David Goldman/AP Photo
Charleston, South Carolina’s historic Mother Emanuel AME Church
CHARLESTON, S.C. – “With fear and trembling” is how the Rev. Eric S.C. Manning reacted in 2016 when he found out that he would be assigned to Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, one year after nine people were killed by white supremacist Dylann Roof at their weekly prayer meeting.
It was the same fear and trembling that Manning felt when he first felt called to serve the church at 27 years old. But he never could have anticipated that calling would lead him to one of the oldest Black churches in the United States, and one that was so fatally targeted by racist intent.
“I have a tendency of always being honest—brutally honest I think at times—and I shared with the congregation that morning that I have no earthly idea how to lead a congregation through this,” Manning said in an interview with the Prospect about his first Sunday service. That morning he read from Psalm 23, in a sermon that reflected on the trust in God to lead. “I believe that it’s God that has sent me here and He will lead us all through this together,” Manning said that morning.
A year earlier, Manning was at home with his family when his daughter told him there was a shooting at a church in Charleston. Manning recalls that at the time he said, “That couldn’t be … I would have gotten a call by now.”
Then his phone rang.
Details were slow to come in that night, and when senior pastor and state senator the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney couldn’t be reached, Manning and his family immediately started to pray. Pinckney was killed in the attack, along with eight other members of that night’s prayer group, while his wife and young daughter were in an adjacent room.
Manning would eventually learn that the church he was serving on June 17, 2015, Bethel AME Church in neighboring Georgetown, was also on Roof’s list of possible targets. “As time progressed, it started to sink in how much hate this young man had and how confused he was, especially in regard to the race relations within this country,” Manning says.
Since the massacre, church members have been healing on their own timelines, Manning explains. Through a grant, Mother Emanuel has been able to work with the Medical University of South Carolina and has set up an empowerment center, which is the central hub of nine different trauma response programs and services, to support the mental health of the victims, first responders, and members of the congregation in the aftermath of the tragedy. The grant allowed Mother Emanuel to bring in clinicians and trauma professionals to aid the church, as well as train church leaders on how to best support the congregation. Manning saw it as part of his duty as Mother Emanuel’s leader.
But at the same time, the horrors perpetrated in Charleston have not abated. The last five years have all seen an increase in the number of reported hate crimes in the United States, according to a report by the California State University, San Bernardino Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. The Mother Emanuel massacre was a dark signal of the expressions of white supremacy, hate speech, and bigotry America was to endure in the Trump years, from the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to spasms of deadly violence this year in places like Portland, Oregon, and Kenosha, Wisconsin.
“Every time something like this happens, it thrust Mother Emanuel back into that space,” Manning says. “It can’t necessarily just be something you pass by or pass through, but you need to call and check on members and make sure everyone is doing all right … it puts everyone back in that space, as if to say, here we go again.”
Part of this year’s presidential election has become a referendum on the tolerance of hate speech, bigotry, and extremism. Democratic nominee Joe Biden says he decided to run after seeing how President Donald Trump sat by during the Charlottesville rally. After a year with one of the lowest levels of hate crimes in the United States in recent decades, the Mother Emanuel shooting in 2015 was the start of an uptick in hate and extremism that would go mostly ignored under Trump’s first term, if not outright encouraged. As hate and anger stews nationwide, and a demagogue eggs it on, all roads lead back to Mother Emanuel.
Evidence indicates that hate crimes can be linked to presidential rhetoric, explains Brian Levin, director of the CSUSB Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. When people are paying attention to leaders, their words can correlate to different behaviors. For example, six days after 9/11, President George W. Bush spoke at the Islamic Center of Washington, and hate crimes dropped “precipitously” the next day and into the next year, Levin says.
By contrast, when President Trump spoke about the 2017 Charlottesville rally—a gathering of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, neofascists, and Klansmen that emboldened mostly white men to march through the streets of a small Virginia town chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” while waving tiki torches and Confederate and Nazi flags—he said there were “very fine people” on both sides.
After Trump’s remarks, hate crimes peaked.
The trends show that hate and extremism has gotten “leaner and meaner.” While there are comparatively fewer attacks, they are more severe.
As far back as December 2015, when Trump, then a candidate for president, revealed his “Muslim ban” plan for the first time, the data showed an increase in the frequency and severity of anti-Muslim attacks. By this point, Trump was regularly receiving wall-to-wall coverage, with networks showing live footage of his empty podium in anticipation of what he would say or do next. This became a conduit for hate, which spread across the country over the next five years.
