The Saving Grace of the Emanuel Nine?
NINE HOURS BEFORE DYLANN ROOF’S MURDEROUS RAMPAGE at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, we were sitting in the Broad Street office of Joe Riley. It was June 17, 2015, and the mayor was just six months away from retiring after a forty-year tenure. We had arranged a meeting with him—our first—to hear his reflections on the strides Charleston had made in confronting its complicated history. Looking back at the cooperation between the city government and local activists on this score, Riley was proud. He was especially pleased that the International African American Museum might soon be a reality. The Charleston City and Charleston County councils had allocated $25 million toward the total price tag of $75 million for the museum. “We have a duty,” the mayor argued, “to honor those who were brought here, enslaved, and helped build our country.”1
After our meeting with Riley, as the two of us headed off to the archives to complete the research for this book, we discussed our own sense of hopefulness. Back in 2005, when we moved to Charleston for what ended up being a two-year stay, we rarely encountered the black past on the many house, walking, and carriage tours we took. But, as we have suggested, the pace of change in Charleston has been notable since we left in 2007. Indeed, as we strolled through Charleston during that 2015 research foray, we overheard several tour guides talking about the region’s history of slavery. One even mentioned plantation overseers and slave drivers, topics that were virtually unspeakable a mere decade earlier.
The following morning, we awoke to the news of the Emanuel massacre. Like the rest of the nation, we struggled to understand Roof’s unimaginable actions. One thing, however, became immediately clear: the history lessons Roof internalized about black history—and slavery, in particular—were not the ones that black and like-minded white Charlestonians have worked so hard to impart to locals and tourists in recent years.
After the massacre, many Americans saw the selfies Roof had posted on his website, unsettling images that show him holding the Confederate flag. Less newsworthy, though just as important, were those of Roof at the Charleston-area sites he visited in the months before the murders. Roof captured himself standing next to the Sullivan’s Island historical marker commemorating a place where African slaves entered America “under extreme conditions of human bondage and degradation.” In the sands nearby, he inscribed a numeric code used by white supremacists to proclaim fealty to their cause and to Adolf Hitler, and then took a photo of it, too. Roof posed for pictures at Magnolia Plantation, Boone Hall, and the newly opened McLeod Plantation, perhaps the best site to visit for an honest, unvarnished account of slavery. At each plantation, he made a point of touring the slave cabins. In fact, the selfie he took at the restored Boone Hall slave street, where he stood next to two slave mannequins, he later identified as his favorite. Roof told the psychiatrist assigned to evaluate his mental competency for his federal trial that it was funny people might think the mannequins were his slaves. He snapped the shot, he stated, “to be offensive.”2
Roof’s trips did nothing to change his historical misconceptions. Undertaken to prepare himself mentally, as he put it, they appear to have functioned instead as a perverse form of tourism porn, pumping him up for his self-appointed mission to kill the Emanuel worshippers. As he stood at a terminus of the Middle Passage, as he wandered through the fields and cabins to which the enslaved were consigned for life, he did not see evidence of slavery’s inhumanity. He saw evidence of white dominance. Roof sought, and found, historical justification for a return to white supremacy.3
Roof’s historical pilgrimages raise troubling questions about the efficacy of correcting a flawed understanding of the past. What does it mean when, in the year 2015, someone can so blithely ignore unvarnished memories of slavery and embrace whitewashed ones to justify killing black people? Does it matter that African Americans—along with progressive whites—have succeeded in resurrecting a more truthful memory of slavery when a domestic terrorist insists they are lying? If, with a computer and Internet access, a white supremacist like Roof can both find and perpetuate retrograde history to try to start a race war, does the Vesey Monument or a better training manual for tour guides make a difference?
Emanuel A.M.E. Church, June 19, 2015, two days after white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine parishioners there.
