Mother Emanuel is a sacred shrine of the Black Liberation Movement and at this moment is the site of a racist massacre of Black people. This is so much more than
symbolic for in the deranged and delusional minds of racists the struggles of Black people for freedom can be abolished by murder and terror. While fear and terror are the ancient tools of the oppressor they have never been proven to be more powerful than the struggle for freedom.
The Freedom Movement is agitated into existence by oppression, by the thousands of wrongs and injustices heaped upon us daily, until we arrive at that turning point where we are fired up and can't take it no more. Then the struggle starts up again as open rebellion and no one individual or government entity can stop it.
Every time we have rebelled throughout our history we have been met by white, racist resistance designed to frighten and terrorize us back into submission. In the wake of the Denmark Vesey Rebellion of 1822 Emanuel African Methodist
Episcopal Church was burned to the ground, and was later shuttered by the slave
holding City of Charleston in 1834. Mother Emanuel A.M.E. was reorganized in 1865 in a new building designed by Denmark Vesey's son, Robert Vesey. The timing of this current massacre coincides with the anniversary of the Rebellion of 1822 led by Vesey. The clock of history never turns back. Freedom is a constant struggle.
Today is no different. Maybe the individual who perpetrated this massacre is not part of an organized racist hate group, but it doesn't matter since his actions are
consistent with the gang of cops who lynch-murdered Eric Garner, and the Chicago cop Dante Servin who shot into a group of Black people and murdered Rekia Boyd. A government, which allows cops to murder Black people with impunity, cannot escape accountability by apologizing and being in hot pursuit of one racist murderer when you have let Darren Wilson, and other racist murderers, go free because they carried a badge.
If there ever was a clarion call from our history for us to rise up and demand that this Government and this Nation, cease and desist in all its institutionalized racism and genocidal policies against our people, this is it.