Following the June 17 shooting of nine churchgoers at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, S.C., the nation has been embroiled in a discussion about gun violence, race relations, racism and the Confederate flag.
The 21-year-old shooter posted a lengthy, poorly-written manifesto online prior to the shooting, which describes his views, espousing hatred for his fellow Americans based on their national origins and ethnicities. He also posted images of himself with guns and the Confederate flag, and other images of himself burning the American flag.
Among the dead was pastor and South Carolina State Sen. Clementa Pinckney [D], making the shooting not just a massacre of innocent civilians at a Bible study group, but effectively a political assassination of an elected official.
The discussion about racism is important for all Americans, most especially in the Deep South, where racial tensions remain strained 150 years after the end of slavery and 50 years after the Civil Rights Act was passed. South Carolina was the heart of the Confederacy, the first state to secede from the Union. The first shots of the Civil War were fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, which can be seen just 4.13 miles away from the Emanuel AME Church.
Due to the deaths of nine African-Americans and the shooter’s use of the Confederate flag, Walmart, Sears, Etsy and Amazon have decided to remove products with the Confederate flag from their inventories while several national flag makers have decided to cease producing them. Google will begin scrubbing the Confederate flag from its online shopping results. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has called for the flag to be removed from a Confederate war memorial at the capital grounds. Alabama Gov. Robert J. Bentley had four historic Confederate flags removed from his state’s Confederate war memorial. The past is important, but we must move forward to the future, Haley said.
Removing flags, however politically and racially charged they may be, will not end racism nor bring back the nine lives lost in Charleston. As a nation, we must share what unites us as a one people: The dedication to equality under the law, fairness and justice for all.
As one small town to another, we can only imagine what the residents of Charleston are enduring personally and as a community. We hope that Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton and Myra Thompson are remembered for the lives they lived in Charleston and the impact they had in their community, not simply for how they died.
To our fellow Americans in Charleston, let me send you these words written during the Civil War to Lydia Bixby of Massachusetts by President Abraham Lincoln: “I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming .… I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost.
“Yours, very sincerely and respectfully.”
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
