Transcript
Into America
Reconstructed: Keep the Faith, Baby
Barack Obama: Giving all praise and honor to God. (CHEERS)
Trymaine Lee: On a sweltering summer day in June 2015, then-President Barack Obama stood before a crowded arena in Charleston, South Carolina.
Obama: The Bible calls us to hope, to persevere, and have faith in things not seen.
Lee: He was there to give the eulogy for the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, a state senator and the senior pastor of the historic Mother Emanuel AME Church.
Obama: He embodied the idea that our Christian faith demands deeds and not just words, that to put our faith in action is more than just individual salvation, it’s about our collective salvation, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and house the homeless is not just a call for isolated charity, but the imperative of a just society.
Lee: Down along the front row, just yards from where Obama stood, eulogizing Pinckney, the reverend’s widow sat draped in all black with a lacy hat framing her head like a beautiful, sad rose. Their two little girls wore white bows in their hair. The president called their father a good man, and a good model of faith.
Obama: And then to lose him at 41, slain in his sanctuary with eight wonderful members of his flock, but bound together by a common commitment to God. Cynthia Hurd. Susie Jackson. Ethel Lance. DePayne Middleton-Doctor. Tywanza Sanders. Daniel L. Simmons. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton. Myra Thompson. Good people. God-fearing people. (APPLAUSE) To the families of the fallen, the nation shares in your grief.
Lee: I was there that day and from a dozen yards away, as songs of sweet Jesus and sweet redemption unfurled high into the rafters, I watched the younger of the Pinckney girls take tiny, measured steps toward her father’s casket, saying goodbye the way no little girl ever should.
It had been just nine days since a white supremacist walked into Wednesday night Bible study, held in the basement of Mother Emanuel Church, and prayed with a group of parishioners before he opened fire on them, killing nine people, including Reverend Pinckney. The attack shook the congregation and America to its core. And it became part of history.
Spencer Crew: Well, what your faith says is that you should forgive others for what they’ve done, that it’s not for you to judge, but it’s for someone else to judge. And so they…
Lee: I’m back in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, touring an exhibit called Make Good the Promises on the legacy of Reconstruction, with emeritus director Spencer Crew. You know, throughout this exhibit there have been so many moments that have given us hope, right, and the history and the context to make us feel good about who we are and pushing forward.
Crew: Right.
Lee: But there are items like this, from Mother Emanuel Church, a Bible that was there that day, and the letter, that’s kinda heartbreaking.
Crew: It is heartbreaking, because it says that you cannot even practice your faith in safety.
Lee: Toward the end of the exhibit there’s a display case dedicated to the Mother Emanuel Church shooting.
Crew: That is what books everyone’s heart, is that they are doing nothing that would warrant this kind of attack. But they’re under attack because they are at this church and because they’re African American. And it makes us also I think worry about the world in which you can find yourself under attack for no other reason than you are who you are.
Lee: Spencer is showing me a Bible that belongs to Polly Sheppard, one of five survivors of the shooting, along with some Bible study notes from that night. The notes are on Mark chapter four, the Parable of the Sower, typed up and printed on plain white paper. And as a kid, I went to Bible study many, many times. And I see the familiar, it’s highlighted. She had this long passage highlighted.
Crew: Exactly.
Lee: And one of those pages–
Crew: Folded over.
Lee: It’s folded over.
Crew: Yeah.
Lee: That seems so familiar.
Crew: Yeah, and just as you would expect a Bible reader to do. And like, actually right next to it are some of the notes that the Bible reader that day had put together to lead that class. So again, what it does is I think it makes it human, it makes it much more real and much more visceral than if we just had talked about it abstractly. I think that’s the power of what these kind of objects can do in an exhibition.
Lee: Reconstruction ended a century and a half ago, but these objects from 2015 are here in the Smithsonian because in so many ways the legacy of the Reconstruction Era continues to guide us today. The Mother Emanuel attack may have been a single night of violence, but it began lifetimes ago.
