SC’s iconic Black church is on a street with an infamous name. That should change.

Five years ago Friday, the state of South Carolina removed the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of its capitol building with the full support of then-Gov. Nikki Haley as well as Sens. Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott.

Only a month earlier the prospect of removing the “stars and bars” would’ve shared odds with, say, the statue of arch secessionist John C. Calhoun coming down from his pedestal in Charleston’s Marion Square — or maybe Hell freezing over.

The toxic banner was finally furled because just three weeks earlier a 21-year-old white nationalist named Dylann Roof had walked into the oldest A.M.E. church in the South — Charleston’s Mother Emanuel — and slaughtered nine African American congregants attending their Tuesday night Bible study group.

In his confession, Roof revealed his motive: to start a race war. As much as the raw hate of his act galvanized the country, the reaction of Mother Emanuel congregation members was almost as shocking: they prayed on it and then forgave him.

“The horrific, unspeakable act that occurred at Mother Emanuel will be of historic significance 100 years from now,” then-Mayor Joe Riley told me this week. “But the grace of the families and loved ones and the way it spread through the whole community was of historic significance as well. The love, the respect, the coming together…”

Perhaps no American city is more implicated in the history of African American slavery than Charleston, and no one is more determined to memorialize that than Joe Riley.

After 40 years as mayor, Riley has devoted himself to the creation of the $75 million International African American Museum, rising on the site of Gadsden’s Wharf, where an estimated 40% of all African slaves brought into America arrived. It looks across Charleston Harbor at Fort Sumter, where cadets from the Citadel fired on Union troops and launched the Civil War.

No one was more instrumental in causing that war than Calhoun, a former U.S. vice president and secretary of war, who championed the cause of “nullification” to preserve slavery, which he termed a “positive good.”

In 1896, with Jim Crow reaching a fever pitch in the South, Charlestonians erected a statue of him in Marion Square, where the old Citadel stood — and less than a block west of Mother Emanuel on, of course, Calhoun Street.

African Americans well knew who he was and what he stood for — so much so that he had to be elevated to his pedestal to avoid vandalism. And there he has stood ever since, thought to be inviolable.

Then, in May, a Minneapolis police officer killed a Black man named George Floyd for all the world to see, and a lot of stuff that could “never happen” suddenly did. Floyd’s death was like a huge pot that boiled over, with cities erupting in protest, some devolving into destruction and looting.

Charleston experienced both, and in the aftermath Mayor John Tecklenburg announced on the 5th anniversary of the Mother Emanuel massacre that Calhoun was coming down.

The city council voted on it one evening and work crews arrived that night to take it down — quickly, legally, permanently.

One more step

One more step is needed to get this right, and it’s about reconciliation, not “cancellation.” Now that Calhoun has left his perch, his name should no longer be on the major street that crosses the Charleston peninsula from the Ashley to the Cooper River, passing Marion Square and Mother Emanuel Church and terminating right by the International African American Museum.

Calhoun Street should become Mother Emanuel Boulevard as quickly as Calhoun’s statue disappeared. The church has occupied the address since 1816. And for better or worse the grisly night of June 16, 2015 has transformed it into a shrine of international reverence and curiosity. Most importantly, is there any group of people in the world who more deserve a small gesture of reconciliation from society than the congregation of this church?

I asked Riley, a dreamer but always a political pragmatist, what he thought.

“It’s an excellent idea,” he said after pausing to think on it. “If you’d asked me a couple of months ago I would’ve said not likely. But change isn’t a steady thing. Sometimes It arrives at an accelerated pace. The idea of changing the name of the street would have great support now, and it would be most fitting.”

Can we have an amen?

This story was originally published July 8, 2020 at 12:06 PM with the headline "SC’s iconic Black church is on a street with an infamous name. That should change.."