Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church

Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, affectionately known as Mother Emanuel, is a Charleston church whose importance in Austin’s narrative comes into focus through the 2015 shooting there. She had never set foot inside, did not know its members, and had not heard the name of its pastor. Yet news of the attack made the church feel like her own: the violence crossed the distance between a specific congregation and the wider community of Black churchgoers, turning a place she had never seen into a site of intimate grief and fear.

The Church and Its Place in Austin’s Imagination

Before the shooting, Austin understood Black churches as places of welcome. Her childhood experience of church had given her a deep sense of belonging: worship joined music, preaching, care for people in hardship, and a community that treated its members as family. That history did not mean she knew Mother Emanuel personally. On the contrary, she stresses that she had never visited it and knew neither the congregation nor its pastor. The connection was not based on acquaintance or travel, but on the church’s place within a wider world of Black religious life.

The shooting therefore changed what a church could mean to her. Black churches had been gracious and hospitable in her experience, places where people offered hugs and spoke goodness into one another’s lives. She had not entered them expecting bombings or political assassinations; such dangers belonged, she thought, to the fears carried by her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Mother Emanuel’s attack unsettled that sense of historical distance. What she had regarded as past terror became a present possibility attached to the act of walking into a Black church.

The Shooting and the Collapse of Distance

One evening in June 2015, as Austin was about to go to sleep, she saw a tweet from an MSNBC anchor announcing a shooting at a Black church. She turned on the television and watched until the coverage became too much to bear. A white supremacist had entered Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church with a Glock 41 handgun and killed people there. The news made her heart sink: she felt that the chance the attack was not racially motivated was nearly nonexistent.

Austin had no personal connection to the victims, but that absence did not make the violence remote. She understood terror as an attempt to spread fear beyond the people directly targeted, and recognized that it had reached her. Mother Emanuel became the particular place through which that wider threat became immediate. The attack made her imagine danger at her own church, despite the two congregations being geographically separate and despite her never having visited the Charleston church.

Fear Beyond the Congregation

Austin’s fear lasted through the night while the shooter remained at large. She wondered whether he might go to another church, whether more people would die, and whether others had spread out across Charleston or the country. News the next morning that he had been captured did not end the fear. She worried about copycat attacks and resented the thought that, on her next visit to her own church, she might be afraid to sit with her back to the door. The attack had changed the feeling attached to an ordinary act of worship: entering a church could now involve calculating the possibility of violence.

That resentment turned into anger, and anger into defiance. Austin got dressed, drove to a quiet church, and cried. She mourned Cynthia Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson; she also grieved for their loved ones, the survivors who had watched people they loved die, and the congregation members whose lives would never be the same. Her mourning reached beyond the named dead to everyone whose connection to the church had been altered by the attack.

Narrative Significance and Aftermath

Austin’s grief also carried disappointment in the country. Despite what she had witnessed and written about the danger facing Black people, she had still wanted to believe that America had improved enough for some forms of violence to be unthinkable. The attack at Mother Emanuel shattered that expectation. She recalls Dr. Simms’s warning that there were no real friends here, and recognizes that she had underestimated the continuing power and lethal imagination of White supremacy. The church’s significance in her account lies partly in this reversal: a place she had never entered made clear that the security she associated with Black worship could not be taken for granted.

The shooting’s repercussions also entered Austin’s later encounters with white audiences. A few months afterward, she spoke at a predominantly white conference in South Carolina while the murders at Mother Emanuel remained on the attendees’ minds. Her talk was warmly received, but the confessions that followed placed the burden of white people’s stories about racism on Black women listeners, including Austin. The conference did not take place at the church, and she does not suggest that its participants belonged to the congregation. Rather, the attack had become part of the public context in which white people sought relief from guilt and Black people were left carrying the emotional weight. In Austin’s narrative, Mother Emanuel stands both for a congregation attacked in its own place of worship and for the fear, grief, and racial responsibility the violence sent far beyond Charleston.