Sharonda Coleman-Singleton

The AME Church was founded by Richard Allen in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1814 as the first independent black denomination.

It is a historically black congregation, one of the oldest south of Baltimore.

Founded in 1816, the church has played an important role in the history of South Carolina, including the slavery era and Reconstruction, the civil rights movement, and Black Lives Matter.

It is the oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church in the South, often referred to as "Mother Emanuel".

When one of the church's co-founders, Denmark Vesey, was suspected of plotting to launch a slave rebellion in Charleston in 1822, 35 people, including Vesey, were hanged and the church was burned down.

Charleston citizens accepted the claim that a slave rebellion was expected to begin at the stroke of midnight on June 16, 1822, and it was expected to erupt the following day (the shooting in 2015 occurred on the 193rd anniversary of the thwarted uprising).

As the rebuilt church was formally shuttered with other all-black congregations by the city in 1834, the congregation met in secret until 1865 when it was formally reorganized, and it acquired the name Emanuel ("God with us").

It was rebuilt based on a design which was drawn by Denmark Vesey's son.

That structure was badly damaged in the 1886 Charleston earthquake.

The current building dates from 1891.

The church's senior pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, had held rallies after the shooting of Walter Scott by a white police officer two months earlier, in nearby North Charleston.

As a state senator, Pinckney pushed for legislation requiring police to wear body cameras.

Several commentators noted that a similarity existed between the massacre at Emanuel AME and the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of a politically active African-American church in Birmingham, Alabama, where the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) killed four black girls and injured fourteen others, during the civil rights movement.

This attack galvanized support for federal civil rights legislation.

Numerous scholars, journalists, activists and politicians have emphasized their belief that the attack should not be treated as an isolated event because in their view, it occurred within the broader context of racism against Black Americans and racism in the United States.

In 1996, Congress had passed the Church Arson Prevention Act, which considers the damaging of religious property a federal crime because of its "racial or ethnic character", in response to a spate of 154 suspicious church burnings which had occurred since 1991.

More recent arson attacks against black churches included a black church in Massachusetts that was burned down the day after the first inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009.

The Charleston church shooting, also known as the Charleston church massacre, was an anti-black mass shooting and hate crime that occurred on June 17, 2015, in Charleston, South Carolina.

Nine people were killed, and one was injured, during a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest black church in the southern United States.

Among the fatalities was the senior pastor, state senator Clementa C. Pinckney.

All ten victims were African Americans.

At the time, it was the deadliest mass shooting at a place of worship in U.S. history and is the deadliest mass shooting in South Carolina history.

Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, had attended the Bible study before opening fire.

He was found to have targeted members of this church because of its history and status.

At around 9:05 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, June 17, 2015, the Charleston Police Department began receiving calls of a shooting at Emanuel AME Church.

Dylann S. Roof, a man described as white, with sandy-brown hair, around 21 years old and 5 ft in height, wearing a gray sweatshirt and jeans, opened fire with a Glock 41 .45-caliber handgun on a group of people inside the church at a Bible study attended by Pinckney.

He had first attended the meeting as a participant that evening.

Roof then fled the scene.

He had been carrying eight magazines holding hollow-point bullets.

The event was finished by about 9:11 p.m.

During the hour preceding the attack, 13 people including the shooter participated in the Bible study.

In December 2016, Roof was convicted of 33 federal hate crime and murder charges.

On January 10, 2017, he was sentenced to death for those crimes.

Roof was separately charged with nine counts of murder in the South Carolina state courts.

In April 2017, Roof pleaded guilty to all nine state charges in order to avoid receiving a second death sentence, and as a result, he was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

He will receive automatic appeals of his death sentence, but he may eventually be executed by the federal justice system.

Roof espoused racial hatred in both a website manifesto which he published before the shooting, and a journal which he wrote from jail afterward.

On his website, Roof posted photos of emblems which are associated with white supremacy, including a photo of the Confederate battle flag.

The shooting triggered debates about modern display of the flag and other commemorations of the Confederacy.

Following these murders, the South Carolina General Assembly voted to remove the flag from State Capitol grounds and a wave of Confederate monument or memorial removals followed shortly thereafter.