Fatal hate yrs. after MLK visit
More than a half-century after Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the church known as Mother Emanuel on Calhoun St. in Charleston, there was a shooting at that church on Wednesday night that was the same as a lynching, just with a gun this time because guns always do the job faster and quicker, even when you have to keep reloading the way Dylann Storm Roof did.
If movie theaters aren’t safe from guns in this country, if first-graders aren’t safe in Newtown, there is no reason to think that a prayer service at a proud, historic church would be safe, either.
You know where the most dangerous and violent place in America was on Wednesday night? A church with a gun in it, Charleston, S.C.
This time it is nine innocent people slaughtered in a church where Dr. King once preached. Now the pastor of Emanuel Methodist Episcopal, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney is one of those killed when this Roof starts firing away at every black face in front of him.
Sometimes it is hate plus a gun. Sometimes it is madness plus a gun. Sometimes it is racism plus a gun. On Calhoun St. it was all three. Always, though, the real common denominator is the gun. Dr. King found that out himself six years after he spoke from the pulpit at Mother Emanuel about his dreams. Now a nightmare in the same church makes you think he dreamed in vain and later died in vain.
The year before he died, he came back to Charleston to speak at County Hall. On the podium that day was Rep. James Clyburn, who still serves his country out of the 6th Congressional District in South Carolina, even though there were rumors of violence, and assassination. A former civil rights leader from that city, Septima Clark, once said, “Many black leaders made it a point to be out of town that day.”
While King spoke, someone threw a light bulb from the balcony. When it landed on the floor, people thought they had heard a gunshot. Dr. King kept right on speaking, not so long before a gunshot in Memphis would make him another victim of guns and hate in what we keep telling ourselves is the most civilized country on Earth; a country where churches aren’t safe, and schools aren’t safe, and a man now stands trial in Colorado because a movie theater in Aurora wasn’t safe.
The shooter was James Holmes in Aurora, Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary. Now Dylann Storm Roof is the one who shoots up a prayer service and keeps shooting until nine are gone.
It is not even three years since Lanza walked through the front door of Sandy Hook Elementary. According to Everytown for Gun Safety, there have been 126 school shootings in this country since then, and 24 shootings at churches. These are numbers that continue to shame us in front of the rest of the world, even as nothing ever changes, even as politicians up to the President look us in the eye and lie about change.
“We either live together as brothers or die as fools,” Dr. King said in the last speech he ever gave in Charleston, S.C.
Now people die in a place of worship because a fool with a gun wants to be famous, even sparing one woman’s life inside Mother Emanuel so the woman could go out and tell the world that he was killing blacks to make America a better place for whites. Once they wore sheets in the South to do what Roof did. He just wore a gray sweatshirt to hide his gun. Where did he get the gun? We know his father, clearly a genius, gave him a .45 as a birthday present, because why not give a gun to your squirrely 21-year-old son? But if he didn’t own one he would have gotten one because anybody can get a gun in America, all in the name of the Second Amendment.
“I’m not going to hate because I’ve seen too much hate,” King said in the ’60s in Charleston.
Fifty-three years ago, he spoke at the same church where Dylann Storm Roof pulled out a gun after waiting through an hour of prayer and started shooting. So it is another church this time, a church in Charleston that for one day in the 1960s was Martin Luther King’s church, a church that now becomes the latest capital of guns and hate and madness in America.