Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Mother Emanuel, traces its founding to 1817, when Black members left Charleston's white controlled Methodist congregation to worship independently, joining the denomination Richard Allen had founded in Philadelphia the year before. Among its founders was Denmark Vesey, a formerly enslaved man who had purchased his own freedom, and the congregation grew quickly into one of the largest Black churches in the South.
That early growth ended abruptly in 1822, when Vesey was implicated in a planned uprising against Charleston's slaveholding class, an insurrection that never took place but whose discovery led to Vesey's execution along with dozens of others. City authorities held the church partly responsible, burned its building to the ground, and banned independent Black congregations in Charleston until after the Civil War ended slavery in the state. Its current sanctuary, completed in 1891 after an earlier building was damaged by an earthquake, has served it since.
The church's name entered public consciousness again, far more painfully, on June 17, 2015, when a white supremacist gunman who had sat through nearly an hour of a Bible study opened fire, killing nine members including the senior pastor, State Senator Clementa Pinckney. The attack drew national attention to the Confederate symbols the shooter had embraced, prompting South Carolina to remove the Confederate flag from its statehouse grounds weeks later.
The congregation kept worshipping in its sanctuary afterward, and the grounds now hold a memorial to the nine killed, an addition to a building whose history already ran from a founder executed for planning an uprising to a congregation that kept reconstituting itself through every attempt to suppress it.