Dylann Roof, who faces the death penalty as the alleged shooter in Charleston, has told law enforcement that he walked into the Charleston church with the intention of targeting black worshippers. He said he hoped the shooting would prompt a race war, decrying black Americans as a plague that needed to be dealt with.
“He somewhere got into his head that he hates black people, and he wants to kill them. Where do you get that, at twenty-one, in your head?” said Ron Davis. “I told Jordan that there are people out there like that; I don’t think our kids really believe that this world is so messed up that there are people really like that. And unfortunately he had to learn the hard way that there are people really like that.”
Ron Davis and Lucia McBath hadn’t planned to be in Charleston; in fact, they were in the midst of a national tour to promote the documentary 3-1/2 minutes, 10 Bullets, which follows the two trials it took to put Dunn behind bars for their son’s death. But the tragedy in Charleston rocked them to their cores. They knew where they needed to be.
“Our story is just one of the many threads that thread through the larger problem of how we view race, guns, violence, bias,” McBath said. “Every one of these stories, they’re all so completely relevant for what we have to deal with in this country; every time there is a story, that’s another thread. For so long these have been our stories…and they’ve never been told outside of our communities.”
The tie that binds Trayvon Martin to Jordan Davis to Michael Brown to Tamir Rice to Clementa Pinckney is the hazard of black skin. In each case an innocuous behavior—walking home in the rain carrying a packet of Skittles, sitting at a gas station listening to music, jaywalking on a suburban side street, playing with a toy gun in a park, or sitting around a church table for a prayer meeting—suddenly leads to a fatal encounter, seemingly only because the person involved was black.
While some have argued that the Charleston shootings should be viewed in isolation—separate from the police shootings that have prompted protest during 2014 and 2015 and the vigilante shootings of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis before them—others have argued that they’re all undeniably linked. “Our stories represent a whole magnitude of stories that have never been told in this country—all of people, of black people, who didn’t get justice,” McBath said. The nation would again turn its eyes to Emanuel AME Church the following week, when President Obama traveled to Charleston to deliver the eulogy at Reverend Pinckney’s funeral.
“The Bible calls us to hope. To persevere, and have faith in things not seen,” President Obama began, standing flanked by black clergy cloaked in purple.
“‘They were still living by faith when they died,’ Scripture tells us. ‘They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on Earth.’
“We are here today to remember a man of God who lived by faith. A man who believed in things not seen. A man who believed there were better days ahead, off in the distance. A man of service who persevered, knowing full well he would not receive all those things he was promised, because he believed his efforts would deliver a better life for those who followed.”
Most striking in Obama’s words that day were their dual meaning. They told the story of the slain Reverend Pinckney, who by age thirteen was preaching behind a pulpit and by twenty-three had begun serving in public office, serving as a state representative and later a state senator. They told the story of the reverend who was remembered as a fierce advocate for his flock, who fought for access to health care and new resources for the poor despite the political winds blowing in opposition. But the president was also speaking of himself, telling the story of the young, idealistic politician who had ascended to the democratic perch of the presidency on the promise of hope and change. He was speaking of himself as a man who had sold the country on the promise of a better America to come, who in the face of radicalized attacks not only on his policies but also on his very legitimacy—as an American, and as a Christian—had dared a nation to look into the future, toward even better days.
In his speech to the mourners in Charleston, Obama drew the same parallels Jordan Davis’s parents have. These slayings were, in fact, linked to the centuries-long assault on the black body. “For too long, we’ve been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present,” Obama said. “Perhaps it causes us to examine what we’re doing to cause some of our children to hate. Perhaps it softens hearts towards those lost young men, tens and tens of thousands caught up in the criminal justice system, and leads us to make sure that that system is not infected with bias; that we embrace changes in how we train and equip our police so that the bonds of trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve make us all safer and more secure.”
But Obama has never described America as fundamentally broken, or as a country that will forever pay the wages of its original sin. Obama has consistently preached an ideology of American exceptionalism that holds that this nation’s greatness is derived not from its present state, but rather from the promise of what is to come. Unlike politicians who through rhetoric pine for some alleged greatness of years past, Obama keeps his belief in American greatness rooted in the reality of the shortcomings and injustices of generations past, and premises it on the hope of a greater America yet to come. On election night 2008, he declared that “that’s the true genius of America: that America can change.” Four years later, having been reelected after a vitriolic campaign in which his citizenship and faith were again questioned, he invoked the doctrine once more: “Tonight, in this election, you, the American people, reminded us that while our road has been hard, while our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up, we have fought our way back, and we know in our hearts that for the United States of America the best is yet to come.”
It’s an ideology that has often been critiqued by the young Black Lives Matter activists who came to prominence toward the end of Obama’s term in office. They heard in Obama’s words the condescending moralizing and equivocating of a politician who had long abandoned his activist roots.
