“You Rape Our Women and Are Taking over Our Country: You Have to Go.” The Mother Emanuel AME Church Massacre at 8 Years

On the pleasant evening of June 17th, 2015, members of the historic Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church gathered for a Wednesday Night Bible study led by their Pastor, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney. By happenstance it was the day after Donald Trump rode the escalator to the lobby of Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for the Presidency. There is no known link between the events.

The church is the oldest AME parish in the South and was founded by over 2000 Black members of three Methodist Episcopal parishes left after one of them decided to build a hearse garage over the Black burial ground on its property. Throughout its early years it was frequently raided and persecuted by White authorities, and frequently forced underground, a condition made permanent after the Nat Turner Slave Rebellion in 1834 when Charleston banned public worship of Black Churches. One of its early Lay Preachers, Denmark Vesey, a free Black who was accused of attempting to bring about a slave revolt. Vesey and five other alleged organizers was tried and convicted This continued until Charleston was liberated by General William Tecumseh Sherman’s armies at the end of 1864.

After the war it grew and in spite of harassment and prejudice was able to construct the current house of worship. In 1909 it hosted Booker T. Washington who spoke to an audience that included many of Charleston’s White leaders. In 1962 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke and encouraged African Americans in Charleston to vote. After his assassination his widow, Coretta Scott King led a march of some 1,500 demonstrators to the church in support of striking hospital workers in Charleston. When they arrived at the Church they were met by armed South Carolina National Guard Troops with bayonets affixed to their rifles. Around 900 church members were arrested.

Even so, the church continued to thrive, with many of its members being community leaders, educators, businessmen, and medical professionals.

On the night of June 17th, 2015, 21 year-old White Supremacist Dylann Roof entered the church and joined the Bible study. Roof asked for Reverend Pinckney and sat by him during the study, at points participating in the discussion and disagreeing with interpretations of Scripture. When the meeting transitioned to prayer, Roof rose from his seat and pulled out his Glock 41, .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol loaded with hollow point bullets which are designed to create the most damage possible to a human body. When he began, one victim asked why. And he coldly told his victims “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” Roof had 8 magazines loaded with that ammunition. Over a period of about six minutes he killed nine people, reloading his pistol five times. The victims included Pinckney. Several people fell to the floor and faked death to avoid being killed, and he deliberately left one woman alive to tell the story as he expected to die by suicide, putting the gun to his head but discovering that it was empty, fled the church toward Eastern Tennessee or Western North Carolina, both hotbeds of White Supremacy. Of the people he shot, every one of them were killed, a 100% kill ratio.

Upon being apprehended, Roof told police that he “almost didn’t go through with [the shooting] because everyone was so nice to him,” but that he ultimately decided to “go through with his mission.”

The banality of his words were stunning. It reminded me of the way that many Nazis went through with killing the Jews during the Holocaust. For most of them it was not personal and many knew Jews, some who had even befriended them in their early years. But still, blinded by their ideology and belief that the Jews were less than human and were taking over their county, these men, like Dylann Roof committed atrocities that beggar the imagination.

In writing about the actions of those in the Holocaust, in particular Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt wrote: “it was of great political interest to know how long it takes an average person to overcome his innate repugnance toward crime, and what exactly happens to him once he had reached that point. To this question, the case of Adolf Eichmann supplied an answer that could not have been clearer and more precise.”

For Eichmann this took years, but for Dylann Roof this took one hour of sitting with people who showed him kindness before he decided to go through with his mission. Sadly there are other people in this country who harbor the same kind of ideology as Roof and while a minority a lot of their though is seeping into the mainstream through alleged “think tanks” and “new organizations” posing as mainstream but which instead argue for the systematic exclusion of blacks, other racial and religious minorities, women and gays in society. Their spokesmen routinely show up as “experts” or “commentators” on the various cable news channels and talk radio and very seldom are confronted by the hosts of these shows.

The purveyors of this type of ideology play on the fears of people who feel they are “losing their country.” They play on the worst stereotypes to increase that fear and loathing and the result is what happened on an unmatched scale in Germany and for us on Wednesday a large scale.

Time tonight prohibits me from listing all the similar race based mass killings, not to mention those committed against Jews, Sikhs, Muslims, and the LGBTQ+ community since Roof committed his atrocity.

Yale Historian Dr. Timothy Snyder wrote:

“The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”

The question is that is before us now as the violent racism that motivated Dylann Roof grows, and is codified in local and State laws around the country, is while people of decency and courage rise up to stop it?

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