We Are Charleston

by Herb Frazier

  Both Myra and Anthony Thompson had worked for decades in their chosen careers before making the profound decision to pastor, and the fact that they attended different churches and were of different denominations is a testament to their mutual respect and admiration. Anthony Thompson worked for twenty-seven years as a probation officer, and he started attending the Reformed Episcopal Seminary in Summerville, South Carolina, in 1985. He was also going for his MA in clinical counseling, and he and Myra agreed it was too much—the seminary degree was the one to pursue. He graduated in 1995 with a master’s degree in divinity. He is now the pastor of Holy Trinity Reformed Episcopal Church, a small church in downtown Charleston, with a simple yet beautiful sanctuary.

  Behind the building is a garden that Thompson’s friends planted in the days following the church shooting. It’s called Myra’s Garden, and it is filled with a variety of flowering plants, benches, and a plain white crucifix against the back wall. Anthony’s friends from high school spearheaded the effort. Tom McQueeny, who graduated from Bishop England High School with Anthony in 1970, was the ringleader, e-mailing photos of the garden to Anthony while he was still in Atlanta with his family during the days that followed his wife’s murder. Neighbors contributed as well, and it is a lovely tribute to his beloved wife, whom he says had four spiritual gifts: helping, giving, teaching, and counseling.10 This is what she spent her life doing. We hope he finds peace in that sacred space.

  Sharonda Ann Coleman-Singleton wore many hats: mom to her three children, Chris, Caleb, and Camryn; track-and-field coach to the female runners at Goose Creek High School, where she also worked as a speech pathologist; and pastor at Mother Emanuel Church, where she worked with the youth and young adult ministries. She did it all with a big smile that radiated energy and love. Coleman-Singleton was a track star in college. Originally from Newark, New Jersey, she attended South Carolina State, where she competed as a champion hurdler; the team won the conference championship. She joined Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, and her sorority sisters nicknamed her “Tookie.” In 1991 Coleman-Singleton received her degree in speech pathology and audiology. She later received her MA degree from Montclair State University in New Jersey.

  When she and her family moved to Charleston from Atlanta, Georgia, in 2007, they joined Emanuel Church. Her husband’s grandparents were longstanding members of the church. She served as itinerant deacon there and helped the acting pastor in his work. In the pastor’s absence she could perform baptisms, marriages, and funerals. According to her friend, Emanuel member Evelyn Sinkler, “When she preached, everyone seemed to listen; she always had a way to pull you in.”11 Ms. Sinkler expresses amazement at Singleton’s stamina. No matter how long her days were at work, Coleman-Singleton always came to Bible study, and she often brought her children. “She embodied the spirit of love,” Sinkler says.12

  Coleman-Singleton’s son Chris, a sophomore at Charleston Southern University, is on the baseball team. He often accompanied his mother to Bible study on Wednesday nights, but he had a game on June 17, 2015, and his life was spared. He arrived home from the game around 9:30 p.m. and received a call from his mother’s telephone. A stranger asked if any other adults were around and told him to get down to the church as soon as possible. Once he heard from the coroner that eight people were dead, he says he cried so much he couldn’t cry anymore.13 Poised and talented, Chris Singleton made the following statement at a June vigil: “Love is stronger than hate, so if we just love the way my mom would, then the hate won’t be anywhere close to where the love is.”14 He is a living testament to his mother, who was only forty-five when she was killed. Chris also led his summer baseball team, the North Charleston Dixie Pre-Majors, to a World Series win, after which the New York Yankees made a $150,000 donation to the Singleton Memorial Fund at Charleston Southern University.

  A six-foot DePayne Middleton-Doctor stood out in the crowd on June 5, 2015, the last day of school at Ashley River Creative Arts Elementary. She was among teachers and other parents with their children who mingled in the corridor outside the auditorium to exchange hugs, good-byes, the thrills of advancing to middle school, and well wishes for a happy summer. Because of Middleton-Doctor’s stature, Linda Meggett Brown and her daughter Faith quickly spotted Middleton-Doctor and her youngest daughter, Czana, Faith’s friend and classmate.15 Twelve days after that brief exchange, Middleton-Doctor was among the nine murdered at Emanuel.

