Charleston church shooting is one more incident in pattern of racist sin in America, SBC leaders say

For many, the massacre at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, is simply another mass shooting. But for African-Americans, church violence has historic dimensions.

The attack June 17 at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church reflects “a pattern of random, racialized violence against religious institutions,” said Valerie Cooper, associate professor of black church studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Here are some examples of black church violence over the years:

• The Charleston church was torched centuries ago. It burned in the 1800s during a controversy surrounding Denmark Vesey, one of the church’s organizers, who led a major slave rebellion.
• Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, was bombed in 1963. Four girls who were in the church perished. 
• Martin Luther King Jr.’s mother was killed in church. Alberta Williams King died June 30, 1974, just after playing “The Lord’s Prayer” on the organ at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. Her son was assassinated six years earlier.
• More than 70 black churches in the South were burned, firebombed or vandalized between January 1990 and April 1996. 
• Hours after the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, Macedonia Church of God in Christ, Springfield, Massachusetts, burned. Two of the three co-defendants admitted they burned the church to denounce the election of the nation’s first black president.

‘This must end’

According to a statement released by several Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leaders after the recent Charleston shooting, “virtually every week we see yet another incident pointing to the sin of racism in American society, from unarmed African-American men and children killed in the streets to worshippers gunned down in their pews. This must end. And the church of Jesus Christ must lead the way.”

The statement — released by SBC President Ronnie Floyd; Philadelphia pastor K. Marshall Williams, president of SBC’s National African American Fellowship (NAAF); California pastor A.B. Vines, NAAF’s immediate past president; and Russell Moore, president of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission — expressed solidarity with “our brothers and sisters in Christ” at the Charleston church.

“The brutal massacre of those in prayer at Emanuel … should shock the conscience of every person,” the statement read.

(RNS, BP)