That Wednesday night, we didn’t know any of this yet. Neither did we know that Clem’s wife Jennifer had been in the pastor’s office with their five-year-old daughter and was probably still cowering there when I first saw the emergency crews rushing by. In the coming days, we learned from her cousin that Jennifer heard the shots and hid with the child under a desk. “Don’t say anything,” she demanded of her daughter, placing her hands over her child’s mouth.
Then we started to hear whispers of a survivor. We later learned that the killer walked up to Polly Sheppard, a retired nurse, and asked, “Did I shoot you yet?” When Polly told him “no,” he said he was going to keep her alive to tell the story.
But as the evening of June 17th grew darker, the story was still an unraveling mystery. And as crazy as this might sound now, we didn’t know at first whether it was a hate crime. Everyone was still trying to process what was going on. In part, I think, we were in shock. The national media, already in town for Hillary Clinton and for the Republican presidential candidates who were coming to the state, were clamoring for reports and, like everyone else, for answers. The city had no time to adjust, and so we were suffocated by a tsunami of national press.
Malcolm Graham, a former North Carolina senator and a self-professed news junkie, told me he was watching MSNBC when he saw the ticker scroll across his screen at about 9:30 p.m. His family had been attending Emanuel AME Church for six decades. A native of Charleston, Malcolm now lived in Charlotte, but he often visited the church where he and his five siblings grew up singing in the choir and attending Sunday School in its basement—where the killings had just happened. His sister Cynthia Graham Hurd was very much a current part of the church family.
“Automatically I got the phone and called Cynthia,” he told me. “Although I’ve lived in Charlotte, she was my link to all things Charleston. I called her to find out what the hell was going on down there, and no one answered the phone. And so I said to myself, well, you know Cynthia, she’s right in the middle of everything trying to figure that out, trying to know herself, and she will call me back. But an hour went by and she didn’t call.”
That disturbed him, because she’d normally call in any emergency to say she was okay. Several hours later, their niece called to say no one could find “Aunt Cynthia” and that she believed Cynthia had been attending Bible study. At that point, Malcolm knew in his gut that she was at the church and somehow involved. And he did not want to find out bad news from the media. Helpfully, he had a friend who was the chief of police in Charlotte. “He got word to me that from those who were able to leave the church, they identified Cynthia as being at the church. Before it was publicly known, before even my family knew, I knew from talking to the chief of police in Charlotte that my sister had been identified as being one of those individuals who was shot. It was just heartbreaking.”
Stories like this were happening all over as family members were hearing from survivors or trying to figure out whether a loved one had made it out alive. Many were learning of the horror from the news. While Ike took me home, I got a call from Jerome Heyward—a social activist who’s like a big brother to me. He was weeping: “I can’t believe someone shot up Mother Emanuel! I can’t believe they shot up the Mother!”
My tears started flowing the moment I got out of the car and stood in our driveway. I called my two most important mentors: Pete Strom, the founder of the law firm for which I worked, and, of course, my father. Pete had already gone to bed by the time I reached him, so his wife asked me whether it was an emergency. I might have been able to get the words out, “They shot Clem in a church.” She woke Pete right away, and like everyone else that night, they switched on the news. Knowing how close I was to Clem and how emotional I naturally am, Pete comforted me and kept telling me that somehow everything was going to be okay.
My father also coolly guided me. Even without knowing what had happened, he knew that Clem had been gunned down for no reason and explained I had to prepare for what I needed to do—which was to think clearly, to try to stitch together the pieces of what had happened, and to speak for those who couldn’t speak for themselves.
When I walked into the house, I hugged Ellen, and we wept together.
I told her I had to return to Charleston the next day. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I felt I had to be there. I got through an emotional interview that night with WIS-TV in Columbia and then poured some Jameson in a cup and went to bed with the heaviest heart. I woke up, packed my bag, and ended up staying in Charleston for two weeks.
* * *
The media trucks that Thursday were choking the entire block from the church on the corner of Meeting and Calhoun streets. The television crews had set up white tents where they stationed themselves and their gear. I wondered whether they understood the irony of what had just happened here on Calhoun Street. John C. Calhoun, the namesake for the street running by Mother Emanuel’s steps, had been a nineteenth-century vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson and an unrepentant slave owner who vigorously defended slavery—which is why he was nicknamed “John C. kill a coon.”
Other roads leading to the beautiful white church were filled with flowers left by strangers. Gorgeous makeshift vigils popped up in front of the church. People of all colors came to the neighborhood to pay their respects to the dead.
I stood near the media tents with Todd Rutherford, who’s also African American and is South Carolina’s House Minority Leader. Photos of Columbia, our state capital, were all over the news channels. Flags were flying half-staff—except for the Confederate flag. We were, like—what? We called Patrick Dennis, the chief legal counsel for the South Carolina House Judiciary Committee at the time. “You know that can’t come down,” he said. “That’s a state law.”
To her credit, then–Governor Nikki Haley, whose parents are Indian American Sikh, wanted the flag down, but she couldn’t do it alone. There needed to be a vote of two-thirds of state legislators to remove it from the statehouse grounds.
