5 years after Emanuel AME massacre, what’s really changed in South Carolina?."
