Charleston

Charleston enters the narrative as both a specific place of racist violence and the source of a fear that travels far beyond the site of the attack. The shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, known affectionately as Mother Emanuel, collapses the distance between historical church bombings and present-day Black life; for Austin, even from elsewhere, the attack makes her own church feel newly vulnerable.

Setting and Historical Context

The attack in Charleston appears after Austin reflects on the 1963 bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where four Black girls were killed during Sunday school. She had grown up hearing about the girls, but only later learned that bombings were a recurring form of intimidation and that the 1963 March on Washington had taken place just eighteen days before the bombing. The narrative places these histories beside one another: a Black church is again attacked, and a violence Austin had understood as belonging to the past returns in the present.

The 2015 Attack

One evening in June 2015, just as Austin was about to go to sleep, she saw a tweet from an MSNBC anchor reporting a shooting at a Black church. She turned on the television and watched the news until she could no longer bear it. A white supremacist had entered Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston with a Glock 41 handgun and killed nine people. Austin describes the church as beloved, and the news as an attack on the Black church she herself loved.

Distance and Its Limits

Austin had never set foot in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. She did not know its congregation members, its pastor, or the people killed that night. Yet the geographic distance did not keep the shooting from feeling like a violation of her own home church. The narrative makes that connection through the purpose of terror: its effects are meant to extend beyond the people and place directly targeted. Austin’s response confirms that the violence crossed that distance.

Fear and Aftermath

While the shooter remained at large, Austin feared that he might attack another church, or that other white terrorists might be acting across Charleston or beyond it. Capture the next morning brought no immediate end to her fear; she worried that the shooting would inspire copycats. She resented the thought that, on returning to her own church, she might be afraid to sit with her back to the door. Resentment became anger and then defiance: she dressed, drove to a quiet church, and cried for the nine people killed, their families and friends, the survivors, and the congregation members whose lives would never be the same.

Narrative Significance

Charleston marks the point where historical memory becomes present-tense fear. The juxtaposition with Birmingham challenges the assumption that church attacks and the threat of racial terror are safely confined to an earlier era. The location matters not only as the scene of a massacre but as the origin of a wider consequence: a place Austin has never visited alters how safe she feels entering her own church.