There can be no doubt that Roof’s rampage sparked a much-needed national conversation about the meaning of Confederate symbols that still dot the American landscape. Just days after the attack, Alabama governor Robert Bentley took steps to disassociate his state from its secessionist past, ordering four Confederate banners to be taken down in Montgomery. In South Carolina, Governor Nikki Haley altered her stance on the Confederate battle flag that flew at the state capitol and called for its removal. So, too, did Glenn McConnell, the former South Carolina legislator and Confederate enthusiast who in 2000 had brokered a deal that removed the flag from the top of the capitol but kept it on statehouse grounds.4
President Barack Obama joined the chorus calling for change in a moving eulogy for one of the Emanuel massacre’s nine victims: Reverend Clementa Pinckney. Just two months earlier, the Emanuel A.M.E. pastor, who was also a state senator, had offered a similarly moving homily at the 150th anniversary commemoration of the first Decoration Day in Hampton Park. Invoking the biblical story of King David and his son Absalom, who had died fighting his father in battle, Pinckney had issued a call for Americans to begin to heal their own divided houses. That same generous, reconciliationist spirit was on display on the evening of June 17, when a Pinckney-led Bible study group at Emanuel so warmly welcomed the young white man determined to kill.5
On June 26, President Obama flew to Charleston to pay his respects to the slain pastor. Six thousand people, including First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, House Speaker John Boehner, Governor Nikki Haley, and former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, packed a College of Charleston auditorium just blocks from Emanuel A.M.E. Church—Mother Emanuel, as Americans learned it was called. Millions more across the globe watched on television and Internet broadcasts. Adopting the cadence of a revivalist, Obama delivered a soaring eulogy that situated the massacre within the context of black America’s long freedom struggle and the violence and recrimination that it has elicited. He spoke poetically of the special place that African American houses of worship like Emanuel have played in this campaign: “Over the course of centuries, black churches served as ‘hush harbors’ where slaves could worship in safety; praise houses where their free descendants could gather and shout hallelujah; rest stops for the weary along the Underground Railroad; bunkers for the foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement.” Appealing to the memory of Denmark Vesey, Obama proclaimed, “There’s no better example of this tradition than Mother Emanuel, a church built by blacks seeking liberty, burned to the ground because its founder sought to end slavery, only to rise up again, a Phoenix from these ashes.”
The president structured much of his eulogy around the Christian idea of grace, which allowed him to ruminate on what the nation had learned as a result of the massacre. Americans, black and white, Republican and Democrat, appeared at long last to be opening their eyes to the fact that the Confederate flag is “a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation,” he insisted. Obama called on South Carolina to remove the flag from the capitol grounds, not as “an act of political correctness” but rather as “an acknowledgment that the cause for which [Confederates] fought—the cause of slavery—was wrong, the imposition of Jim Crow after the Civil War, the resistance to civil rights for all people was wrong.” Taking down the flag, he declared, “would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s history; a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds.”6
Two weeks later, South Carolina applied that modest balm. President Obama’s eloquent plea, combined with a national outcry and the support of newfound converts like Governor Haley, helped to sway many of the flag’s conservative defenders in the South Carolina General Assembly, which voted overwhelmingly to take it down. On July 10, 2015, South Carolina removed the Confederate battle flag that had flown at the capitol since the early 1960s, when segregationist legislators had hoisted it atop the statehouse dome in the heat of the civil rights movement. “South Carolina taking down the confederate flag—a signal of good will and healing, and a meaningful step towards a better future,” tweeted President Obama.7
Activists across the country also set their sights on Confederate and proslavery symbols. While some protesters attacked Confederate monuments with graffiti, other opponents of Confederate and proslavery memorialization took a more formal and potentially permanent approach. From Tennessee to Texas, grassroots groups, universities, and lawmakers reconsidered the prominent location of Confederate statues in their communities, opting to take down tributes to Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, P.G.T. Beauregard, and Nathan Bedford Forrest.8
Students at several northern universities pushed their institutions to rethink the honors they had bestowed upon prominent racists. At Yale, they demanded that the university rechristen Calhoun College, an undergraduate residential college named for John C. Calhoun, class of 1804. In February 2017, the university announced its decision to rename the college after alumna Grace Murray Hopper, a pathbreaking computer scientist and naval officer. “John C. Calhoun’s principles, his legacy as an ardent supporter of slavery as a positive good,” explained Yale president Peter Salovey, “are at odds with this university.”9