  Brown and Middleton-Doctor shared more than just having daughters in the same class. They also were schoolmates at Baptist Hill High School in Hollywood, South Carolina, where Middleton-Doctor played for the girls’ basketball team. As students, Brown didn’t know Middleton-Doctor that well because she was a few grades ahead of her, but in the small community south of Charleston, she knew of her and her family. Years later Brown and the rest of the Hollywood community became even more acquainted with Middleton-Doctor’s family life when she delivered a Sunday sermon that revealed how her faith sustained her through a divorce from the father of her four girls, Czana, Gracyn, Hali, and Kaylin.16 In 2012, Wesley United Methodist Church, across the road from the Baptist Hill campus, invited Middleton-Doctor to be the speaker during a women’s day program. Brown remains in awe of the sermon Middleton-Doctor delivered with a voice of authority, demonstrating she was a Bible scholar adept at relating Scripture to everyday life.17

  Reared by parents who worked in service professions, Middleton-Doctor was the middle child of three girls born to retired AME pastor Leroy Middleton and retired social worker and Head Start administrator Frances Middleton. She followed a path of service to her community and church and was the third female minister among the Emanuel Nine. Middleton-Doctor did her trial sermon in the early 2000s at Mount Moriah Baptist Church in North Charleston, South Carolina, where she also sang in the choir. She and Dr. Brenda Nelson were the first two women ordained to preach at Mount Moriah before they moved their memberships to Emanuel.18 Both received their local licenses to preach in the AME Church on the fatal night of June 17. Middleton-Doctor returned to the AME Church to rejoin her roots and find a church family that she could call home, and she found it at Emanuel.

  In the pursuit of becoming an AME minister, Middleton-Doctor was a regular at the Wednesday night Bible study. She was a woman of God who not only was strong in her faith but also had a desire to help those in need. Middleton-Doctor administered grants for Charleston County that enabled residents to make repairs to their homes that they couldn’t otherwise afford. In 2005, she retired as director of the county’s Community Development Block Grant Program. The year before she died, Middleton-Doctor had joined the staff at Southern Wesleyan University as the admission coordinator in the school’s Charleston learning center.19

  Middleton-Doctor, who along with her daughters joined Emanuel on May 31, 2015, was a strong single parent who “functioned for the girls,” Ashland Magwood Temoney, Middleton-Doctor’s niece, says. She attended school and sporting events; “she was their rock.” When Middleton-Doctor’s marriage began to fail, she advised Temoney in making her decision to marry. She told her to make God first and be certain she was making the right decision. “She wasn’t a party pooper, and she didn’t let her situation,” her divorce dampen her niece’s excitement about being married, Temoney says. Years later on March 12, 2015, when Temoney gave birth to her son Archie Temoney II, Middleton-Doctor could not come to the hospital. But she came the next day. “She was excited for him coming, and I have a phone message she left me on my due date. ‘Hey I am just calling to see if Try has made his arrival and see how you are doing.’ I have saved it so I can hear her voice.”20

  Three of the Emanuel Nine were tied not by pulpit affiliation but by blood. At the time of the shootings, Charleston city councilman William Dudley Gregorie was on the phone with his mother, longtime Emanuel member Marguerite Gregorie, who was in Cleveland, Ohio, visiting her daughter Ellenora and Ellenora’s husband, Walter Jackson, Susie Jackson’s son. In one night the Gregorie family l
ost not only Susie Jackson but also her nephew, Tywanza Sanders, and their cousin, Ethel Lance. Text messages from Dudley Gregorie’s city council colleagues flashed on his cell phone that something had happened at his church. He went to the command center and was told the devastating news.21

  Earlier that night Dudley Gregorie was concerned that he hadn’t had an opportunity to give Susie Jackson a hug after the property committee meeting, chaired by Myra Thompson. When the meeting ended, he turned, but Susie Jackson’s seat was empty. After the meeting he found Jackson in the basement, seated with Ethel Lance, cutting out coupons from the newspaper. So he did hug Jackson then, and they talked about her recent trip to Cleveland to see his mother. And he hugged Lance as they were joined by Nelson and Middleton-Doctor. That night Thompson had her license to preach renewed, and her chairmanship was coming to an end, but she assured Gregorie that she would continue to be active with the committee. Then they went into the Quarterly Conference around seven o’clock. Had the shooter arrived at the church an hour earlier, more than fifty people would have been gathered together.22

