It was September 15, 1963, a normal Sunday morning at 16th Street Baptist in Birmingham, Alabama. Four young girls — Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair — were in the basement assembly room changing into their choir robes. The sermon for the day was titled “A Love That Forgives.”
Then an explosion ripped through the church, injuring 22 and killing the four little choir girls, the youngest of whom, Denise McNair, was just 11 years old.
Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair: Their names have been etched in my memory since childhood. I learned them with the books of the Bible. The way a student in Catholic school can recite the saints and Christian martyrs, I memorized their names: the martyrs of civil rights.
Jimmie Lee Jackson, shot by a state trooper, died February 26, 1965, in Marion, Alabama; Medgar Evers was killed June 12, 1963, in Jackson, Mississippi; Emmett Till was killed August 28, 1955, in Money, Mississippi; Samuel Hammond, Henry Smith and Delano Middleton died February 8, 1968, in Orangeburg, South Carolina; Martin Luther King Jr., was killed April 4, 1968, in Memphis; the list goes on and on.
Now we add nine names.
You see, the inescapable truth is that the Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, the Rev. Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, the Rev. Daniel L. Simmons Sr., Myra Thompson and the Honorable Sen. Clementa C. Pinckney were gunned down not for politics, revenge or even money. They weren’t caught in a crossfire, in the wrong place in the wrong time. They were targeted for their race. Just like Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair, they were killed because they were black.
It’s as undeniable as the killer’s own words: “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country.” It’s something out of a bad movie. It forces us to confront the inescapable reality of racial division facing our nation. Staring at that gaping wound, we dare not turn away, because this conversation, as uncomfortable as it makes us, is long overdue.
Right now in America, homicide is the leading cause of death for black males between 15 to 34 while, in South Carolina, blacks make up just over a quarter of the total population but roughly 65% of the prison population.
Infant mortality rates are roughly twice as high for black children in South Carolina as they are for whites, and a child has better odds being born in Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Botswana or Cuba than being born black in my state. Nearly every statistic you can look at — from health care to education to annual income and unemployment — the disparities between black and white are striking.
We dare not look away from these things, because if we do, then nothing will ever change.
It is yet to be seen what the long-term impact of the Mother Emanuel massacre will be for our state and nation. It’s yet to be seen whether the congregants’ martyrdom will be something more than a footnote to history, more names on the wall. But for the first time in a long time, we are looking at the issue head-on and as a people — black and white, young and old, rich and poor, men and women — together.
The problem is right there in front of us. Now, what are we going to do about it?