CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) – The bullet holes in the fellowship hall at Emanuel AME church have been patched, but the holes in the fabric of life in Charleston remain.
Sharonda Coleman-Singleton is absent from Goose Creek High School, her exhortations still ringing in the ears of girls who ran track for her. At the library, there’s no one to give just the right guidance, to find the right book, as Cynthia Hurd did. The strong voice of Emanuel’s pastor-legislator, Clementa Pinckney, does not resound, here or at the capitol in Columbia.
Dylann Roof, killer of these worshippers and six others at one of the South’s first African-American churches, is headed to death row after an agonizing and therapeutic trial. But if justice has been served, the community has not moved on; the shots that rang out on June 17, 2015, still resonate.
They are amplified by the unfinished case of a white North Charleston police officer charged with murder in the death of a black driver. Efforts go on to build a museum to tell the stories of more than three centuries of African-American struggles, and to place this community’s recent suffering in context.
And at Emanuel, churchgoers still assemble for Bible study on most Wednesdays, vowing that love and faith will prevail.