  Susie Jackson, at eighty-seven, was a true matriarch at Mother Emanuel Church. Most of her family attends the church, and she lived right around the corner on Alexander Street. She had two children, but was known for opening her home to many others. “She was a mother to so, so many,” Emanuel member Carlotta Dennis said on the day of “Ms. Susie’s” funeral.23

  Jackson grew up in Charleston and attended Buist Elementary School, located across the street from Mother Emanuel Church. Later she attended Burke High School. Over the years, she worked as a beautician and home health care provider, but her heart was with her church, where she was a trustee. She was also in the Willing Workers Club. According to her lifelong friend Evelyn Sinkler, “Ms. Susie was always willing to do her part in the edification of the children in our church. The Willing Workers Club sponsored a baby contest, a fashion show, and an Easter egg hunt.”24 Jackson also sang in the Jubilaires Choir and the senior choir, regularly attended Bible study, and was a member of the Women’s Ministerial Society, the Missionary Society, and the senior citizens group.

  If anyone was sick or shut in, she would pay that person a visit. Known for being soft-spoken, Susie Jackson was always thinking of others. She also loved to travel and was a member of the Traveling Partners—a group of women from the church who went on annual trips together. Her niece, Felicia Sanders, was in the group, as well as some of Jackson’s sisters and her friend Evelyn Sinkler. Every year they chose a different destination to visit, and they often invited other friends to come with them. They had planned to go to Chicago on June 21, 2015. One of Ms. Susie’s nieces told Evelyn Sinkler that her aunt had already started packing for the trip before she was killed on June 17.

  Susie Jackson’s cousin, Ethel Lance, often joined the Traveling Partners too. Lance, a lifelong member of Mother Emanuel, was a mother of five and a grandmother. Lance was known for singing the gospel song “One Day at a Time” to her friends at Emanuel Church. It gave her strength. Everyone who knew her described how much she loved to sing and dance. But most of all, she loved her church. At her funeral Norvel Goff described her dedication: “She was at the church seven days of the week. I believe if God gave her eight she would have been there eight days a week. . . . Mother Emanuel was deep down in her spirit, her soul.”25 Lance’s funeral was held in the large Royal Missionary Baptist Church in North Charleston. At the service her oldest grandchild, Brandon Risher, said, “She was a victim of hate, but she can be a symbol of love.”26

  Ethel Lance was a longtime member of the usher board at Mother Emanuel, and she was also active in the senior citizen’s group there. Most notably, she’d been the church custodian since her retirement, and lovingly cared for the old building. She was so devoted to Mother Emanuel that she once returned to the church from her home west of the Ashley River when Pinckney called her because he’d forgotten some food that someone had given him. She drove back downtown to the church to put the food in the refrigerator—she just couldn’t let it spoil. This is a wonderful example of her love for her pastor and her church.27

  The youngest victim on June 17 was twenty-six-year-old Tywanza Kibwe Diop Sanders. His nickname was “Wanza,” and his big, sweet smile was infectious. His final words were, “Where is my Aunt Susie[?] I’ve got to get to my Aunt Susie.”28 At his funeral at Mother Emanuel Church on Saturday, June 27, 2015, Tywanza’s brown casket was placed beside Susie Jackson’s silver casket, having arrived at the church in two caissons led by white horses. So many members of this large family were in attendance that unrelated mourners were asked to give up their seats for family. The pews were filled with his young friends from both his Charleston childhood and his years at Allen University in Columbia.

