Generation Emanuel: Meet The Black Lawmakers Whose Careers Were Ignited By The Charleston Shooting 

Reverend Clementa Pinckney knew the Bible from back to front. But according to a close spiritual colleague, one of Pinckney’s most treasured passages was the “Parable of the Sower.” The scripture tells the story of a teaching Jesus Christ delivered from a boat in the Sea of Galilee where he spoke of a man who scattered seeds along the ground. Some fell on rocks or among thorns where they failed to take root. 

“But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it,” Jesus said, according to scripture. “This is the one who produces a crop, yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.”

That story of a positive foundation giving birth to new life and growth would play a fateful and tragic part in a hate crime that took place 10 years ago this week. Pinckney was holding a Bible study session on the verse for his congregation at the historic Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015 when a white supremacist opened fire, leaving the reverend and eight others dead. 

Pinckney and the congregants had welcomed their killer into their midst to read the parable and pray with them. Yet these words represent more than the final text contemplated by those who lost their lives that day. Its core teaching of “good soil” yielding a continuous bounty proved to be a prophetic metaphor for the living legacy of the people who passed away at the church, which includes four Black men with a personal connection to the shooting who now serve as elected leaders in their communities.

“Without that tragedy, I would have never ran for office,” recounted JA Moore, who lost his sister in the shooting and now represents a state legislative district that includes North Charleston. “Without that tragedy, I would’ve never done a lot of things that I’ve done. It’s my compass. It’s my guiding light. It’s everything that I am.” 

Moore organized a commemoration for the tenth anniversary of the shooting that will take place Monday night at the Charleston Visitors Center. He will be joined by the men he calls his “pain partners,” three other lawmakers who have deep ties to the people who were lost that day; Charleston county council chairman Rev. Kylon Middleton, South Carolina state representative Hamilton Grant, and Malcolm Graham, a member of the city council in Charlotte, North Carolina. Ahead of the anniversary observances, they all spoke to TPM about how their careers were inspired and driven by that moment of unimaginable loss. 

On the night of the shooting, Moore had just landed a new job and was preparing for a big event the next day. He had to get to bed early. Moore recalled seeing a news flash about an incident downtown as he went to sleep. On the drive to work the next morning, Moore turned on his phone to find a flood of messages. 

“I remember just stopping the car,” Moore said. “Just stopping in complete shock.”

Moore comes from a large family. He is one of thirteen siblings, but he describes his late sister, Myra Thompson, as “a gem” among them. 

“She had what I have described as relentless love, you know? Love that won’t quit. … She wouldn’t let you not be in her life and not love her back because her love was so strong and relentless and enduring,” said Moore. “She would call you once or twice, and by that third or fourth time, if you didn’t respond to her call, she was showing up to your house, or your job, or wherever you were.”

The sprawling group of brothers and sisters had never gathered together in one place. Thompson, a decorated teacher who was leading the fateful Bible study after being re-licensed to preach earlier that same day, had made it her mission to unite them. It’s a goal she accomplished in death. 

“What was sad is that the first time all of my dad’s kids had gotten together was at her funeral, unfortunately,” Moore explained. 

‘I Felt This Obligation To Do Something’

Thompson’s passing also led Moore, who had previously worked with the local Democratic Party and activist organizations, to run for office for the first time. He was elected to South Carolina’s House of Representatives in 2018.

“I kind of harken it to, like, this burden of strength: a lot of times survivors have to become strong and become leaders,” said Moore. “It was almost immediate … I don’t even know how or why it happened, but immediately, other family members and the community kind of looked to me in a lot of ways. And I felt this obligation to do something.”

None of Rev. Kylon Middleton’s close relatives were killed in the shooting. Instead, the man who would go on to lead the Charleston County Council lost a spiritual sibling in Clementa Pinckney. The pair knew each other as children and rose through the ranks of the African Methodist Episcopal Church together. Middleton is the pastor of Charleston’s Mount Zion Church, which is known as Mother Emanuel’s “daughter” church. It was founded in the late 19th Century by worshippers from the parent congregation who were concerned that their growing flock needed more space. Like their churches, Pinckney and Middleton also considered themselves family. 