Archival Recording: Time and again in talking to people, they talk about this resilience of this community, that they are a faithful community but they are a resilient and strong community. But when you talk about the greater context of what South Carolina meant to the slave trade…
Lee: Back in 2015 I was in Charleston, reporting on the massacre for NBC News. And I remember it clear as day. This guy came over to me and said, “I want to show you something.” He took me to what’s called the Hanging Tree, where people were once lynched, not too far from the church.
And he took me to the Citadel, which is now a prestigious military college, but originally it was formed as a slave patrol. There’s a covered market nearby, still in operation, where white folks with enough money once bought and sold other human beings.
As beautiful as this city is, with its cobblestone streets and angel oak trees and horse-drawn carriages, its soil is soaked in blood. Generations of enslaved people toiled in this city to death. The Mother Emanuel massacre was just one incarnation of the violence heaped upon Black bodies here.
Yet somehow Black Charleston has always pushed through it all. Despite the weight of the violence and bloodshed, they have continued to make a way. Resilience is as much a tradition in this city as violence. After the Civil War ended and Reconstruction began, the formerly enslaved were able to buy land, establish formal communities, and organization politically.
And the Black church served as a conduit for this nascent freedom building, even before emancipation. Black folks were building faith communities and networks of churches using the Scripture to circumvent the strictures of white society.
But there would always be backlash. Throughout time and across geography, in the South in particular, white violence has often been aimed squarely at the Black church and its members, because the church represented Black power, freedom, and faith.
More than just places to worship, the church has been a refuge, a place to organize, to educate, and to uplift. Faith was a guiding principle, but also something very practical. It was armor and an arsenal when the spurs of white supremacy cut deep.
And I wanna be clear, this faith is about more than religiosity. I’m talking about faith as fortitude, faith as strength. The kind of faith that no Christian, Muslim, or Jew has sole dominion over. This sort of faith has buoyed us throughout our history.
Faith is what helped deliver us from the evil of slavery, guiding people like Harriet Tubman along the Underground Railroad, sending them toward freedom in the dark of night, using spirituals as secret codes. Faith was at the center of the Civil Rights Movement, helping us to organize and plot and face the world together, as we’re reminded in this sermon from Pastor and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
Adam Clayton Powell Jr.: Keep the faith, baby. As I walk the streets of the Harlems of the world, people are depressed. They are frustrated. They are downtrodden. They see no hope. They see no tomorrows. And I say to them always, keep the faith, baby.
Lee: And it’s a sort of secular faith, a hope for the future that pushes so many people onto the streets when it’s time to fight and protest injustice today.
Voices: No justice, no peace. Let’s go. Prosecute police. Hands up. Don’t shoot. Hands up. Don’t shoot. Hands up. Don’t shoot. Black lives matter. Black lives matter. Black lives matter. Black lives matter. Black lives matter. Black lives matter. Black lives matter. Black lives matter…
Lee: I’m Trymaine Lee, and this is Into America. For generations the church is where we’ve educated our children and exercised political agency. It’s where over and again we’ve harnessed the faith to keep moving forward, despite opposition and violence.
There are few better examples of this than the Historic African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Mother Emanuel AME in particular. So today we’re looking at Mother Emanuel to understand faith as a source of power, pride, and rebellion. This is Reconstructed Part Three: Keep the Faith, Baby.
Powell: Keep the faith, baby. (UNINTEL) Keep the faith, because God’s realities always exceed man’s fondest dreams.
Obama: The church is and always has been the center of African American life. (APPLAUSE) A place to call our own in a too-often hostile world, a sanctuary from so many hardships.
Lee: When President Obama delivered the eulogy for Reverend Pinckney, he was sending a message intended to ring out far beyond the audience.
Obama: That’s what the Black church means. The place where our dignity as a people inviolate. And there’s no better example of this tradition than Mother Emanuel, a church (APPLAUSE) built by Blacks seeking liberty, burned to the ground because its founders sought to end slavery, only to rise up again. A phoenix from these ashes. (APPLAUSE)
Elizabeth Alston: As a member of Emanuel I think that courage is not the strength to go on, but going on when you have no strength. When you don’t stand up for something you’ll fall for anything. So I’m just here to let you know that I stand for something.
