Imagine the scenario. You invite a person, in fact, a stranger, into your home at their request. On the surface he seems to be normal, sincere and interested in getting to know you better and being a part of your life and community. Everything seems to be going smoothly. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the individual you have befriended suddenly pulls out a gun and decides to murder you and your fellow family, friends and associates.
Horrific and almost unimaginable, right? This was the horrifying scenario that took place on at the historic Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17.
This is the house of worship where mass murderer Dylann Storm Roof betrayed the kindness and generosity of the members who granted him permission to worship in fellowship and communion with them. After sitting quietly in a church pew for over an hour, Roof suddenly jumps up, makes the misguided and deluded charge that Black men are raping White women and that Black people are taking over America and must be stopped from doing so.
He then proceeds to gun down various church members, eventually taking the lives of nine men and women. Three of his victims were over 70 years old, including an 87-year-old great-grandmother. The church pastor and state senator Clementa C. Pinckney was also a victim of this madness. Roof decided to spare the life of one church attendee, informing her that he wanted her to tell the world what had transpired. Murdering people in church: incomprehensible.
Needless to say, Roof’s actions leave the congregation members and the nation perplexed, stunned and outraged by such a sadistic act of homeland terrorism. Roof is a 21-year-old White male with White supremacists affinities and ties. He has had a history of deviant behavior and drug use. The sad and sobering truth is that this is hardly the first time that a Black church has been the target of homegrown terrorism by White supremacists.
Attacks on Black churches have been a common occurrence in America since the nation’s inception. The ongoing and relentless bombing and burning of churches during the era of the modern civil rights movement of the 1950 and ’60s, as well as the intense period of church burnings that occurred in the South and in pockets of the Midwest during the mid-1990s, were indicative of a long and tormented history of violence directed toward Black houses of worship and Black Christianity in general.
Black ministers such as the late Revs. Fred Shuttlesworth and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., were under relentless attack from the Ku Klux Klan, other virulent and vicious racists and, in some cases, Southern law enforcement. In the case of Dr. King, he managed to earn the deep enmity of then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. The hostility directed toward these men also placed their welfare and that of those close to them in jeopardy.