President Obama’s time in office would never see the postracial America that so many had assumed his presidency would usher into existence. And he knew that. On that first election night, in 2008, he declared, “This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change.”
In his eulogy in Charleston, Obama said, “More than any particular policy or analysis, is what’s called upon right now, I think—what a friend of mine, the writer Marilynne Robinson, calls ‘that reservoir of goodness, beyond, and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things.’
“‘That reservoir of goodness,’” Obama repeated. “If we can find that grace, anything is possible. If we can tap that grace, everything can change.” And as applause broke out, the president of the United States transitioned into a hymn: “Amazing Grace.”
“Clementa Pinckney found that grace,” Obama declared when he had finished singing. He went on to again list the name of each of those killed by hatred’s bullets that evening in Charleston. “Through the example of their lives, they’ve now passed it on to us. May we find ourselves worthy of that precious and extraordinary gift, as long as our lives endure. May grace now lead them home.”
As Obama concluded, Bree Newsome, several hours north in Charlotte, turned off her television and headed to her car. The themes of forgiveness and God’s amazing grace had resonated with her. As had the faces of those slain, which reminded her of her own church family. And she believed in the audacious hope in each line of the president’s plea.
But if that day was one for hope, the next would be a day for action.
Earlier that week, on Tuesday, Bree Newsome had been one of about ten activists who hatched a plan at a meeting convened in a Charlotte living room by Todd Zimmer, an environmental activist who had previously protested in Charlotte. The group was a mixture o
f racial justice activists and several local environmental activists. They all agreed that they had to do something—the shootings of the Charleston nine had rocked them each to the core. And the fact that Reverend Pinckney’s body was lying in state in a building that proudly displayed the Confederate battle flag on its grounds, they felt, was a deranged insult to the slain minister’s humanity. By honoring a flag flown by an army that had fought to keep his ancestors enslaved, South Carolina was making an unspoken declaration of how little it valued Reverend Pinckney’s life.
The flag had first been placed above the South Carolina statehouse in 1961, as the nation began an intense, decade-long debate about desegregation and civil rights; allegedly, the flag honored the hundredth anniversary of the start of the Civil War. For years, activists, led by the NAACP, have argued that the reinstatement of the flag in South Carolina, as well as a wave of Confederate memorials, flags, and markers that popped up in the 1960s, was little more than a racist backlash against the civil rights movement, and have demanded that they be removed.
“The fact that we were even having this conversation embodied why we were in the streets saying ‘black lives matter,’” Newsome told me. “It shows why it’s necessary to say it, it reinforces the truth that we live in a society built on devaluing black life.”
Newsome speaks with the calm confidence of a grade school teacher going over her lesson in front of a class of eager pupils. Many of the activists who have found platforms during the Obama years overflow with the fire of the righteously indignant, speaking with the voice of an oppressed people who will no longer sit silent. But Bree Newsome speaks truth with a steadiness of temper and tone that attests to the veracity of what she says, enticing you not with soaring rhetoric or emotion but through thoughtful measure.
“What hit me was not just the massacre,” said Newsome, who could still remember the feeling of disgust churning in her stomach when, after public debate, the Confederate battle flag was moved from atop the South Carolina statehouse to a monument just outside it. “It was the lack of leadership, the lack of moral leadership.”
Each of the activists gathered that day in that Charlotte living room wanted the flag to come down and believed that a disruptive protest in which they forcibly took it down themselves could swing momentum in the ongoing debate about Confederate symbolism. Next came figuring out who would be the one to take the flag down, and how they would do it.
“We needed to raise morale, and to rally the movement. We were really devastated at that time, in those immediate days after the massacre. I remember being at the vigil the day after, there was just this absolute feeling of devastation and shock,” Newsome recalled. “We felt that it was an important statement to make, that it would force a ‘crisis moment,’ forcing South Carolina at that moment to either leave it down or raise it back up.”
Initially, they considered a covert, nighttime operation, with the hope of minimizing the likelihood that those who removed the flag would be accosted by onlookers or Confederate flag sympathizers, or harmed by the police who guard the statehouse. But ultimately, that wasn’t the message they wanted to send.
“There was no reason to hide our action in darkness,” Newsome said. “We’re on the side of justice. We didn’t need to be ashamed or hide our actions.” The next tactical hurdle was more logistical: they had to figure out who in the group could afford to be arrested.
