CHARLESTON, South Carolina—The gunman didn't walk into just any church on Wednesday evening. He walked into one of the oldest and most storied African-American churches in the country. He walked into Charleston Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. "Mother Emanuel," as everyone here calls it. It is a church that burned to the ground in 1822 for its part in planning the Denmark Vesey slave rebellion. It is a church whose parishioners were forced underground for decades by a ban on black churches. It is a church that was leveled by an earthquake in the late 1800s, only to be rebuilt yet again. It is a church where both Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. spoke, a...
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