Around the same time a trio of pro-Palestinian protesters were escorted out of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on Monday afternoon for interrupting President Joe Biden’s speech to parishioners, I was in Columbia, listening to state senators Shane Massey and Brad Hutto argue about South Carolina’s not having a hate crime statute, even now. Hutto, who is for a hate crime statute, said not having one, as 48 other states do, “hurts our industrial recruitment” and discourages tourism. Massey said such legislation is unnecessary because people are already being sufficiently punished without specific hate crime legislation.
For better and for worse, South Carolina has long been a cradle of protest.
The coincidence of Biden’s being interrupted in the church where white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine Black people at Bible study as South Carolina lawmakers were debating whether the state needs hate crime legislation was profound. For better and for worse, South Carolina has long been a cradle of protest. The state government grounds are a monument to the Confederacy and white supremacy, honoring names such as John C. Calhoun, Wade Hampton and segregationist Strom Thurmond, the late U.S. senator whom Joe Biden eulogized in 2003.
By contrast, as the history on its website proudly proclaims, the African Methodist Episcopal denomination is the result of a protest from Black Methodists who weren’t being treated equally by white congregants. Denmark Vesey, a freedman, joined the AME church in 1817 and planned a slave rebellion in 1822 at Mother Emanuel. Vesey was executed by hanging, and the church where he plotted the attack was burned to the ground.
What’s more appropriate, then, in the sanctuary of Emanuel AME? The head of the government making a campaign speech or people yelling out for the freedom of people who are being oppressed? “The truth is under assault in America,” Biden said during his campaign stop at the church….
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