“We were like brothers,” Middleton said.

Mother Emanuel occupies a central place in Charleston. It is one of the oldest Black churches in the South. The sacred space has survived natural disasters and an effort to burn it down due its links with an attempted slave revolt.

Pinckney, who, in 1996, became the youngest African American elected to South Carolina’s legislature, similarly loomed over the city. At the time of his death, he was a state senator with a district that included southern parts of Charleston and a growing national profile. 

“He definitely was a voice,” Middleton said. “He was a large person in stature, but he was large in life.”

Like Moore, Middleton found himself propelled into politics following the tragedy at Mother Emanuel.

“I immediately started advocating, which I never really did prior to the shooting, for gun reform and for sensible gun laws,” Middleton said.

This led to more “community organizing” and, in 2020, Middleton was elected to the Charleston County Council as the first Black person to hold his seat. While there is a Republican majority, Middleton, who is a Democrat, was elected chairman earlier this year in what was seen as a notable shift. Politics is something Middleton said Pinckney envisioned for him. 

“He always wanted me to run for office,” Middleton recalled. 

Hamilton Grant, a Democratic state representative, married into the cadre of South Carolina lawmakers who were marked by the shooting. 

“My wife is the granddaughter of Reverend Daniel Simmons Sr., who was the only person who did not die in the church,” Grant explained. “He passed away in surgery.” 

Grant met his wife, Alana, in the aftermath of the tragedy. Along with other members of his fraternity, Omega Psi Phi, he organized an effort to distribute water at the vigils and demonstrations that were taking place around the church. Alana was also playing a prominent role in the events with a campaign inspired by her grandfather’s values. Grant explained that Simmons “lived in love.” 

“He preached love and this legacy of ‘be love, so hate won’t win’ and she started ‘The Hate Won’t Win’ movement,” Grant said of Alana and her grandfather. 

As Grant got to know Alana and became part of her family, he had an up close view of the fallout from the shooting. It helped inspire his political career and he was elected to the statehouse last year after mounting an unsuccessful bid for Richland County Council in 2019. 

“I was there for the closing arguments of the trial with my wife. I was there when death threats got called into a family member,” Grant said. “These are things that should not happen to people based off of their skin color, … who they love, how they love … who they worship. And so, that has always been a driving force.”

Malcolm Graham, a Democrat on the city council in Charlotte, North Carolina, has a political career that predated the shooting. He previously served on the council from 1999 until 2005 and was a member of the state Senate from 2005 until 2015. Graham said he was always focused on “leveling the playing field” as someone who represented majority minority districts. However, his focus sharpened after he lost his sister, Cynthia Graham Hurd, at Mother Emanuel.

“Since that day, 10 years ago, it’s been about really trying to be her voice, standing up for her, and making sure that everyone knows that she was more than a victim.” Graham said. 

Cynthia was a librarian who, according to Graham, “became the matriarch of the family” after their parents passed away.

“We have a debt to pay for Cynthia and eight others who we lost, to make sure that their death is not in vain,” Graham said.

Fighting Systems That Are ‘Killing Black And Brown People Every Day’

All four of the lawmakers who were touched and driven by the shooting said the main effect it had on their work was adding what both Graham and Middleton described as “urgency.” Moore said his desire to address issues of racism and inequality was amplified by the loss of his sister and the realization the core issues of the civil rights era remain unresolved. 

“We’ve experienced it firsthand, right? We understand that this is just as dangerous as it was then. We have loved ones that made the ultimate sacrifice for this,” Moore said. “We’ve lived through what racial hate looks like, and what white supremacist mentality looks and sounds like. We’ve seen it.” 

Both Grant and Graham also noted that, after living through history, they are disturbed by President Trump’s anti “DEI” push to eliminate materials focused on the Black experience from schools and universities.

“If I don’t do what I need to do and get other members to see things, how I see it, there’s a very real possibility that that history will be either whitewashed or completely erased from our history books,” Grant said. “There’s a very real threat that, when my children become grade-school age, they will never hear about the massacre that took their great-grandfather.” 