At around this time, pictures began to emerge of Dylann Roof enveloping himself in the Confederate flag. We began to highlight this fact during television interviews. Something else made us stop in our tracks: Father’s Day was dawning on us, and Clem’s two little girls would not be making brunch for their father. That hit me hard, so much so that when I mentioned it during an interview with Al Jazeera America, I broke down. “I know this has been a long day,” the commentator said, thrown off by my sudden inability to speak. I couldn’t stop the tears. All I could think about was Clem’s daughters.
The reporter and the viewers could see adults and children laying flowers on shrines behind me, which obviously prompted him to ask next, “What do we tell the children?”
I sucked in my breath. “I’m not sure I know the answer to that today,” I said, and then added: “What we can tell them is that we can do better, we must do better, and we will do better.”
This was supposed to be a small, quick interview, but of all the interviews I did during those two weeks, this one went viral and was seen all over the world.
People referred to those killed as “The Emanuel Nine,” but in South Carolina we knew there were so many more people destroyed by the shooting. Take Malcolm’s family. Of six children, fifty-four-year-old Cynthia was the fourth and the oldest girl. Aside from her five siblings, she also had nieces and nephews and other close relatives, all of them mourning her loss. She was a librarian with the Charleston County Library for thirty-one years and worked part time for sixteen years at another regional library. She had built years of relationships with her co-workers and was so much a part of the community that two days after the killings, an emergency Charleston County council meeting was held, with only one agenda: rename the library where she worked after her. It is now called the Cynthia Graham Hurd/St. Andrews Regional Library.
Malcolm’s family had been part of Mother Emanuel for six decades; his parents were buried in the church’s cemeter
y, as would be Cynthia. Her life touched hundreds, if not thousands, of people. Now, multiply that loss by nine.
Malcolm found the media to be so intrusive that he was compelled to make a relatively quick decision. The night when he discovered Cynthia had been one of the nine killed, he resolved to stand up and tell her story and explain her positions and beliefs. “Here’s a lady who had so much grace and dignity, was killed in the fetal position underneath a table,” he told me. “I decided that she deserved to have a voice, that she would not be remembered as just being a victim.”
Not diminishing the fact that nine people died together, Malcolm still believed his sister was an individual, and she had her own hopes, dreams, aspirations, and way of thinking that he wanted her to be remembered by. “I felt comfort in the fact that she did not die alone. If that makes sense. But she also was this tremendous, impactful individual, that deserved to stand on her own merits as an individual.”
* * *
As we stood outside Mother Emanuel, some of us compared the tragedy to the Boston marathon attack, after which Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, rightfully so, put the city on a voluntary lockdown when one of the perpetrators was still on the run. This made us all wonder why Charleston mayor Joe Riley and chief of police Greg Mullen hadn’t done the same. But in the end, we came to realize and appreciate the infinite wisdom these South Carolina public servants indeed had.
The morning after the shooting, police released video of Dylann Roof entering Mother Emanuel. Everything from his bowl haircut to his gray sweatshirt to the black car he drove were clearly visible. The video was everywhere on television and shared across social media platforms. And it wasn’t more than twenty-four hours after the shooting that US Marshal Kelvin Washington drove to the church, rolled down his car window, and shouted to me and Todd, “We got him!”
Earlier that day, a florist in Shelby, North Carolina, about four hours from Charleston and very close to Charlotte, noticed a young man driving a little black car just like the one that had been broadcast. She took down his license plate number and called police.
Todd and I repeated out to the crowd what Washington had just told us. It was an insane feeling. The atmosphere outside the church was tense, but a sense of jubilation bubbles up when people come together to celebrate lives but also to unite in fighting wrongdoing.
Hailed as a hero, the florist, Debbie Dills, would not accept the label. “It wasn’t me,” she told The Today Show. “It was God. He used me as a vessel.”
Speaking Truth to Power
Undoubtedly, like my dad, who wanted to live for Emmett Till, I wanted to live for and give voice to Clem and the other victims of this horrific crime. In Charleston, I too became a vessel, pushing forward only because I was hopeful tomorrow could be better.
During the early days of the tragedy, CNN anchor Kate Bolduan interviewed me, asking some tough questions. She was polite and gracious, but it was an example of a dance that all of us had to do, careful not to say anything that would distress the families of the victims while still speaking truth to power. Kate’s first questions were why Dylann Roof intentionally picked these people and why this historic church.
Where do we start to even try to answer that first question? Why have black people been subjected to a torrent of violence right from the time the first African set foot on these shores? Today it is Mother Emanuel, but in 1963 it was the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham where four little girls were killed. In 1968, it was the Orangeburg Massacre. Sadly, even more comparable to my father’s Emmett Till generation is the symptom of overzealous cops and those organized to defend the unjustified killings of people of color. Like those white-helmeted officers in Orangeburg, Dylann Roof saw the nine people he killed in the church as being less than human. We’d heard rumors; friends and relatives of Roof told the media that he believed in segregation, believed African-American men were raping white women and that black people were taking over the world.