Lee: Elizabeth Alston has been a member of Mother Emanuel for more than 50 years. She was in the audience for Reverend Clementa Pinckney’s eulogy. She remembers the pain and devastation of those early days after the tragedy, but also the strength of the congregation.
Alston: The connectiveness, spirituality is there. The love is there. The compassion is there. I can thank Mother Emanuel for me being faith based, whenever something comes up that your religion takes hold. And Emanuel has been that for most of us.
Lee: So Mother Emanuel is a place of compassion, of faith, but as Obama said that day, it’s also been a place of resistance. Mother Emanuel isn’t the church’s original name. Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church was the first AME church in the South, and it quickly gained such reverence that people began lovingly using the term “mother”.
Reverend Clementa C. Pinckney: Where you are is a very special place in Charleston.
Lee: This is from an old video of Reverend Pinckney, two years before the shooting. It’s from a talk given to a group of doctoral students from Northeastern University. The tape is courtesy of the Mullikan Law Firm. In it, the Reverend talks about the history of Mother Emanuel and the AME denomination, which dates back to the late 18th century in Philadelphia. It’s important for you to hear this history from Reverend Pinckney in his own words.
Pinckney: We started in 1787 through our founder, Richard Allen, who left then St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church because they were telling him he needed to pray after the regular members prayed. And so that’s how the denomination began, in a fit of civil disobedience and a little issue with theological fairness, if you will. (LAUGHTER) What our church and denomination stands for is really it stands for the universal vision of all people being treated fairly under the law, as God sees us in his sight.
Lee: Mother Emanuel was founded in 1818 by Morris Brown, a free, prosperous Black man, after he paid a visit to the original AME church in Philly. And like that first AME, Brown’s church also became a center of resistance to the white power structure.
Pinckney: In about 1822, there was an interesting minister here whose name was Denmark Vesey. And Denmark Vesey planned an insurrection.
Lee: Denmark Vesey believed slavery was contrary to the laws of God, and that those in bondage were bound by God to free themselves. With a few dozen men, he planned to seize weapons, set Charleston on fire, and kill the mayor and any other white men who tried to stop them. Then he planned to set sail to Haiti, which had won its independence about two decades earlier.
Pinckney: The rebellion was planned so well that once the authorities found out about it, they had a little Guantanamo experiment. They basically took Denmark Vesey and all of the co-conspirators that they could find and they interrogated them.
Lee: The white authorities tortured Vesey and his comrades. 150 people were arrested and Vesey and 34 other men were hanged. Mother Emanuel was burned to the ground. But the state didn’t stop there. Reverend Pinckney tells it like this.
Pinckney: The state of South Carolina really, really got concerned and scared, and so we have the military college of South Carolina, the Citadel. Does anyone know where the original site of the Citadel was? You actually passed it on Meeting Street. The guns of the Citadel were basically facing this site and the community of Africans, African Americans, who were living in this area. And that’s how the Citadel got started.
Lee: Nine years after Vesey’s failed revolt, and 350 miles to the north, there was another rebellion in the works, also rooted in faith. On August 21st, 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved Black preacher, led a revolt in Virginia. Turner and dozens of other men, some on horseback, went house to house, freeing Black people and killing more than 50 white residents along the way.
But the victory was short-lived. At least 200 Black people, including Nat Turner, were eventually captured and killed. In the aftermath, states across the South passed laws banning Black people from reading and writing, hoping it would prevent another Nat Turner. And three years later, in 1834, South Carolina cracked down on the places where these rebellions had taken shape. Here’s the late Reverend Pinckney once again.
Pinckney: The state of South Carolina, because of the work of Black congregations in Charleston to include Emanuel, teaching persons to read, and really in a sense sort of fomenting this desire that all people should be free in this state basically put out a law, or instituted a law that closed Emanuel. I mean, by state law the church was closed along with others.
Lee: The congregation of Mother Emanuel and so many others went underground, hiding from white authorities. But the flame of faith and resistance was never extinguished. And after the Civil War, four million Black people were finally free. And with that freedom came the right to worship the way they chose. Back at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, curator Spencer Crew explains it like this.