As the nation approached the two-year anniversary of the Emanuel massacre, some southern towns and cities—especially those with active progressive and African American communities—continued to revisit the future of their Confederate memorials. New Orleans, which had voted in late 2015 to take down its four monuments to the Confederacy and white supremacy, was the most prominent example. After a protracted legal struggle and threats of violence against a contractor hired to do the job, the city removed the first monument in the early morning hours of April 24, 2017. Under the cover of darkness, and wearing helmets, flak jackets, and masks to protect them from retribution, workers dismantled the Battle of Liberty Place obelisk, which honored the Redeemer vigilantes who had led a bloody 1874 coup against Louisiana’s biracial Reconstruction government. Over the next few weeks, monument supporters from across the country descended upon New Orleans. They held vigils at the remaining memorials, waving Confederate flags and openly brandishing firearms. Monument opponents, including members of the Take ’Em Down NOLA Coalition, a local grassroots organization that had been working to rid the city of all public testaments to white supremacy, staged demonstrations of their own. As tensions mounted, and New Orleans police tried to keep the peace, the city steadily toppled the remaining memorials. First went the Jefferson Davis monument in Mid-City, then the P.G.T. Beauregard statue in City Park. Finally, on Friday, May 19, with a large crowd watching and mostly cheering the workers on, the towering Robert E. Lee monument, which sat in Lee Circle, a prominent roundabout in the heart of the city, came down.10
That afternoon, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, who had pushed for removal since the Emanuel massacre, gave a compelling defense of his hometown’s actions. Any conversation about New Orleans’s Confederate monuments, he suggested at the outset, had to begin with a forthright reckoning with the place of slavery in the city’s history. Although New Orleans was once “a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were brought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River,” the city had not installed a single memorial testifying to this fact. This gaping hole in New Orleans’s commemorative landscape, the Democratic mayor continued, amounts to “historical malfeasance, a lie by omission.” The city’s Confederate monuments only exacerbated the lie. The statues to Lee, Davis, and Beauregard “are not just stone and metal,” he declared, “they are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history.” Instead, these monuments obscured New Orleans’s commitment to slavery and promoted a “fictional, sanitized” vision of the Confederacy that fought to defend the institution. Mayor Landrieu’s words were widely lauded across the country.11
The momentum for removal intensified that summer. In May and then again in July 2017, the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups gathered in defense of the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, which city officials had decided to remove. This crusade to keep the Lee monument standing came to a head in August at the “Unite the Right” rally, a terrifying two-day demonstration led by the Klan, neo-Nazis, and other white supremacists. One demonstrator plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring nineteen others. In response, calls to bring down Confederate statues sounded out from California to Florida. In sixteen states, monuments were either removed—often at night, with no advance notice given—designated for removal, covered, or, in some cases, vandalized. Outside of Phoenix, Arizona, the Jefferson Davis Highway Memorial was tarred and feathered. In Durham, North Carolina, protesters threw a rope around the neck of a statue of a Confederate soldier that stood in front of the old Durham County courthouse and pulled it from its pedestal. One hundred and fifty-two years after the Confederacy lost its war to defend slavery, the fallen soldier—a heap of deflated, twisted metal—lay prostrate in defeat.12
* * * *
AND YET.
Have Americans truly turned a corner? Despite all of the attention to symbols and the memories they evoke in the wake of the Emanuel massacre, it’s not clear that we have. Between the summer of 2015 and the summer of 2017, more than eighty public Confederate symbols were renamed or removed. But that leaves more than fourteen hundred monuments, schools, counties, holidays, and military bases across the country that still honor the Confederacy and its defenders. Some communities have even added Confederate tributes. After the University of Louisville dismantled its Confederate monument in late 2016, for instance, the small Kentucky town of Bradenburg, about fifty miles away, took the memorial and installed it in a city park. More than four hundred people, nearly all of whom supported the monument, attended the dedication ceremony. Asked whether he thought putting up the memorial might be controversial, Bradenburg’s mayor Ronnie Joyner replied, “I never looked at this statue as a black versus white thing or that it had a link to slavery or anything like that.” Joyner viewed it simply as a tribute to Confederate soldiers.13
