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By Norris Eppes
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"Our own city has been tormented again," Sheryl Dunmeyer said, standing on a Charleston sidewalk by herself Thursday. The heat was sticky. Ms. Dunmeyer was trying to catch shade from the trees that bordered Morris Street. She kicked at the gray South Carolina dirt while she spoke.
"My God," she said, talking about her first thought after hearing of the massacre. "How is the family? We'd just gotten over Walter Scott, and began the healing process with that. And here we go again."
Reverend Herbert Jenkins, Deacon Theodore Hartwell and Fred Snype were talking together, standing in the sun by a police car in the street. The heat index was in the hundreds. Everyone was sweating, so that at a point it didn't matter. People from Morris Brown AME church were handing out water bottles to the crowd.
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This was the first memorial service since Dylann Roof allegedly shot to death nine African-Americans in Emanuel AME church in Charleston on Wednesday night. Morris Brown AME, a few blocks away from the site of the shooting, was packed full inside the church, so a crowd gathered outside. There were prayers, speeches, songs and clapping. Jenkins, Hartwell and Snype were toward the back of this outside crowd.
"These incidences are no longer few and far between," said Jenkins. "It's becoming commonplace. What are we going to do to rectify the ills that are affecting our society?"
Many people were talking about the shooting, how it didn't seem to be something that could happen in our city. It was supposed to be something that happened far away, an attack that we'd watch on television. A family of three—Tamara Wright, BreAnah Brown and Tréy Brown—were standing back as the crowd exited the church after the memorial service.
"Not at the church," Wright said of the shooting. "Not at the church. On the streets, at a club, sad to say, maybe even at a sporting event. But not at the church."
Harwell spoke to this also. "I'm an AME," he said. "I go to church in Mount Pleasant. And we always have white visitors. We don't have no suspicion, you know, that they're going to do something stupid. We just accept them as a person. That's normal for most of the black church."
"Within the city of Charleston," said Wright, "Wednesday night is known all over the city as a time for Bible study. It is nothing abnormal for people to still be in church 8, 9, 10 o'clock. It's our home away from home."
She paused to adjust her hat and fan herself. "It's just as scary as it is sad. Scary because we were raised—I raised my children, my parents raised me, my grandparents raised my parents—that if you have nowhere to go, the church was the place."
At this she began to weep, standing there with her children under the shade of the live oaks. People walked around, talking or listening to those who gave speaches. Some people had hand-drawn signs. One read "Black Lives Matter" and below this text there was a drawing of streets around where Emanuel AME church sits. A man was playing a djembe, crouching with the drum between his knees as he stood on the sidewalk.
"It's the time for people to realize," said BreAnah Brown, Wright's daughter, "even though we've come a long way, there's still a long way to go. There still is definitely a division, especially in the South, and especially in Charleston. Where something like this happens, and the Confederate flag is still waving at the capital. You know? It's history repeating itself. Because back in the days it wasn't unheard of for African-American churches to be bombed. I'm sure you know about the four girls. So it's just like, are we back to this again?"
That flag—the Confederate battle flag—came up in conversation frequently. People pointed out and talked about how it was still flying above the courthouse in Columbia.
Fred Snype, as he stood by the police cars, said, "This speaks to the way that 9/11 changed everything with flying. This is going to change everything with church now. Even when we come together to pray."
Jenkins chimed in. "But not necessarily in a bad way."
"Hopefully we come together stronger," Snype agreed.
"It's the mentality," BreAnah Brown said, talking about the motives of the shooter.
"Hate is taught. Nobody is born to hate. Hate is taught. We have to change the way we think, and change the way we see others, and realize that we are all humans—black, white and in between. We are all humans." She paused. "It was just a terrible act. The more you hide from it, it doesn't make it go away."
Her mother, Tamara Wright, spoke clearly and seriously and softly. "Respectfully love," she said. "Respect life. Respect choices. Respect people's ways of living. Respect each other's race and religion. Even when there are things we may not agree with. Respect is the key."
Later in the afternoon, retired U.S. Army Colonel Walton Jones came outside with his son. They had been in church for the memorial. After the service, they stood on the sidewalk. Nobody was really leaving.
"We have a state that's still silently tolerant of hatred," he said. "Now, any politician who speaks out against that flag being flown? And people call it a battle flag. The losing side of the battle doesn't get to fly the flag."
"It's silently tolerated," he added. "I was in Iraq. If it was any place else, we wouldn't let them fly the flag. But we also know that that flag—although it was a battle flag—for black people, post-Reconstruction, anytime we saw that flag, whether it was during the civil rights, whether it was Jim Crow, we knew to run and hide. Because it was a terrorist flag for us. It wasn't about state's rights."
Jones talked about how the massacre was a terrorist attack. "That guy came from Lexington with a plan. Of all the churches, he sought out that one. Because he was making a point. You may be a high school dropout, but when they finish this investigation, somebody figured out the prominent AME churches. This is like when terrorists attack American Airlines. Where 'American' is in the word. African. Episcopal," he said slowly.
Later, he added that Dylann Roof "thought this out, and he's not that smart. Someone else helped. So it was a terrorist attack. It was a planned out terrorist attack."
As the crowd was leaving Morris Brown AME church, Jones talked about what to do next. What was there to do next?
"We need actionable love," he said. "Until you come and have dinner at my house, and I have dinner at your house, and my kid and your kid go to the same church—and it's more segregated in churches than anywhere else—until we get to that level of love, that I see beyond your color and you see beyond mine, and say, 'Hey, y'all come on over, we're having a cookout'? We're still going to have this separation."
"I see it within your generation," he added. "I come downtown Charleston, I see your generation interact. That's more assimilation. But we still haven't gotten into each other's homes."
He talked about growing up in Charleston. He currently lives in Moncks Corner, South Carolina. "Blacks knew," he said, that "walking down King Street, you walk from work to home, and don't stop. That was known."
He pointed to a man who had walked by earlier with his bicycle. This man had been speaking out loudly against police profiling.
"He's saying the cops stopped him because he didn't have a light on his bike after sundown. And they could have given him a ticket, a summons, a warning. So, there's still that kind of harassment. I have a convertible white Mercedes. I was stopped in Flowertown," he said, referring to the town of Summerville, South Carolina by its colloquial name, "because I had the top down. I was coming from a jazz thing. Now, I don't drink. But he said he saw me swerving. So I already had the anxiety—and I'm 30 years in the Army, retired colonel—that I'd be harassed."
"It's that silent hatred," he said. As he said this, the police came toward the crowd and began waving people away from the front of the church, off the road and toward King Street. They were saying there was an emergency. Jones helped his son down from where the little boy had climbed onto a stone wall. The child had been standing to see better over the crowd.
"There has to be action," Jones said. "I want to have lunch with you. I want to have dinner with you. I want you to come meet my family. You know, I want you—if I had a sister—to date my sister, my niece. More than that, I want white men to be OK with my boy dating their daughter. We haven't gotten there yet. It's going to be a while, but we have to get to that."
Norris Eppes is an MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. You can find him on Twitter @norriseppes.
Correction: An earlier version of this article contained an incorrect spelling of the name of the Emanuel AME church.
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