Crew: Religion had always been an important part in the African American community, but often the churches they went to under enslavement were churches that were run by the land owners. And at those churches, the key thing was to remind you to be a good servant, to do as you are directed, and then you’ll get your reward later on. But as they’re gaining their freedom at the end of the Civil War and into Reconstruction, you see many more African American churches emerging, churches in which they can control what goes on in them. And this is critical.
Lee: During Reconstruction, free Black Americans were founding towns all across the South, and often in towns like Promised Land, where we visited last week, one of the first communal buildings to go up was a church.
Crew: Because what the church is is an institution that is supported by the African American community.
Lee: Faith and the church had been a well of quiet resistance before the war, in revolts like Nat Turner’s, or the rebellious act of running away, or in simply surviving enslavement. And after the war, these new Black churches carried on the tradition out loud and in the open.
Spencer says that many of the Black political leaders during Reconstruction got their start in the church. In fact, Richard Harvey Cain, one of Mother Emanuel’s first preachers during Reconstruction, would go on to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Crew: Church has become an important place where people can practice leadership, where they can speak up and debate and share their ideas, and learn how to convince others about their point of view. And now are able to take that skill and to go out into the larger community.
Lee: But with power comes attention and jealousy. And for the newly freed, this often meant being the target of white violence and terror.
Crew: What we have located here are some of the ways in which they sought to create this sense of terror. They had groups like the…
Lee: Spencer takes me to the part of the Reconstruction exhibit that’s full of artifacts tied to this white violence.
Crew: We have what is a very interesting Ku Klux Klan hat. It doesn’t look like the ones that you normally would see in the sense that you’d think about their white hood by itself, that’s more in the 20th century. In the early days, people would create their own kind of different hoods and hats to wear. The idea was that they were trying to intimidate and frighten the people they went to see, so they’d make them as ghoulish and as scary as they could.
Lee: I gotta say, to call this thing a hat doesn’t begin to capture what it looks like. It’s more like a mask made from old, yellowed bed sheets. There are three long, stuffed fabric horns jutting from the skull, and a long, pointy red cone for a nose, and bushy black eyebrows over the outline of dead eyes. And sticking out of the mouth are three long fangs. It’s somewhere between goofy and grotesque.
Crew: It’s from North Carolina, and it really illustrates the kind of different ways in which people would dress up to try to intimidate African Americans and others who would be helping them.
Lee: Would they also commit acts of violence in these masks?
Crew: Oh, absolutely. If the intimidation doesn’t work by itself then violence becomes the next step.
Lee: Sometimes a church itself would be the target, but perhaps more often these white terrorists attacked the people connected to the church.
Williams: Harriet Postle is from York County, South Carolina. She was married to a preacher named Isaac.
Lee: This is Kidada Williams. She’s a history professor at Wayne State University and has written a book about racist violence aimed at African Americans. Much of her book is based on testimonies from victims. What she’s about to read is testimony from a preacher’s wife, Harriet Postle. And it was recorded during a federal investigation into the KKK in 1871. Quick warning, the passage contains graphic violence and strong language.
Williams: She describes when KKK members, her neighbors, visited her in her home, asking her for her husband, who had snuck out of the house just before they arrived. The group of white men then began beating her in front of her children. She said, “The one who had his foot on my body mashed me badly, but not so badly as he might have done, for I was seven or eight months gone travail.
“Then I got outside the house and sat down and I called the little ones to me, for they were all dreadfully frightened. They said my husband was there and they would shoot in every crack to get him. And they did shoot all over the place. There are bullet holes there and bullet marks on the hearth yet.
“And they say to me, ‘We’re going to have the truth out of you, you damn lying bitch. He is somewhere about here.’ Said I, ‘He is gone.’ And with that he beat my head against the side of the house till I had not sense barely left. But I still had hold of my babe.”
Lee: And there’s another one from South Carolina, this one from a preacher named Elias Hill, who’d also been involved in local politics for liberal candidates. As part of that same investigation, he told federal officials about the night six members of the KKK dragged him out of his bed and into the yard.
