Many have preached politics from this pulpit, but Biden is the first president
Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, the oldest AME church in the South, will forever be associated with former President Barack Obama for his memorable – and melodious – eulogy for the nine victims of a racist massacre at the fellowship hall in June 2015.
But it is Joseph R. Biden Jr. who will become the first sitting president to speak at the storied church when he delivers a campaign speech there Monday on the threats to American democracy, including those posed by politics and fueled by hate violence.
Mr. Obama made his contemplative remarks about race and wagged his way through “Amazing Grace,” not on the Calhoun Street property the city bought in 1865, but around the corner from a college arena. Now Mr. Biden will speak as president in the creaking old shrine itself, supported by towering stained glass a floor above the scene of the massacre, a setting that conveys a mosaic of messages as he tries to revive his African-American base to blow in. .
Mr. Biden is far from the first to make a political case from the pulpit of Emanuel. His predecessors include Booker T. Washington in 1909, W. E. B. Du Bois in 1922, and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1962.
The church’s founding pastor, the Rev. Richard Harvey Cain, used it as a springboard to Congress during Reconstruction. Civil rights-era preacher Rev. Benjamin J. Glover simultaneously led the local NAACP and organized anti-discrimination marches from the steps. The Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, the pastor who welcomed 21-year-old Dylann Roof to Bible study and was first shot by him, was also a long-serving state senator, the youngest African American to serve in the Legislature South Carolina was chosen.
The Biden campaign’s choice of Emanuel is intended to show common cause with Black voters, who polls show have lost some degree of enthusiasm for the president. South Carolina, where African Americans make up about 60 percent of the Democratic electorate, will host the party’s first primary on Feb. 3.
Before the 2015 shootings, Emanuel exemplified two centuries of black resistance against slavery, oppression and discrimination. Its long history highlights the essential role the Black Church played in freedom movements in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The congregation began forming in 1817 in the commercial heart of the slave trade, following a daring escape by free and enslaved black people from white-controlled churches. The first house on Charleston’s East Side was destroyed in 1822 by city officials after they concluded that a thwarted slave revolt had taken place within the “African Church.” The accused leader, a free black carpenter named Denmark Vesey, was hanged along with 34 others, many of them church members.
The congregation was re-established as Emanuel immediately after the Civil War, when AME missionaries followed Union troops into bombed Charleston. It soon spawned other churches throughout the Low Country, earning the nickname ‘Mother Emanuel’.
After the murderous action of Mr. Roof — who is on death row in a federal prison — Emanuel evolved into a different kind of symbol: of the persistence of racist violence in a post-civil rights era. And when family members of five of the victims showed up at Mr. Roof’s sentencing hearing and expressed forgiveness for the unrepentant white supremacist, the church began to embody their breathtaking expression of Christian grace.
Those families and survivors of the shootings have been invited to visit Mr. Biden at the sanctuary after the speech. He is also expected to meet ministers at the fellowship hall, which is little changed from the night of the attack.
Focusing his speech on Mother Emanuel, Mr. Biden emphasizes “that there is still work to be done, a reminder that even though we are in the 21st century, we still have some 19th century ghosts in America,” Pastor Joseph said. A. Darby, a prominent AME minister in Charleston and longtime Biden supporter.
Like many Americans, Biden was deeply affected by the events of June 2015. Seventeen days before the shooting, he had lost his eldest son, Beau, to brain cancer. As vice president, he and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, attended the memorial service where the Obama eulogy was delivered. They happened to be vacationing nearby on Kiawah Island, and Mr. Biden returned to Charleston two days later to worship with Emanuel congregants.
He made it clear that his own grief had merged with theirs. He had come to show the government’s solidarity, he said, but also “to draw some strength from all of you.”
Mr. Biden recounted that experience at a key moment in the 2020 campaign, shortly before the crucial South Carolina primary, in a poignant television exchange with Rev. Anthony Thompson, the widower of one of the Emanuel victims. He characterized the forgiveness expressed by Mr. Thompson and others as “the ultimate act of Christian charity.”
Biden’s victory in South Carolina, which was largely driven by black voters, righted his election campaign after losses in previous elections. Although he didn’t visit Emanuel during that race, eight of his Democratic challengers did.
Emanuel has become totemic in debates about combating hate crimes and gun violence, with the Rev. Eric SC Manning and the survivors of the attacks playing prominent roles. One of those five survivors, 79-year-old Polly Sheppard, said of Mr. Biden’s visit that “it is an honor that the victims and survivors are remembered by the president and people across the country.”
More than eight years after Emanuel was thrust into the unwanted spotlight, the community is still recovering. Church leaders now juggle weddings and funerals with the burdens of running what has become an international shrine. Tour buses arrive during the week; Some Sundays there are almost more visitors, many of them white, in the pews.
The congregation, already shrinking thanks to an aging membership and the gentrification of downtown Charleston, has just 576 members, down from more than 2,000 in the 1950s. The Covid pandemic turned many into Sunday morning streamers. A quarter of the approximately 100 worshipers at the service this week were visitors.
Pastor Manning has led a multi-year effort to raise millions to repair severe termite damage in the trusses and perform other renovation work. The first phase, completed last year, made it safe to reoccupy the choir loft but left the church $870,000 in debt. In addition, a foundation has raised $25 million to build a memorial for the victims of the Emanuel shooting, designed by architect Michael Arad, best known for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York. Ground was recently broken in the church parking lot.
The monument’s purpose and Mother Emanuel’s story align with Mr. Biden’s political message, said Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, an AME member whose district includes the church.
“The act of violent extremism that took the lives of nine innocent worshipers of Mother Emanuel AME Church could have torn this community and the country apart,” Mr. Clyburn said. “Instead, the victims and affected families brought the Charleston community together in a moment of darkness and responded with hope and resilience. Lessons can be learned from the tragedy that occurred on this sacred ground.”