Charleston Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church Shooting

The Charleston Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church Shooting makes racial terror newly immediate for Austin: an attack on a congregation she has never visited reaches across geography and into the safety she had associated with Black churches. The deaths awaken a fear she thought belonged to earlier generations, and expose the distance between America’s story of progress and the continuing vulnerability of Black life.

Historical Background and the Black Church

The attack arrives against a history in which Black churches have been both places of worship and targets of racial violence. Austin recalls learning about the four girls killed in the 1963 Birmingham Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing. That bombing followed closely after the March on Washington and took place amid the integration of Alabama schools; it was the third bombing in eleven days and the first to kill. As a teenager who loved church, Austin had wondered what it would mean to have been born into that earlier danger. The question had seemed safely historical.

For Austin, the church is not an abstract symbol. Her childhood Black church gave her an unusually strong sense of belonging: its worship joined music, preaching, community care, and a faith attentive to the poor, sick, and hurting. There she encountered a Jesus who cared about people’s material needs and Black lives, not only their souls. That history helps explain why an attack on a distant Black congregation can feel intimate. The church being targeted belongs to a tradition and a communal world she knows, even though she has never entered that particular building.

The Attack and Its Immediate Reach

One evening in June 2015, just as Austin was about to turn over and go to sleep, she saw a tweet from an MSNBC anchor reporting a shooting in a Black church. The short announcement was enough to make her heart sink. She judged that the chances the attack was not racially motivated seemed negligible, turned on the television, and watched as long as she could bear. A white supremacist had entered the Charleston church with a Glock 41 handgun and taken as many lives as he could. Austin understood the news not as an isolated report, but as the renewed violation of a place of worship: her beloved Church had been attacked again.

She had never set foot in Mother Emanuel, the congregation’s affectionate name for the church. She knew none of its members, and had not previously heard the name of its pastor or of those killed. Yet the absence of personal acquaintance did not lessen the felt injury. The attack’s intended terror extended beyond its immediate victims; Austin recognizes that fear traveling across the geographical distance between Charleston and her own church. The news changes what that distance means. A church can be unfamiliar as a location and still feel like home as part of a shared Black religious life.

Fear, Grief, and Defiance

Before the shooting, Austin had experienced Black churches as gracious and welcoming, filled with people eager to offer hugs and speak kindness. She had not carried the fear of church bombings or political assassinations that her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had known. She believed those dangers belonged to the past. The attack unsettles that inheritance: even on the night of the shooting, the assailant had received the church’s love, yet that welcome did not protect the congregation from his violence.

Her fear continues through the night while the shooter remains at large. She wonders whether he will attack another church, whether there will be more deaths, and whether he is acting alone or as part of a wider group of white terrorists. When she wakes and learns that he has been captured, the immediate uncertainty ends, but the fear does not. She worries about copycats and resents that the next time she enters her own church she may be afraid to sit with her back to the door. Capture cannot restore the sense of safety the attack has taken from her.

That resentment becomes anger, and anger becomes defiance. Austin gets dressed, drives to a quiet church, and cries. Her grief includes the nine people killed: Cynthia Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson. She mourns their family members and friends, the survivors who watched people they loved die, and congregation members whose lives will never be the same. Her response holds collective loss and personal vulnerability together; she cries for those directly affected and for herself, not out of self-pity, but because she had wanted to believe the country had become better than this.

The Event’s Meaning in Austin’s Narrative

The shooting makes the past present. Austin recalls Dr. Simms’s words, Ain’t no friends here, and recognizes how badly she had wanted to believe that some forms of violence had become unthinkable. She had spent the previous year writing about hatred of the Black body, yet still feels shocked and foolish for having underestimated White supremacy’s endurance and lethal force. The event turns historical knowledge into bodily fear: the danger is no longer safely contained in stories about earlier generations.

That realization also sharpens the book’s distinction between racial harmony and justice. A narrative of national progress cannot account for the persistence of racial violence if it treats history as finished or leaves the structures that sustain it unnamed. Austin argues elsewhere that telling an ordered account of Black and white America requires acknowledging the nation’s commitment to violent white supremacy and confronting its consequences. In the wake of the attack, the gap between a church’s welcome and a racist assailant’s violence makes that unresolved history impossible to dismiss as remote.

The event also clarifies why remembrance and dialogue alone are insufficient. Austin’s broader account of reconciliation insists that conversation must lead to action, alter the distribution of power, and pursue justice for those most marginalized. The shooting is not presented as something that can be repaired by expressions of sympathy or by the reassurance that racial progress has already occurred. Its consequences include a lasting fear of entering church, mourning for a congregation she did not personally know, and a renewed recognition that Black communities continue to bear dangers others may mistake for past history.