IN JULY, Lee Bennett Jr. stood at the podium of the Gaillard Center in downtown Charleston, S.C., as part of a three-day bicentenary commemoration of Denmark Vesey — a free Black man who had planned what could have been the largest organized resistance by enslaved people in U.S. history. Bennett brought both American history and personal history with him that day: The space where he spoke used to be his own neighborhood. There are some places where the veil between past and present feels especially thin.
The next day, Bennett offered me a tour of Mother Emanuel AME Church, where he is the historian. He spoke about Vesey, a founding member of Hampstead AME Church, established in 1818. In 1822, Vesey was arrested and executed, along with 34 others, for his plan to liberate the enslaved people of Charleston. Later that same year, a white mob destroyed Hampstead Church. By 1834, the city of Charleston made it illegal for Black congregations to meet, pushing the congregation to gather in secret until after the Civil War. In 1865, they came out of hiding and took the name Emanuel, “God with us.”
Bennett grew up near Mother Emanuel in “Da Burrow,” the African American neighborhood now buried beneath the Gaillard Center. In 1965, Black neighborhoods across the country were (and still are) wiped out in the name of urban renewal (pronounced: urban removal). The mass eviction functioned as an act of violence against Mother Emanuel Church: They didn’t lose their building, but they lost their neighborhood. In 1965, residents were offered up to $200 for relocation expenses. The planned demolition of Bennett’s community — not through fire or hurricane, but by human action — left incalculable losses. Bennett recalled how his mother prepared meals for elderly neighbors and sent him to drop those meals off at people’s homes. When their neighborhood was leveled, that support network crumbled. “We lost a lot of elders,” he said. Now, homes near Mother Emanuel sell at a median price of near $1 million.
Bennett said it felt “surreal” to speak aloud about Vesey in the space that was once home. Vesey planned to release captives and commandeer a ship to Haiti — to get himself and his people back home, or closer to home. They wished to seek asylum in the newly independent Black nation. The sounds that filled the Gaillard Center that weekend did not bring affordable housing back to downtown Charleston, but they worked as a kind of incantation, a collective remembrance. At times, when a brass band marched the aisles and a DJ played family reunion classics, the symphony hall felt more like a block party.
In January, the International African American Museum will open a few blocks away, on the spot in Charleston Harbor where the ancestors of at least 50 percent of African American people were unloaded as cargo. I walked through the African Ancestors Memorial Garden, an outdoor space planted with West African fauna. Looking down at the walkway, I saw life-size silhouettes of bodies crammed into the hulls of ships. I laid my body down in an outline. Then I stood up dizzy, thankful for the ways that places can hold memories.
There is no going back. We get up. We build. We make music. We tell the truth. We take up space, and we find a way home.
Josina Guess is a Sojourners associate editor and a contributor to Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic.
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