With great sadness, I wanted to write about the profound senselessness, heart-wrenching tragedy, and frightening injustice of the events of the evening of June 17, 2015 in Charleston, South Carolina. On that night, members of the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church were exercising their right, their freedom, to come together to worship God.
The church’s bible study members and their pastor unknowingly welcomed a white stranger with murderous intentions into their midst; a killer apparently motivated by the toxic combination of racial hatred and irrational thought. After worshiping with the church members, the stranger put down his bible and picked up his concealed gun, killing nine African American adults in the process.
Last week’s tragedy was not the first time that this AME church experienced adversity. Back in 1822, white Charleston residents burned the church down because of their anger over a foiled slave revolt organized and led by Denmark Vesey, one of the leaders of the church. Vesey was a former slave who paid for his freedom after winning money in a lottery. Rather than moving north, Vesey stayed in Charleston and slowly but doggedly organized a revolt that reportedly involved nine thousand co-conspirators – men and women intent on fashioning their own path to freedom from the prison of American slavery.
The revolt was compromised before it could be implemented.
But as writer Richard Durham found while digging through the records that survived Vesey’s lengthy trial, Vesey remained committed to freedom even as he was sentenced to death for his revolutionary actions (see my April post). And perhaps in light of the deaths in Emanuel AME Church this month, Vesey’s declaration “until all men are free the revolution continues” resonates today with a slight variation;
Until all men and women can live free of the tyranny of racial and religious hatred, the fight for justice and the need for compassion for all humanity must continue.