Today I’m not going to stick to the topic of this
blog. Instead, I want to talk about
something that, I’m sure, you’ve heard about by now: the massacre inside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina .
One of the cruelest ironies is that members of a
Bible study group—including the church's pastor, who also happens to be a South Carolina State senator—in one of America’s
oldest historically black churches were gunned down by a young white man who
sat with them on the eve of Juneteenth— a few days after the 800th
anniversary of King John issuing Magna Carta.
And the Confederate Flag flies in front of the
State Capitol.
A century and a half after slaves in South
Carolina and Texas and other states got word that they were free men and women,
a young man hadn’t gotten the message that the Fourteenth Amendment of the US
Constitution guarantees all citizens, regardless of their skin color, the
rights enumerated in the first ten amendments (a.k.a. the Bill of Rights). Heck, he didn’t even get the message that there’s no such country as Rhodesia anymore.
He was simply acting from the same sort of ignorance, the same sort of hate,
that left earlier generations of young African Americans hanging from trees or
at the bottoms of rivers.
And the Confederate Flag flies in front of the
State Capitol.
More than a century and a half after the
Emancipation Proclamation, in the state in which the opening shot of the US
Civil War was fired, a young man entered a Bible Study group and waited for the
“right” moment to shoot someone nearly as young as he is, people old enough to
be his parents, grand-parents and great-grandparents. He shattered the peace and sanctity they
found in what, for many generations of African-Americans—and, perhaps, for
those members of the Bible Study group—has been their closest-knit, if not
their only, sanctuary.
And the Confederate flag flies in front of the
State Capitiol.
 |
| From the church's website. |
A pastor was killed along with a deacon and
laypeople. Families lost sisters,
brothers, mothers, fathers; friends lost friends and people lost spouses and
other loved ones. They loved and were
loved; they raised families and were raised by families. And they contributed to the lives of their
communities through their professional and volunteer work, and the loves and
interests they shared with those around them.
And the Confederate flag flies in front of the
State Capitol.
Dylann Storm Roof, in an instant, ended the lives
of Rev. (and Sen.) Clementa Pickney, Mira Thompson, Daniel Simmons Sr., Cynthia
Hurd, Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Tywanza Sanders, De Payne Middleton,
Ethel Lance and her cousin Susie Jackson. All of them, one hundred and fifty
years after Juneteenth.