  Tywanza Sanders was an entrepreneur full of hopes and dreams—and he was serious about poetry. He was a spoken-word poet with a social conscience. His poem “Tragedy” was recited at his funeral. It ended with the lines: “Divided by color / So we are all trying to be equal.”29 His English teacher at Allen University was poet and assistant professor Charlene Spearen. Tywanza had shown her his poems when he was a student, and they continued to work together after graduation. Spearen says he was writing all the time, and he was very self-possessed and compassionate. “He took responsibility for any choice he made. For example,” Spearen explains, “if he was having problems with a course, he took ownership of it. He was a bit older than your average college student; therefore, he was more mature.”30 According to Spearen, both Tywanza’s writing and his life were based on a set of ethics taught in communities of faith. He respected his parents and loved his fellow man. He believed that we are our brother’s keeper, and that there was a moral behavior that determined how we should treat one another. “When he saw something violate these principles,” Spearen adds, “that’s what he wrote about.”31 He also wrote about the realities of being a young black man in today’s America. Tywanza worked with Spearen on the NEA Big Read Project featuring the work of writer Zora Neale Hurston, and he helped teach poetry workshops in Lowcountry schools. He would recite his poems and engage students wherever they went, and “the kids loved him.”32

  The Friday before Tywanza was killed, he called his English professor and told her he had about two hundred pages of his poems that he wanted to publish in book form. “ ‘It’s time,’ he said. ‘It’s time.’ ”33

  The oldest man killed on June 17 was Rev. Daniel L. Simmons Sr. Known as Dan to his friends and family, Simmons was born in the summer of 1940 in the small town of Mullins in Marion County, South Carolina. Like Tywanza Sanders and Clementa Pinckney, Simmons attended Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina, where he received his BS in education administration. But Simmons was drafted right out of high school. He started his college studies, then served in the United States Army in Vietnam, and returned to graduate. While in the military, Simmons was wounded and received a Purple Heart. Later he earned a master’s degree in social work from the University of South Carolina. He married Ann Graham, who was also from Mullins. They settled in Columbia and had two children—Daniel Lee and Rose Ann. Simmons worked as a counselor for the Veterans Administration in Columbia. Before that, he worked as a teacher and counselor with the South Carolina Department of Corrections. Previously he worked as a coach operator for Greyhound Bus Corporation and an insurance broker for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Somehow he made the time to attend seminary, and in 1988 he received his master of divinity from the Lutheran Seminary in Columbia. For the next ten years, Simmons pastored at a number of churches in the Columbia area.

  After twenty-four years of marriage, Ann and Dan Simmons were divorced; Dan remarried and divorced again. He moved in 1999 to Charleston, where he served as pastor at several AME churches. Simmons retired in 2013, whereupon he joined the ministerial staff at Mother Emanuel AME, where he generally led the Bible study on Wednesday nights. He had coached Myra Thompson on the Bible passage she used in the
study June 17.

  Joseph Darby, presiding elder of Beaufort’s AME district, says Simmons was “dependable . . . and an excellent administrator,” adding, “he had a very good sense of humor.”34 Simmons’s nephew, Al Miller, says the bishop would send his uncle to a church to clean it up. “He obeyed the AME rules. He went by the book.”35 Miller also says, “When Dan was not in the pulpit, he was genuinely a good-hearted person. But when he left a church, members still called on him to visit a sick loved one or give them communion.”36 Miller also commented on the fact that his uncle had a gun license, and he carried a gun in his car to protect himself. Sometimes Simmons would visit rough neighborhoods while visiting the sick and bereaved in his capacity as minister, and he felt safer having a gun. The gun was in his car the evening of June 17; Simmons was shot but died later at the Medical University Hospital in Charleston. Since his death, his granddaughter Alana and her family have started the #HateWontWin movement to spread tolerance and encourage children and teenagers to connect with people from different backgrounds.

  Malcolm Graham has said that he will spend the rest of his life honoring his sister Cynthia Graham Hurd and “pushing for justice at all levels.”37 One of six children, Cynthia was the oldest daughter. Her father was a truck driver, and her mother was a domestic worker for two families on Church Street. Cynthia became the matriarch of the family after her parents died more than twenty years ago, living in the house on Benson Street where they were raised in downtown Charleston. Cynthia called it “the family compound.” A math major in college, she eventually commuted to the University of South Carolina to get her master’s in library science. According to Malcolm, as a child she loved books so much that she read every volume of the World Book Encyclopedia.38