The legislators are focused on other issues that have an obvious connection to their own experience, including gun violence and hate crimes. However, they all also pointed to other policy areas like economic opportunity, health care, affordability, and even transportation infrastructure as more insidious manifestations of inequality that they are eager to take on. 

Like Moore, Graham invoked the civil rights era as he spoke on the impact of Charleston and how it made him want to fight “systems that in a way are killing black and brown people every day.”

“As Dr. King said when he gave the eulogy at the 16th Street Baptist Church when four little girls were killed in a bombing in Birmingham by Klansmen, he … paid less attention to the killer and more attention to the system that produced the killer,” Graham explained. 

Indeed, in that 1963 eulogy for the four little girls who died in that Alabama church, Martin Luther King Jr. declared, “we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers.” King, who noted the children “died between the sacred walls of the church of God,” also touched on the theme of the Parable of the Sower and the idea that, even among scorched earth and unimaginable evil, something good might grow from those seeds firmly planted in love. 

“The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as a redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city,” King said. 

As the survivors of Charleston attempt to help the legacies of their loved ones take root, they face some hard realities. In South Carolina, most Black voters are Democrats, but the party is a small minority in the legislature. That has made it difficult to achieve some changes that might seem like a natural response to the killings at Mother Emanuel. The loophole that allowed the shooter, Dylann Roof, to purchase his gun still remains open and South Carolina is one of only two states left in the country without a hate crimes law. 

For Grant, this lack of progress in the statehouse — where a black cloth was draped over the chair where Pinckney once sat — is frustrating, particularly when coupled with platitudes from Republican colleagues. 

“It’s still, 10 years later, just a slap in the face by this state that JA and I walk in the chambers and see the chambers across the hall where a sitting senator once was every day to hear, ‘Oh, I’m praying for you and your family,’” Grant said. “But yet those prayers are not met with action, with legislation. It’s a slap in the face.”

Graham described the four lawmakers who were marked by Mother Emanuel as “keeping the faith” over the long haul. 

“We’re all in the fight together,” he said. “We all are strong believers and have great faith, but we also know that there’s work to be done, and each in our own separate ways, we’re doing the work.”

‘Forgiving Is Not Forgetting’

The history of the city of Charleston and of Mother Emanuel both provide vivid examples of how long the struggle against racism has gone on in the South. The African Methodist Episcopal Church was founded in the 1800s by recently freed slaves who had been discriminated against at the pulpit in mainline protestant churches.

“The church was born, the AME church, out of liberation,” Middleton, the Charleston county council chairman, said. “It is a justice-seeking denomination. It is a church that is born up out of protest.”

Mother Emanuel stands on ground that represents both ends of the struggle for equality. It is located on a street named for John Calhoun, who was America’s seventh vice president and one of the most infamous defenders of slavery. The underground railroad ran through the corridors of both Mother Emanuel and Middleton’s church, Mount Zion. In more recent history, civil rights leaders, including Booker T. Washington and Dr. King, spoke from the pulpit. And, in the final weeks of his life, Pinckney campaigned vigorously for Charleston police to adopt body cameras following the killing of an unarmed Black man, Walter Scott, who was shot in the back following a traffic stop. 

While Mother Emanuel evokes the South’s long history of racism and protest, Dylann Roof, the shooter who targeted the church is emblematic of the more modern face of racism, with digital radicalization, online manifestos, and reverence for Africa’s apartheid era. Subsequent mass shootings in New Zealand and Buffalo, New York are believed to have been inspired by his murders. 

“These are troubling times. The issue of racism is not dog whistles anymore, right? It’s right in front of our face. It’s in our public policy,” Graham, the Charlotte city council member, said. “So, the urgency of now is that we have to remind people what happened 10 years ago in Charleston, remind them further that, six years after Charleston, Buffalo occurred, and 10 years after Charleston … there’s a guy that wants to make America great again, which means going back to the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s in his opinion. Those times weren’t great for me and people that look like me.”

