When South Carolina Massacred Members of the Charleston Emanuel AME Church

[gollygee]

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/20/state-massacred-members-charleston-emanuel-ame-church/

A freed slave named Denmark Vesey was accused of plotting a slave revolt. State prosecutors charged that Vesey, along with other organizers, had used evening sermons at Emanuel AME to organize congregation members to rebel against their white masters.

(snip)

The news of Vesey’s alleged plot reverberated around the state and country. “Believing that ‘black religion’ had caused the uprising, South Carolina instituted a series of draconian measures against African American churches and communities, including a ban on services conducted without a white person present,” the Washington Post’s Sarah Kaplan recalled last week.

Contemporary news accounts in 1822 pointed to literacy as the problem. “Among the conspirators, the most daring and active was Monday, the slave of Mr. Gell. He could read and write with facility, and thus attained an extraordinary and dangerous influence over his fellows,” noted an account in the Daily National Intelligencer.

Though the church was rebuilt, the ban on black churches then forced it to close, with congregation members meeting only in secret even through Reconstruction. A new building did not go up until 1872 — only to fall during an earthquake in 1886. But the church rebuilt again, and survived the white supremacist paramilitaries of the “Red Shirts,” Jim Crow, and years of official and unofficial persecution. Indeed, it thrived and became a beacon for freedom.