Williams: “They pointed pistols at me, all around my head once or twice, as if they were going to shoot me, telling me they were going to kill me. Wasn’t I ready to die and willing to die? Did I preach? One caught me by the leg and hurt me. He had a horse whip.
“And he told me to pull up my shirt and he hit me. I reckon he struck me eight cuts, right on the hip bone. They said I must quit preaching and put a notice interest newspaper renouncing Republicanism, that if I did not, they would come back the next week and kill me.”
Lee: Eventually the men let Mr. Hill’s sister bring him back to bed, but they followed him into the room.
Williams: “They said, ‘Don’t pray against the Ku Klux, but pray that God may forgive Ku Klux. Pray that God may bless and save us.’ I was so chilled with cold, lyin’ out of doors for so long, and in such pain, that I could not speak to pray. But I tried to. And they said that would do very well.”
Lee: These organized white attacks happened all over the South for decades, impacting countless Black families. Many fought back, fending off these terrorists with guns of their own. But Kidada says the trauma was deep and long lasting.
Williams: I think one of the things we have to keep in mind is that most people who experience this violence aren’t going to be able to John Henry their way through this. They’re not gonna be able to power on. A lot of them are completely devastated by what happened to them.
Their loved ones are killed before their eyes. They are left with disabling injuries. Some people experience things like paralytic fright where they freeze, and that makes them vulnerable to being carried away. And sometimes it can devastate a parent to not be able to protect their child in the context of this violence. And all of those leave long-term scars on the people who lived through these attacks.
Lee: How did Black folks try to fortify themselves, ourselves, against this stuff? There were institutions being built in our communities, but how did we move forward in the idea of faith?
Williams: Well, some people move forward, some people don’t. But I think a lot of them, there is a sort of understanding that they had lived through slavery and they had lived through the war, and they had survived these attacks that were intended to kill them.
And so for a lot of them there was the commitment and the belief and the need to move forward. Because they had a world to build for their children. They had a future to make for themselves and for the people they held dear. So they have a sense of faith.
That faith allowed them to live through slavery and survive the war. And those are no small things. They’re quite significant. And that faith is also what brings a lotta those people forward into the world after it’s been turned upside down by this violence.
Lee: It’s this faith in ourselves that has sustained Black people through our darkest times. The faith that we can push America to a place where our whole selves are finally free.
Pinckney: And that’s what church is all about.
Lee: This is Reverend Clementa Pinckney again, from his 2013 talk to students.
Pinckney: And sometimes you gotta make noise to do that. Sometimes you maybe have to die, like Denmark Vesey, to do that. Sometimes you have to march and struggle and be unpopular to do that.
Lee: There’s a line in the Bible that Black Americans have long known to be true. It’s from James, Chapter Two, Verse 26. It goes, “Faith without works is dead.” Back in the Smithsonian, Spencer Crew says this principle is at the heart of the Black church.
Crew: It illustrates the kind of power of community church can have, and how to use that as a stepping stone or a kind of activism, and that freedom should come immediately. Freedom is something you have to take and move forward with yourself, and not wait for others to make it happen for you. And looking to the modern Civil Rights Movement and all the leadership that’s there, a lot of them are ministers.
Lee: The Civil Rights Movement of the ’50s and ’60s was born in churches and buoyed by faith. Its preacher leaders followed in the footsteps of Harriet Tubman and Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner. But this time they pushed for fair treatment within the system, rather than overthrowing or escaping it. And they were able to mobilize people on a scale that this country had never seen.
Archival Recording: You can turn your back on me, but you cannot turn your back upon the idea of justice.
John Lewis: You must find a way to get in the way. You must find a way to get in trouble, good trouble, (APPLAUSE) necessary trouble.
Malcolm X: We suffer political oppression, economic exploitation, and social degradation, all of ’em from the same enemy.
Archival Recording: How do we get our kids back in the struggle and in the movement? Well, you see, it’s right down in the trenches where they are.
Lee: And when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech at the March on Washington in August 1963, his message of resistance and faith rang out far beyond the church, reaching millions.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, (APPLAUSE) knowing that we will be free one day.
