Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church

Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Mother Emanuel, traces its founding to 1817, when Black members left Charleston's white controlled Methodist congregation to worship independently, joining the denomination Richard Allen had founded in Philadelphia the year before. Among its founders was Denmark Vesey, a formerly enslaved man who had purchased his own freedom, and the congregation grew quickly into one of the largest Black churches in the South.

That early growth ended abruptly in 1822, when Vesey was implicated in a planned uprising against Charleston's slaveholding class, an insurrection that never took place but whose discovery led to Vesey's execution along with dozens of others. City authorities held the church partly responsible, burned its building to the ground, and banned independent Black congregations in Charleston until after the Civil War ended slavery in the state. Its current sanctuary, completed in 1891 after an earlier building was damaged by an earthquake, has served it since.

The church's name entered public consciousness again, far more painfully, on June 17, 2015, when a white supremacist gunman who had sat through nearly an hour of a Bible study opened fire, killing nine members including the senior pastor, State Senator Clementa Pinckney. The attack drew national attention to the Confederate symbols the shooter had embraced, prompting South Carolina to remove the Confederate flag from its statehouse grounds weeks later.

The congregation kept worshipping in its sanctuary afterward, and the grounds now hold a memorial to the nine killed, an addition to a building whose history already ran from a founder executed for planning an uprising to a congregation that kept reconstituting itself through every attempt to suppress it.

Mother Emanuel's first article ends with the shooting itself and the removal of South Carolina's Confederate flag; what followed in the courts and on the church grounds has unfolded over the decade since. Dylann Roof was tried in federal court in 2016 and 2017 on hate crime and civil rights charges, representing himself during jury selection and sentencing to keep evidence of his own mental state from the jury, and was sentenced to death, the first defendant ever to receive a federal death sentence for a hate crime. Appeals courts upheld that sentence in 2021, and the United States Supreme Court declined to hear a further challenge in 2022; Roof has continued filing motions seeking to vacate the sentence since, none of which have succeeded.

The church itself began planning a permanent memorial years before construction could begin. Designed by architect Michael Arad, best known for the National September 11 Memorial in New York, the Emanuel Nine Memorial centers on a courtyard where two large carved marble benches, shaped to suggest wings, flank a fountain inscribed with the nine victims' names, water spilling from a cross shaped source across the inscriptions below. A planned second phase, the Survivors' Garden, will add stone benches and trees dedicated to the shooting's five survivors, with a sixth tree representing the church itself.

Groundbreaking took place in 2023, and the memorial's first phase is nearing completion, with an opening expected later in 2026, more than a decade after the shooting it commemorates, a monument still under construction on the same ground where the congregation kept worshipping through the years it took to build it.