The Assassination of Clementa Pinckney

In late June of 2015 I was on the outskirts of Charleston, SC in the neighboring city of Mt. Pleasant with Queen Quet, the Chieftess and Head of State of the Gullah/Geechee Nation, her son, and two members of the Gullah/Geechee Nation Council of Elders. We were embarking on a road trip to Seabreeze, North Carolina, in the northernmost reaches of Gullah/Geechee Nation to check in on the status of that small coastal beach community that was once a busy destination for Black vacationers. Queen Quet had heard from a woman who owned a home along the Intracoastal Waterway a few years back that she and her family were struggling to hold on to their land, and Queen and the Elders wanted to see for themselves what was happening in Seabreeze.

As we ate our lunch in preparation for the trip, Queen and the Elders reflected on the funeral of their friend and ally, Senator Clementa Pinckney, one of the 9 people murdered during Bible study in the basement of the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, SC just 10 days earlier. President Obama had delivered one of the eulogies at the televised funeral, surprising some viewers by breaking into the hymn “Amazing Grace” in the midst of his eulogy in the tradition of Black church sermons, and not at all in the tradition of American presidential speech. Reflecting on the jarring juxtaposition in that moment and the national response to the eulogy, one of the Elders noted that it was “America’s first Black funeral.”

That we could elect America’s First Black President before ever experiencing America’s First Black Funeral was disorienting to me, especially juxtaposed against the relentless hegemony of what Mary Thomas (2011) has called “banal multi-culturalism” that characterizes the racial and political discourse of the so-called “post-racial” New South. The observation that this was America’s First Black Funeral is more than a witty quip; it is a comment on the pervasive cultural, political and socio-economic gulf between Black and white America. This gulf is responsible for the general failure to recognize this event as an act of terrorism and an assassination of an important political leader. Indeed, the terror incited that afternoon was not targeted at our collective polity, but a very specific group of people. The location the shooter chose was likewise not fully recognized in popular media, or even in the white community of Charleston, for its proper place in the people’s history of the United States. If we understand the life of Senator Pinckney and the Emanuel AME Church from the vantage point of Gullah/Geechee Nation, however, we might better understand the events of June 17, 2015 in both their historical and present day political and racial context. It may, in Senator Pinckney’s words, “give us new eyes for seeing.”

Figure 1.

Queen Quet, Chieftess and Head of State of the Gullah/Geechee Nation, and Senator Clementa Pinckney. Courtesy of the Gullah/Geechee Alkebulan Archive. Photo Credit: Kumar L. Goodwine-Kennedy.

Highway 17, where we were stopped for lunch, is the primary thoroughfare through Gullah/Geechee Nation,¹ which runs from Jacksonville, North Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida, and westward from the coast to 30 miles inland. Queen Quet is the elected representative of the Gullah/Geechee people, enstooled as Queen and Head of State after representing Gullah/Geechee people at the UN and many years of activism and advocacy on behalf of Gullah/Geechee people. The Gullah/Geechee people are descendants of Africans brought to the US from the “Rice Coast” of Africa. Africans from that region were targeted by slave traders and valued by South Carolina plantation owners for their knowledge of rice cultivation. Because many whites were intolerant of the coastal lowland climate and environment, enslaved Africans on plantations in the region were often left alone to carry out the work of the plantation. Later, as they escaped or were freed, many gravitated to the Sea Islands, barrier islands along the South Carolina and Georgia coast, which...