The killing of nine people Wednesday during a bible reading at a black church in South Carolina is a reminder of past racial atrocities, a Duke scholar said.
The murders at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston are the latest in a long, sad history of anti-black violence, bombings and arson aimed at black churches, said Valerie Cooper, an associate professor of black church studies at Duke Divinity School. In many southern communities, the church is the beating social, political, religious and even economic heart of black communities, Cooper said.
“Particularly during the 20th century, burning black churches was a way to try to intimidate blacks seeking increased political or economic power since the churches so often functioned as the hub of civil rights organizing,” she said. “The bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, and the subsequent death of four little girls who were there for Sunday school, shocked the nation with the violent lengths to which racists would go to disrupt and destroy black churches, and by extension, black communities.”
It is particularly sad that the attack took place in a church belonging to the oldest independent African American denomination—the AME or African Methodist Episcopal Church, Cooper said. The AME was born in response to a racist incident at the then-integrated St. Georges Methodist Episcopal Church in 1792. Black Philadelphians who had been part of St. Georges began to organize a separate denomination where they could escape racism, exercise autonomy, and worship as they wished.
“Since the AME denomination was born as a response to racism in the church, it is particularly ironic that this particular church would be the site of a new racist attack,” she said. “Sadly, too little has changed over the years.”
Cooper added that because midweek meetings at black churches tend to draw the most devoted members for Bible studies, prayer meetings and choir rehearsals, it is likely that the Charleston’s most devoted congregants were among the victims.