It’s a conversation commonplace in activist circles as they plan direct action protests, figuring out who can afford—physically, financially—to be taken into custody for the cause. Mothers and fathers responsible for the daily care of children, those with prior legal records, and those employed at places that may not take kindly to one of their employees’ acquiring a new mug shot will all be ruled out. In Ferguson, during the early protests, several of the activists with the largest social media followings—Netta Elzie and DeRay Mckesson among them—often deliberately avoided arrest, reasoning that they would serve a greater purpose by documenting the scenes of other protesters being shackled and teargassed than if they themselves were taken into custody. During Ferguson October, dozens of clergy members led by Cornel West and Jim Wallis crossed the police line in the parking lot of the Ferguson Police Department, an act of civil disobedience meant to prompt their arrests, while other activists—many of them young locals who might have had unpaid speeding tickets that could result in pending warrants or who were more likely to lack the funds to bail themselves out—continued the chanting behind them.
At the Charlotte meeting, several of the activists were immediately ruled out. Newsome had no hesitation. She’d studied the history of nonviolent disobedience, read the writings of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and knew the value of disruptive protest. She’d also been arrested before—during the Moral Monday protests over voting rights.
If the State of South Carolina would not take down this flag, she would take it down for them.
Next began her preparation: Newsome and her partner, James Tyson, another Charlotte-based activist, began to train. An activist friend they knew in New York traveled down to North Carolina to teach Newsome how to climb. Next the pair found a local school and spent hours practicing on the flagpole out in front. When summer classes were in session during the day, they would find light posts on secluded side streets and resume practicing there.
“It’s critically important that white people actually put some skin in the game,” Tyson told Democracy Now, the nonprofit interview program, not long after the protest. “Racism is unacceptable, white supremacy is unacceptable.”
The full group met at an IHOP near Charleston before dawn the morning after President Obama delivered Reverend Pinckney’s eulogy. There was a KKK rally scheduled for the statehouse later in the day, so they decided the flag would need to come down early in the morning to protect Newsome from attack by any white supremacists who happened to arrive early. Fellow activists posing as joggers or sitting in cars pretending to read served as lookouts for police and other threats. Meanwhile, Newsome and Tyson remained at the restaurant. After forty-five minutes of waiting, they got word via text message: the coast was clear.
Another activist dropped them off near the statehouse, and Newsome and Tyson began to move toward it, at a pace somewhere between a walk and a jog. They knew Newsome would need to catapult herself at least fifteen feet up the pole to be safely out of the reach of the police.
They reached the flagpole, and Tyson carefully helped Newsome over the four-foot fence that surrounds it. That fence, installed by the statehouse after an attempt by activists years earlier to remove the flag, would serve as vital protection for Newsome; the police couldn’t get to her without climbing over the fence themselves.
She shimmied higher, foot by foot.
With the lowest corner of the flag just out of her reach, she heard the voices of the police officers who had begun to respond.
“Ma’am, ma’am!” they yelled. “Get off the pole!”
“Ma’am, come down off the pole!”
But just moments later, she had reached the top, had unhooked the flag, and was holding it in her right hand, her left arm wrapped tight around the flagpole.
“It was personal to me, as a matter of faith, to show defiance in the face of fear,” Newsome told me months later. “I was feeling the struggle, the struggle of millions of people over hundreds of years. And with James standing guard beneath me, I was feeling the racial solidarity of our white allies, from the abolitionists until now, in this fight. It was a reminder that we’re not in this alone.”
Moments later she descended the flagpole, reciting Scripture as she lowered herself into the arms of two officers, who placed her and Tyson in handcuffs.
As the two were taken to a patrol car, their fellow activists emerged, chanting the words of Assata Shakur, a former Black Panther, that were among the most commonplace rallying cries of the Black Lives Matter activists: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We m
ust love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
Just forty-five minutes later, the Confederate battle flag was again raised outside the statehouse. And even before much of the national media had taken note of Newsome’s protest, its cameras would be focused on the dozens of angry white supremacists gathered in front of the statehouse. “What was the point?” skeptical commentators were quick to ask. “They’re just going to put that flag right back up,” they argued. But Newsome had succeeded in creating that crisis moment. In a battle that at points had felt fruitless, the momentum had begun to shift.
The next week, when legislators began to debate a bill that would remove the flag from the statehouse grounds, the mood had clearly changed.
“Think about it for just a second. Our ancestors were literally fighting to continue to keep human beings as slaves, and continue the unimaginable acts that occur when someone is held against their will,” declared State Senator Paul Thurmond, the son of famed segregationist Strom Thurmond, who had represented South Carolina for forty-eight years. “I am not proud of that heritage.”
On July 10, 2015, the flag that Bree Newsome had removed again came down.
CHAPTER SIX
Ferguson, Again: A Year Later, the Protests Continue
Kayla Reed never intended to be an activist. In fact, on August 9, 2014, she was on the clock, at the first of her two jobs, as a pharmacy technician.
Reed was St. Louis–born and –bred, a proud graduate of Riverview Gardens High School, one of three public high schools in which Ferguson children may end up enrolled. Her graduating class, the Class of 2008, had been the last students to walk the stage before the school lost its accreditation.
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