Lee: But like so many times before, the push for freedom was met with violence. Just one month after the March on Washington, white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, murdering four little girls. The ’60s also witnessed the assassination of Malcolm X, who always led with the fiery brand of faith.
Malcolm X: Instead of the so-called Negro man continuing to watch his churches being bombed and his little girls being murdered, it’s time for the so-called Negro man to take a stand.
Lee: And when Dr. King was gunned down as he fought against poverty and injustice, that faith was tested again. Then in 2015, when that young white supremacist murdered nine people at Mother Emanuel, during Bible study no less, the nation once again was reminded that our bloody, racist history isn’t history at all.
Obama: We do not know whether the killer of Reverend Pinckney and eight others knew all of this history. But he surely sensed the meaning of his violent act. It was an act that drew on a long history of bombs and arson and shots fired at churches. Not random, but as a means of control, and a way to terrorize and oppress. (APPLAUSE)
Lee: But resistance through faith doesn’t live in the past either.
Bree Newsome Bass: You come against me with hatred and oppression and violence. I come against you in the name of God.
Lee: Coming up, in the aftermath of the shooting at Mother Emanuel church, how one woman felt called to undertake a daring act of bravery in the name of faith and freedom.
Obama: For too long we were blind to the pain that the Confederate flag stirred in too many of our citizens. (APPLAUSE) It’s true, a flag did not cause these murders. But as we all have to acknowledge, the flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride.
Voices: Yes sir. (APPLAUSE) Yeah.
Lee: Two days before President Obama delivered this sermon, the body of Reverend Clementa Pinckney, the man he was eulogizing, lay in state in the rotunda of South Carolina’s capitol building in Columbia. Just steps away on the capitol lawn flew the Confederate battle flag, the flag that his killer proudly posed for pictures with before the shooting.
Obama: For many, Black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation.
Voices: Yes.
Obama: We see that now. Removing the flag from this state’s capitol…
Lee: As Obama was saying these words, a group of activists had already hatched a plan.
Newsome Bass: My name is Bree Newsome Bass. I claim the whole Carolinas ’cause that’s where my people are from, but I am in Raleigh, North Carolina right now.
Lee: Bree Newsome Bass is an artist and activist. As the daughter of a Baptist preacher, she grew up learning that faith and freedom were deeply intertwined.
Newsome Bass: On both sides of my family I had ancestors who were enslaved and then founded churches on the plantations where they were–
Lee: Wow.
Newsome Bass: –and then built brick and mortar churches after slavery. So my understanding of Christianity was very much tied to the history of Black people, right, and this idea that if God brought the Hebrews out of Egypt, he would bring us out of bondage, you know? That kind of narrative, the belief in a God who cares very much about the poor and the oppressed.
Lee: But it wasn’t until she was in her 20s that she found her own path of activism through faith.
Newsome Bass: The turning point for me, like a lot of people, was, like, 2012-2013, the Trayvon Martin case, the attacks on voting rights. That was the moment where I kind of, I made a more conscious decision. Like, I am going to devote a significant part of my energy and my time and my life and my effort to this cause.
Lee: Then the Mother Emanuel shooting.
Newsome Bass: I remember calling my sister, because my sister had heard the news, and we were just crying. And you know, I’m just asking, like, “How long does this go on?” That attack on the church, it felt very much like the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church. You know, that’s the conversation I’m having with God. Like, “How long does this go on? Why is this even happening?”
Lee: Dylann Roof would eventually be convicted of multiple murder and hate crime charges and sentenced to death. But Bree remembers how in those early days people refused to call what he did, those heinous acts, terrorism.
Newsome Bass: And then, of course, the focus went to the Confederate flag.
Lee: The flag had been a source of contention for decades. In 2000, Reverend Pinckney himself argued to remove the flag from the floor of the South Carolina Senate.
Pinckney: As a pastor of a church, I listen to the stories and the pains of the people who feel so offended by the fact that a flag that has been used as a symbol to brutalize, demoralize, and humiliate them still flies in our state capitol. I hear those stories.