“We see this [link] with a fair degree of consistency,” Levin says. “When leaders speak around visceral or fear-inducing, panic-inducing events, their words correlate to things like an increase in hate crime.”
Trump’s presidency has made life harder for the Mother Emanuel congregation. Manning shares that people still call the church and leave hateful voice mails. The church has also had to increase physical security at their building. Manning adds that Trump’s resistance to acknowledge white supremacy in the United States has hurt as much as his overall lack of empathy.
“It’s hurtful when you don’t want to come to a place to understand why it’s so hurtful,” Manning says. “You have to remember in history, when torches were coming down the road, there was no good thing on the other end; from an African American perspective, that meant a lynching was getting ready to take place.”
Today, we know that lynchings were not just acts of violence and hate, but also a tool used to scare African Americans away from voting. A recent study shows that wherever there were more lynchings in the 20th century, there are fewer registered Black voters even today.
Recent data also shows an uptick of extremist attacks around elections, Levin explains, sometimes mirroring the rhetoric of the moment. The worst month for anti-Black hate crimes in the last 30 years was during the 1996 presidential campaign, when much of the discourse was fixed on the “welfare queen” stereotype and the welfare reform bill passed under President Clinton.
This year, the U.S. hasn’t seen as many attacks, which may be because of COVID-19 keeping people indoors. But there was an attempted plot by an extremist group to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan. The trends show that hate and extremism has gotten “leaner and meaner,” Levin explains. While there are comparatively fewer attacks, they are more severe.
There are also more ways someone can be radicalized today. Groups like QAnon, the Three Percenters, the Boogaloo movement, and others can spread information on social media and online forums easily. Social media companies are currently playing catch-up when it comes to purging their sites of hate groups, and indeed their algorithms promote provocative and sometimes hateful content, spreading it around their platforms.
Roof was radicalized by looking at statistics of “Black on white” crime and browsing the Council of Conservative Citizens website, not by the most “over-the-top, swastika-bearing websites,” Levin explains. You could argue that his massacre at Mother Emanuel set off a global competition for the most egregious homicides. While one of the United States’ largest national-security threats is domestic terrorism, it is also an international threat, with attacks in New Zealand, Germany, Norway, and across the globe.
Meg Kinnard/AP Photo
The Rev. Eric S.C. Manning, pastor of Mother Emanuel AME Church, with then–Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, ahead of her remarks to the Charleston NAACP banquet, September 21, 2019, in Charleston, South Carolina
The usual targets of hate groups are also expanding to what Levin calls more of a revolving carousel of hate. “The traditional list that we would use for intergroup violence … we still track it, but the number of folks that are targeted because of prejudice is now expanding into other things because it’s more politically acceptable,” he says. Hate becomes, Levin says, “‘I don’t hate Black people, but I hate the Marxist Black Lives Matter.’”
In the first presidential debate in late September, Trump was asked by moderator Chris Wallace to condemn the rise in white supremacy and extremism in the United States. Instead, he told a hate group called the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” The phrase was later printed on Proud Boys merchandise and apparel.
But within targeted groups, there is a resilience rooted in history. Mother Emanuel, which was founded in 1816, was targeted when its leaders tried to coordinate a slave rebellion. Thirty-four men were hanged and 35 more banished from the state, and the church building was destroyed. Roof was not the first person to try to destroy this place of worship. Rev. Manning says he thinks about Mother Emanuel’s history every single day.
Manning also uses his position to continue to encourage his congregation to stay involved. That means reminding people to vote during Sunday services and daily prayer Facebook live streams. He also marched with Black Lives Matter protests this summer, not shying away from the racial-justice movement of the moment.
Voting can put an end to the Trump presidency; during the 1960s leading up to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, voting in itself was an act of protest. But this year, even if Trump is voted out along with a wave of Trump-supporting allies, it will not remedy the emotional fervor that predated him, leading to domestic terrorists like Dylann Roof. And Manning stresses along with his voting reminders that it will be important to hold elected officials accountable after Election Day.
“We’re going to hold you accountable as well,” Manning says. “We gave you our voice; we gave you our vote. And we are expecting to further our dialogue and we expect to have adjusted what needs to be adjusted.”
Manning and his son, who’s in his early twenties, streamed their presence live from one protest, and Manning was told by members of the congregation how proud they were that their pastor was participating. But Manning sees his participation as nonnegotiable.
“It comes back down to the conviction that I have, in which I understand the historical significance of being the pastor of Mother Emanuel and I do not have the option to sit on the sidelines,” Manning says. “I must be involved and I must speak out when these kinds of injustices are taking place and encourage others to not just talk about doing something but do something.”
