Diversity
Workplace
special edition
in the
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Portland Observer
Online
‘City of Roses’
Volume XLIV
Number 27
www.portlandobserver.com
Wednesday • June 24, 2015
Established in 1970
Committed to Cultural Diversity
PHOTO BY O LIVIA O LIVIA /T HE P ORTLAND O BSERVER
Rev. Terry McCray Hill, pastor of Bethel AME Church (center), and Samiya Bashir, Reed College creative writing professor, participate in a public lighting of candles in mem-
ory of the nine African Americans killed at the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. The community vigil was held at Bethel the day after the June 17 shooting,
packing the northeast Portland church with hundreds of people of all ages and ethnic backgrounds.
Solidarity with Charleston
Unity and hope
ring out after black
church massacre
O LIVIA O LIVIA
T HE P ORTLAND O BSERVER
The whole country has spent a week coming to
terms with a massacre in a historically black southern
church that took the lives of nine African-Americans,
including the church pastor, South Carolina State Sen.
Clementa Pinckney.
BY
The June 17 shooting at the Emanuel African Meth-
odist Episcopal Church, occurred during a regular
Wednesday night bible study. The killer, 21-year-old
Dylann Storm Roof, a self-proclaimed white suprem-
acist, was arrested a few hours later.
The ensuing discussion surrounding the shooter’s
motives, and the history of white supremacist attacks
on black communities and places of worship, has
spread to Portland along with other major cities, all of
which have sent back a message of solidarity and hope
to the Charleston victims and families .
Shootings, bombings, and attacks of black churches
are hardly new to Americans, or even to Charleston.
The 199-year-old Emanuel AME Church has its own
history of white supremacist attacks, and was burned
down in 1822 when one of the church’s cofounders,
Denmark Vesey, was accused of conspiring to form
a slave rebellion. Vesey and 35 members of his all-
black congregation were executed. Vesey’s son would
rebuild the church in 1865. The church came to be
known as “Mother Emanuel” by community members
who recognized it as the oldest historically black con-
gregation south of Baltimore, Md.
A number of scholars, journalists, activists, and pol-
iticians have emphasized the need to understand the
attack in the broader context of racism in the United
States and especially in the South, rather than seeing
it as an isolated event of racially motivated violence.
C ONTINUED ON P AGE 13