Significantly, Charleston itself has seen fewer changes in its commemorative landscape than have other parts of the country—and fewer changes, frankly, than we would have predicted. In the week following the Emanuel massacre, the Citadel Board of Visitors voted 9–3 to remove the Confederate Naval Jack that hangs in the university’s Summerall Chapel. But South Carolina’s Heritage Act, which was passed in 2000 as part of the bargain that moved the Confederate flag from atop the capitol building, makes the General Assembly the ultimate arbiter of any changes to, including the removal of, historic memorials. When Citadel officials requested that the General Assembly amend the Heritage Act to allow them to take down the Naval Jack, the Republican speaker of the house declined. Some Democratic lawmakers and a group of Citadel alumni who started the #TakeItDownNow campaign have refused to take no for an answer, but they have yet to make discernible progress.14
Although Charleston designated a portion of Calhoun Street as Mother Emanuel Way Memorial District, it has no plans to change the name of the street to Emanuel Avenue, as some have suggested, or to tear down the Calhoun Monument or any Confederate monuments in the city, as the NAACP and other local activists have demanded. New mayor John Tecklenburg did announce in the summer of 2017 that the city planned to add contextualizing plaques that explain the problematic histories of the memorials. John Calhoun “was an advocate for slavery,” said the mayor, who suggested a properly contextualized Calhoun Monument would underscore that fact. It is unclear, however, if the state Heritage Act would permit such plaques. There is also evidence, albeit inconclusive, that someone tried to vandalize the Denmark Vesey Monument in the spring of 2017 by prying the statue from its base.15
Moreover, the backlash engendered by the attack on pro-Confederate symbols reveals a deep reservoir of resistance across the South and beyond. New Orleans’s lengthy campaign to take down its Confederate memorials sparked protests, calls for a boycott of the city, and threats of violence. Charlottesville’s decision to remove its Robert E. Lee statue led to armed conflict and death. In some states, conservatives mobilized against activists in the liberal cities and college towns most likely to demand action, attempting to tie their hands. State legislators in Virginia and Mississippi, for example, tried but failed to strengthen existing laws prohibiting the removal or modification of monuments, while those in North Carolina and Alabama adopted new statutes preventing any such changes. After the Lee statue was toppled in New Orleans, Karl Oliver, a Mississippi Republican state representative, wrote on Facebook that city officials “should be lynched.” He later apologized for his incendiary choice of words and deleted the post, though not before two fellow Republican members of the legislature had liked it. The ongoing affinity for Confederate symbols is not confined to the South. According to Dewey Barber, the owner of a Confederate memorabilia store in Georgia, 20 percent of his sales in recent years have been to northern customers. Barber also noted that while the Emanuel massacre was a tragedy, it had been a boon for his business, with sales of Confederate flags spiking after the shootings. Sales surged again at Barber’s shop as well as at a similar store in Pennsylvania after the Charlottesville episode in 2017.16
Standing atop his pedestal, John C. Calhoun towers over Charleston, including Emanuel A.M.E. Church, whose steeple is visible on the right.
The most troubling chapter in the post-Emanuel story has centered around a powerful set of protagonists: President Donald Trump and his supporters, some of whom are avowed white nationalists. Although Trump agreed with the decision to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse grounds in 2015, a handful of backers repeatedly unfurled Confederate banners—some with his name printed on them—at campaign events in 2016. After his election in November, Trump’s fans turned even more enthusiastically to the flag, displaying it at rallies from Virginia to Oregon, Florida to Colorado.17
The New York native fully entered the fray in August 2017. The white supremacists who organized the Charlottesville demonstrations to defend the city’s Robert E. Lee monument that spring and summer made clear their allegiances—both to the racist function of Confederate monuments and to President Trump. “What brings us together,” announced Richard Spencer, the leader of the first demonstration in May, “is that we are white, we are a people, we will not be replaced.” At the August “Unite the Right” rally, which was kicked off by a nighttime march of Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi protesters bearing tiki torches, former KKK imperial wizard David Duke said that he and his fellow white supremacists were “going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump” to “take our country back.” The death of counterprotester Heather Heyer at the hands of the homicidal white supremacist who hit her with his car prompted President Trump to denounce the conflict. But he pointedly attributed the events to “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.”18
Unwilling to draw a distinction between right-wing forces claiming to act in his name—many of whom were armed to the teeth—and their left-wing opponents, Trump served up a mealy-mouthed statement that spread the blame evenly and did not take a firm stand against white supremacy. Prominent white nationalists, meanwhile, interpreted his comments as support for their efforts. Responding to bipartisan pressure to offer a less equivocal condemnation, Trump did so in prepared remarks two days later, only to revert to his earlier sentiments several times in the coming weeks. After declaring that “there were very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville and tweeting that it was “sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” a defiant Trump doubled down at a Phoenix rally in late August. As an enthusiastic crowd of supporters cheered, Trump charged the “dishonest” media with mischaracterizing his role in the Charlottesville unrest. “The only people giving a platform to these hate groups,” he insisted, “is the media itself, and the fake news.” Alluding to the push to rid the landscape of Confederate iconography, Trump concluded: “And yes, by the way, they are trying to take away our history and our heritage. You see that.”19