Roof’s dark legacy includes legal action that has stretched up to the present day as he and his attorneys have sought to vacate his federal death penalty conviction. While Roof has remained unrepentant, the ongoing legal action has included moments where family members of those Roof killed have suggested they forgive him. That issue and terminology has proven divisive among others touched by the tragedy. 

While he has stressed that those personally affected should be allowed their own reactions, Graham has criticized what he called a “race to forgiveness” on the broader public level. It’s worth wondering why there has been so much coverage and attention on whether these Black families “forgive” in a world where white America has not necessarily reckoned with its Calhouns and Roofs. Yet discussing this question with the political leaders who were most closely affected by Charleston sheds light on forgiveness in this context. 

Each offered a nuanced view of their own reaction that stressed taking the focus off of Roof. 

Grant, one of the two South Carolina state representatives in the group, said his wife is one of the family members who has said she forgives the shooter. He offered his own explanation for what that means. 

“Forgiveness is spiritual through our lens. … I’m not forgiving the actual person. … you are making the opportunity to really start the healing process,” Grant said. “Unless you can forgive the action or forgive yourself, then you really hold on and harbor feelings and emotions that will block the pathway to healing.” Grant also stressed that “forgiving is not forgetting.”

“I can forgive you for a wrongdoing and have nothing to do with you and not like you and not want anything to do with you in the future, but I forgive you for the action,” he explained. “That allows the space for God to essentially do the healing work.”

For their part, while they specifically turned away from the terminology of forgiveness, both Moore and Graham said they were focused on healing and going beyond Roof.

“I would still say, ‘Fuck you for ruining my fucking life and killing my sister.’ … I don’t forgive him, but I’ve moved on,” Moore, the other South Carolina state representative, said. “I don’t hold that. … I’ve released all of that, but I don’t forgive him for what he did. It’s unforgivable.”

Graham said, despite not forgiving Roof for killing his sister and for “trying to kill a race of people,” he does not “walk around with hate in my heart.”

“I didn’t forgive 10 years ago and I don’t forgive today,” said Graham. “I’m not gonna forgive someone who didn’t ask for it. At that time and even to this day, I don’t think about him.”

Middleton similarly said his approach is not to “hold space for hatred” of Roof.

“I have released him to the universe,” Middleton explained. 

For Graham, part of what’s important is to remember his sister, the eight other people who were murdered, and the others who were hurt. 

“My focus is not on him. It’s on who we lost, who we loved, and the impact those individuals made,” said Graham. “So, I could give a damn about Dylann Roof.”

‘We Don’t Let Them Die’

The legacies of those lost at Mother Emanuel include multiple foundations, a library named for Graham’s sister, as well as a spate of books and movies about the deceased. And, years after Pinckney’s push, all of Charleston’s uniformed police officers are wearing body cameras. Of course, their legacies also include the four leaders whose work they inspired. According to Graham, for them, the shooting “energized everything.” 

“It was a call to action, that we couldn’t play, dream, or drift,” Graham said. “We had hard work to do and heavy loads to lift,”

Middleton said the shooting “ignited a movement” and provided living proof of the lessons from Pinckney’s beloved Parable of the Sower. 

“Again, that same topic from the Bible study: When you plant the seed in the ground, the seed dies. Yes, but then, it begins to germinate and grow. Now, some of those seeds are going to be, you know, tossed among thorns, and they’re going to be choked to death and die. And then, some will just fall on dry ground and then somehow that will be scorched by the sun,” Middleton said. “But there are those seeds, and these nine — specifically Pinckney — have been planted in good soil so the life that continues to come. You’re talking about the four of us, but even beyond the four of us, there are so many others, who have been ignited.”

Ten years after death and hate came to Mother Emanuel, the solid roots of the church continue to bring forth defiant bursts of new life and love.  

“What was intended for evil, you know, as we say, God turned it around. And, certainly, I would love for all of them to live and be here. The beautiful thing is that they still live through all of these things that we continue to do,” said Middleton. “We don’t let them die. We’re calling their names. We’re remembering their sacrifice. We’re honoring their legacies.”