Kate’s question why this church got me thinking. Whenever you’re able to inflict pain on the black church, you got to the heart of who we are. It cuts at our core. That’s why they bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Alabama and likely why Dylann Roof walked into Mother Emanuel.
Still, why did he choose Mother Emanuel? Established in 1816, Emanuel is the oldest AME church in the Deep South and has one of the oldest black congregations south of Baltimore. The church was cofounded by Denmark Vesey, a literate former slave I always admired and who had planned a large slave revolt. When white landowners found out about Vesey’s plans, they burned the church building to the ground. After Vesey’s capture and hanging in 1822, Vesey’s son rebuilt the church.
There’s a 2013 video of Clem speaking about the history of the church to a mostly white group of visitors. Though only in his late thirties at the time, he has the elegance and demeanor of a much older man. His deep baritone voice is pitch perfect, calm and loving, as he says, “It’s a very special place, because this church—and this site, this area—has been tied to the history and life of African Americans since about the early 1800s.”
When he politely asks the group to bow their heads in prayer, it’s a heartbreaking moment to watch because I now know bowing his head in benediction was the last thing he did.
The church was always a force for social change. Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the Mother. It’s also part of the powerful African Methodist Episcopal organization. To give you a sense of the AME’s reach, think of this: if I were governor of South Carolina and Clem’s dream of being AME bishop had come true, he would have been more influential than me in the South.
I didn’t want to evade Kate’s questioning; however, it seemed that every hour we were learning of a new twist or turn to the story. Also, people were just so tired—many of us hadn’t slept, and others were still in disbelief. So her question was important, very damn important, but at that moment, it wasn’t at the top of my priority list. I pointed out something that was troubling, but also a testament to how fresh our wounds were. Right behind where I was standing was the church parking lot. And the cars of the people who had been killed the night before were still parked there.
I decided to answer Kate’s question. “I think this gentleman was filled with hate,” I told her. I also explained I could not understand how someone who’s only twenty-one years old, born in the nineties, could have the same mindset and outlook of racists of the fifties and sixties. “We need to figure out the answers to ‘why,’” I said. “But right now, we are hugging, caring, loving, and praying.”
Governor Nikki Haley believed Roof should get the death penalty, and Kate wanted to know my opinion about that. It was a tough question for a politician to answer. Truth is, I have a serious problem with the death penalty, and I told her so. It disproportionately affects African Americans. As a lawyer, I said, I am quite aware that witnesses lie and sometimes DNA evidence is discovered decades later that exonerates someone. But if there were ever an individual who deserved the death penalty, I said it would be Roof, who walked in the doors of Mother Emanuel filled with evil.
Kate asked whether I’d seen Jennifer, Clem’s wife. I told her I had not because I was giving her space. But when the cameras are gone, I said, we will still be here for Jennifer and all of the grieving families.
Anger Is Not a Sin
I was on nearly every television news station—except Fox News. I had no interest or time to allow a Fox News anchor to browbeat me for my beliefs on what racism is and what I consider racist. I was being asked by the media to speak for the church victims, for their families, and to try to answer what this all meant. I was angry, and I was sad, and I did not have all the answers, but I was going to put my best foot forward for those who couldn’t speak for themselves.
As I kept thinking about the question of “why us,” I realized that deep down I knew the answer. It’s simply because of the color of our skin. This has been the answer f
or four hundred years. The related question is, Why does dark skin so offend white people? There’s no value in skin color itself. It adds nothing to or detracts from a person’s skills, heart, or humanity, any more than eye or hair color does. So why have people with dark skin been terrorized for centuries, to this very day, and held in such contempt? Why were we enslaved for 250 years? Why were so many public initiatives to support former slaves, going back to Reconstruction, half-baked? Some say because of fear, hatred, or even jealousy, but does the “why” really matter? Considering what we’ve been through, how much we’ve been oppressed, for how many centuries, it’s remarkable that we continue to fight and we are still strong. What we’ve been through has caused us anxiety, great stress, but we’ve turned that pain into strength. I said all this to whoever listened.
For instance, Black Lives Matter asked me to speak at a march and rally they organized in Charleston. There was concern about our safety, so we decided to have the march in broad daylight. I recalled what my father always warned, “People do things under the cover of darkness they would otherwise not do.”
My speech was brief, but I knew that I wanted it to have some rhythmic cadence and be something that people could feel. I quoted a gospel song, but mostly the words came fast and furious, flowing straight from my heart. “I want everybody to know that this terrorist did not win. He wanted to invoke terror and fear. But we aren’t for that. We are standing up together, arm in arm, or on our knees, with our faces to the rising sun, praying to our Lord and telling him that we will not bow down, but we will stand up.”
Sometimes you are thrust in a moment. During some interviews I wasn’t “television ready” but soaking with sweat from the Charleston sun; sometimes my sadness and anxiety kicked in. But I kept going because my people, our people, needed a voice—which brings me back to Malcolm Graham.
My Vanishing Country Page 14