When the Confederate flag shows up at Republican rallies, when Confederate monument critics are killed in the streets, when even the president of the United States sees Confederate symbols as benign signifiers of American heritage, it’s reasonable to wonder if some people will ever change their thinking about the enslaved past. True, not all the evidence on this point is so menacing. In her address to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, First Lady Michelle Obama—whose enslaved ancestors lived on a Lowcountry plantation near Georgetown, about an hour north of Charleston—argued that the story of America is a “story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation.” But, she continued, those generations “kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.” The next day, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly countered that the “slaves that worked there were well-fed and had decent lodgings.” O’Reilly may not have underscored his claim with a gun, but as a television commentator with millions of viewers and fans, he spread it far and wide.20
Invoking the lash of bondage and the sting of servitude, Michelle Obama emphasized the resiliency of those who had come before her and helped pave the way for the first African American president and first lady. For her, the memory of slavery is deeply personal. For some white Americans who, like O’Reilly, promote whitewashed memories of slavery, the issue is personal, too, particularly if they are descended from slaveholders or Confederate soldiers. These whites object to how unvarnished memories of slavery can be used to implicate their ancestors and, by extension, themselves.
They have a point. We should not be expected to reject our ancestors for their moral failings. And we certainly should not be held responsible for their actions. This does not give us license, however, to turn a blind eye to our forebears’ flaws or the complexity of the world in which they lived. We can pay respects to our ancestors without slipping into outright reverence for them, especially when that reverence leads to, in Mayor Landrieu’s apt words, historical malfeasance. More important, while it is unfair to ask white Americans today to accept blame for the sin of slavery, it is entirely reasonable to ask that they understand how its memory and legacies continue to shape the daily experiences of whites and African Americans in very different ways.
The issue is not just personal, then—it is political. When it comes to a topic like slavery, getting the past right is important in and of itself. But what is also at stake in remembering slavery honestly is our approach to race and in equality today. And on this front, the partisan divide is clear. Polling data reveal that Republicans are less likely than Democrats and independents to support the removal of Confederate flags and monuments from public spaces, to cite slavery as the primary reason for the Civil War, and to say that schools should teach children that slavery was the conflict’s main cause. Meanwhile, nearly six in ten white Republicans believe that too much attention is paid to race today, compared to 42 percent of white independents and 21 percent of white Democrats. Although almost half of white Democrats and a third of white independents say that their race has made it easier for them to be successful in life, only 17 percent of white Republicans believe their race has proven an asset. Before the 2016 election, four out of five supporters of Donald Trump said that whites face just as much discrimination as do African Americans.21
It is hardly a coincidence that whitewashed memories of slavery, the Confederacy, and the Civil War find more fertile ground on the political right than on the left. These ideas, after all, have long reinforced reactionary positions. A century ago, the Lost Cause provided the intellectual and emotional foundation for segregationist laws and customs. Today, the enduring misunderstandings born from Lost Cause mythology make it easier to oppose policies and programs that would redress the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow—from affirmative action and more progressive taxation to criminal justice reform and reparations.
In his stirring eulogy to Reverend Clementa Pinckney in 2015, President Barack Obama predicted that the saving grace of the Emanuel massacre might be “an honest accounting of America’s history.” We should hope so. On its own, of course, such an accounting will not heal our racial divide, and it certainly will not eradicate the racial barriers that continue to plague this country more than a century and a half after emancipation. But it would be a start.
The persistence of racial inequality in America—whether in the form of police brutality, school segregation, mass incarceration, or wealth disparities—reflects, to some degree, the persistence of our divided historical memory. Was slavery really all that bad? Was it really all that important to our nation? The answers to these questions matter. As Charleston proves better than any American city, the memory of slavery has always been fraught and contested ground. If a national consensus about our original sin finally seems within our reach, grasping it will not be easy. And the fact that it took the murder of nine people to inch us closer is a national disgrace.