Charleston’s Reckoning

“This is not who we are,” blinked the message from a white friend who lives in Charleston, put up a few days after the brutal murder of nine people in a church not far from his home.

The sentiment was a well-meaning expression of astonishment and outrage. But in it there’s a troubling implication of denial. Many of us Americans simply don’t want to see that racism is part of us and has been for centuries. We need to acknowledge that to address its poisonous consequences: inequality, poverty, despair, injustice, violence.

Charleston Mayor Joe Riley characterized it this way for the local paper: “We see this locally as the huge, heartbreaking tragedy it is for us, but I think we don’t understand fully what a heartbreaking tragedy it is for our country. This is heartbreaking for the United States of America.”

In other words, this attack reflects the ugliest truths of who we are as a nation.

For Mayor Riley, and for all of us, there’s a powerful significance that Charleston is at the center of this moment. The city was a crucible of American slavery, the port of entry for the greatest number of African slaves, the site of numerous slave revolts, a birthplace of Southern secession, and the site of the first shots fired in the Civil War. It is also known as the Holy City, for its many churches and its powerful spirituality. So, here we are — again — at that intersection filled with portent and possibility where spiritual grace, reflection, and the chance for atonement meet our terrible racist history.

White fear and hatred of blacks — the kind the killer expressed — is rooted in our history. Instead of fully enfranchising blacks after the Civil War, America built a legally segregated nation that would endure for another hundred years. Racial subjugation continued unabated for generations, both fueling and fueled by deep-seeded racist fear and, in the South, whites’ resentment at losing the war that persists to this day.

Racism — institutional and personal — was allowed to continue due in large part to denial, a sort self-serving dishonesty. Segregation, proponents argued at the time in a stunning piece of racist logic, was good for whites and good for blacks. Many Americans still contend absurdly that the war wasn’t fought over slavery, a falsehood that conveniently absolves the losing Southern side of its unjust cause that is nonetheless pushed in many Southern schools and households.

This is who we are.

When the civil rights movement brought an end to official segregation and Americans were forced to come face to face with the nation’s terrible racial injustices, some whites picked up the Confederate battle flag and stood up in violent opposition. And yet many still contend that the flag is a benign symbol of Southern heritage.

This is who we are.

In America today, streets, parks, and bridges still bear the names of former champions of slavery, and many in the South still celebrate Confederate Memorial Day in honor of Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis. And yet, even amid all this — which could be called, at the very least, institutional hat-tipping to our racist heritage — many Americans still contend there is no such thing as white privilege.

This is who we are.

It takes more human horror, like the killings in Charleston, to open our eyes and hearts. The Confederate flag, forever an affront to many Americans, is an example. Overnight after the Charleston killings, even ardent opponents of removing the flag are finally saying: “I get it now.”

In a sermon a week after the killings, Nelson B. Rivers, a Charleston civil rights activist and minister, described his conversation in 2000 with his state senator, Glenn McConnell, over the removal of the flag from the state capitol. Rivers told the story to his mostly black congregation in the fittingly named Liberty Hill section of North Charleston. McConnell, a career Charleston politician, told Rivers the flag would never be removed.

“He told me,” Rivers said to his flock, “taking it down would cause too much pain.”

Rivers paused, then boomed in reply: “I told him: ‘Don’t have a pain contest with me!’ ”

The minister went on: “I’m from the land of never: Charleston, South Carolina. I’ve been told all my life I’ll never graduate from high school, I’ll never graduate from college, the flag will never come down.”

Never say never. With battle flags coming down across the South by mandate, even McConnell now agrees they should be removed. But the flag is just the beginning. The symbols of America’s original sin are everywhere.

In Charleston, the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the site of Dylann Storm Roof’s alleged June 17 killing rampage, stands on Calhoun Street. John C. Calhoun, a U.S. vice president, senator, and a penetrating political thinker in the early 19th century, is considered one of Charleston’s most illustrious citizens. Calhoun also was an ardent anti-abolitionist and a leading national proponent of slavery. Slavery, he famously said, was a “positive good.”

Yet, there is John C. Calhoun atop a towering pedestal a few hundred yards from the A.M.E. church, peering down sternly on thousands of black churchgoers, many of them descendants of slaves, queuing up to bid farewell to the nine black lives lost in that racist attack.

This is who we are.

President Obama was well aware of the historic significance of his presence and his eulogy two weeks ago. In honoring nine murdered black Americans he would speak words rarely spoken by any U.S. president, let alone a black man: that the South’s cause was wrong, that segregation was wrong, and that the terrible legacies of slavery poison our society still today.

The response in the arena was universally positive.

“Removing the flag from this state’s capitol,” Obama continued, “. . . would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s history. . . .”

“But I don’t think God wants us to stop there. For too long, we’ve been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present. Perhaps we see that now. Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty, or attend dilapidated schools, or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career.”

Let them not die in vain, many said afterward. Grief, some said, is empty without action. But just how far America will move to address its race ills remains to be seen. Relegating the Confederate flag to museums and history books would be merely a symbol of the profound atonement that needs to come.

When the president broke into “Amazing Grace” at the end of his eulogy, he was not only seizing the soaring emotion of the moment, he was sharing a story that describes the task ahead. The hymn was written by John Newton, a foul-mouthed, drunken former slave-ship captain who made many trips across the Atlantic laden down with humans in chains, stacked up like cordwood. Some of their descendants might well have been among the 6,000 in that hall.

Newton underwent a conversion after a violent storm at sea where he begged for forgiveness and another chance. He would become a priest and an abolitionist and the creator of the eternal “Amazing Grace.” The hymn tells us that, regardless of the sin, redemption is possible. But only if we are willing to see ourselves for who we really are.

Biddle Duke’s newspaper reporting career in several states and abroad included a stint at The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C. An editor and publisher of weekly newspapers in Vermont, he began his reporting career on the South Fork in the 1980s. When he’s not in Vermont, he lives in Springs.