Lee: But after the shooting, debate hit a fever pitch.
Archival Recording: It’s a symbol to those men who fought and who died during the war.
Archival Recording: It should be tooken down.
Archival Recording: Our heritage, my right to keep this flying on our capitol grounds.
Voices: Take the flag down.
Archival Recording: We want this for all of our people, all of our children, to get this hatred out of our society and of our mind.
Newsome Bass: For society to allow the focus of the aftermath of the Charleston massacre to be the flag, that is very clearly saying that the flag matters more than the lives that were lost, you know? We’re not talking about humanity, we’re talking about a piece of nylon fabric. And we’re doing that because of the symbol. We’re doing that because it’s a symbol of white power.
Lee: Bree knew that she had to do something.
Newsome Bass: I moved to action. You know that’s where I go because I do strongly believe that faith without works is dead. And I don’t think that we are called to simply be passive observers to evil in the world. We are called to be active participants in the fight for justice.
And so for me, it was what can I do? Apparently Rosa Parks, after the lynching of Emmett Till, she said, you know, “You killed Emmett Till. I’m gonna take down your whole system.” Like, oof. Like, I felt that. Like, I felt. Because I think that is my feeling too.
Lee: Bree was in Charlotte, North Carolina, about an hour and a half north of Columbia. She started talking to other activists about what they could do and what they kept coming back to was the flag.
Newsome Bass: Once the power structure demonstrates that, like, the flag is what they care about, you know, then the flag is what has to come down.
Lee: They thought up different ways of handling the situation.
Newsome Bass: Do we shoot an arrow with (LAUGH) fire at it? I mean, we thought about taking it down and replacing it with another flag.
Lee: But in the end, they decided the best way to get their message across was to simply take the flag down.
Newsome Bass: Because if all I do is go up and take it down, they can’t talk about anything else except whether they’re gonna leave the flag down and raise it back up. You can’t talk about, “Oh, look at these vandals who set it on fire.” You can’t talk about, “Oh, what is this flag that they replaced it with.” You can’t talk about anything.
Lee: But in order to get the flag down, they would need to get up to it first. And that meant that someone would have to scale a 30-foot flagpole in full view of the capitol and the police, and anyone else who might want the flag to stay right where it was.
Newsome Bass: There was a basic question we had to ask. There was about nine of us who were gathered there. And the question was who could do it? Who could train on how to do it? And who could risk being arrested?
Lee: Bree had no climbing experience, but she volunteered anyway because what she did have was something more powerful.
Newsome Bass: What added another layer to it was my personal history, you know? My ancestors were in South Carolina. Like, I’m directly descended from people I can go to the grounds where my ancestors were enslaved, because my family never moved far from where we had been. So that history was very personal to me. And so with me being the one to do it, I could carry all of that with me.
Lee: From that moment, Bree had just four days to learn how to climb.
Newsome Bass: I faced waves of fear. Like, in those four days between when I, you know, volunteered to do it. In fact, I remember the very first time I attempted climbing I was like, “I don’t think I can do this.”
Lee: With help from experienced climbers she kept practicing. But even as the climbing got easier, Bree and the other activists had a lot to consider.
Newsome Bass: We had to decide beforehand if somebody shows up with a gun, what do we do? And we decided that everybody runs for cover. I made peace with the fact that I might die. But it is an act of love. It is an act of love in the way that Jesus demonstrated.
Lee: On Friday, June 26th, 2015, Bree and other activists made the drive to Columbia. On the way down they listened to President Obama’s eulogy, and Bree meditated on what she was about to do.
Obama: For many, Black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation.
Voices: Yes.
Lee: After just a few hours of sleep, Bree and the other activists met at an IHOP by the capitol. They climbed into cars and headed to the state house. Arriving before the sun, the team began to take their positions.
Newsome Bass: We had people who, for instance, were just pretending to be out and about, jogging, or you know, doing whatever in the park. And they were, like, the lookout.
Lee: Bree and James Tyson, a white activist from the Charlotte area, were the ones whose job it was to actually remove the flag.
Newsome Bass: And so we were waiting in the car. I had practiced all of it. I pulled my gear on in the car, inside the car, because, you know, you don’t want somebody to look over and see you pulling this gear on in the parking lot.
Lee: In addition to her climbing harness and helmet, Bree decided to wear all black that day as tribute to the Black Power Movement. Then it was time. Bree and James walked slowly and deliberately toward the flagpole.
Newsome Bass: We practiced walking very, you know, resolutely, but don’t run, because running would draw attention. And we had James wear a safety vest and a white construction helmet, so if anybody were to glance over, you know, it just looks like we are maybe doing some construction work or something down there.
And we walked over. James held his hand down so I could step into his hands. And he helped me over the fence. I did end up falling on the fence some kinda way, because one of the spokes went through my hand. But I was filled with so much adrenaline at that point that I just kept going.
Lee: The goal was for Bree to get at least eight feet up the flagpole before any officials took notice.
Newsome Bass: We felt like if I could at least get to that point nobody could easily reach up and grab me. And then I can pause and catch my breath if I need to. I don’t think I was too far up before the police were over there and shouting at me to come down. (UNINTEL YELL)
Archival Recording: Ma’am.
Archival Recording: Ma’am, get off the pole.
Archival Recording: Ma’am.
Archival Recording: Now. Ma’am.
Archival Recording: Come down off the pole.
Archival Recording: Ma’am, come down off the pole.
Archival Recording: Get off the pole. Ma’am. Ma’am…
Newsome Bass: I had planned to climb in silence. I wasn’t really planning to, like, make any statements or anything, like, while I was doing it. But the police yelling at me is what prompted me to, like, talk back to them and, you know, I’m saying, “This is a nonviolent action.”
And I can’t remember, somebody said something like, “This doesn’t have anything to do with you.” And I was like, “My ancestors were enslaved here. This has everything (LAUGH) to do with, like, please don’t tell me this doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
Lee: And then in this moment, with her adrenaline pumping, Bree Newsome began to pray.
Newsome Bass: I prayed the 27th Psalm. I said, “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life, of whom shall I be afraid.” The Lord is the stronghold of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid? And that, I was, that was like reminding myself. You know, like, “Okay, look,” you know, like, “Okay, I, you know, I will go where you tell me to go, just be with me. Just be with me.”
Lee: At the top of the flagpole, Bree unhooked the Confederate flag and yelled.
Newsome Bass: You come against me with hatred, and oppression, and violence. I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today.
Archival Recording: Get off the pole.
Newsome Bass: Scaling the pole, being at the top, holding the flag in my hand, like, looking down and out across the city, I actually had a tremendous sense of peace. Like–
Lee: Wow.
Newsome Bass: I’ve never felt anything like that before or since. I believe it was the Holy Spirit. I believe that I had an experience of the Holy Spirit, because I truly did believe that I was called in that moment to take that flag down.
Lee: So you climbed 30 feet high, you know, you had that flag in your hand. The police are there. Walk us through, like, coming down the pole and everything that happened next.
Newsome Bass: It was right when I was getting ready to take it down that they threatened to taze me. So there was this point where they had, like, three or four people with tasers trained on me. I’m attached to a metal pole and they’re talking about they’re gonna electrocute me pretty much, right?
I’m trying to come down, sir. I’m gonna comply, I promise you. I’m coming down. I’m prepared to be arrested. Once I was able to actually unhook the flag, I mean, that felt like victory from there. I was kind of, like, (LAUGH) I’m ready to be arrested now, you know, because we’ve done it. Whatever happens from here happens.
Lee: But on the ground below, those cops still had their tasers pointed her way.
Newsome Bass: And so that’s why if you see the video when I’m coming down, James is holding on to the pole, because he’s basically saying, like, “If you do that you’re gonna have to electrocute me too,” and people are standing around and shouting. And so as I’m coming down, after they have just threatened to electrocute me, their big thing was that the flag not touch the ground.
Lee: Wow.
Newsome Bass: At one point we had to tell them, like, “Let the flag go, ’cause she can’t come down, like, the way you’re pulling on the flag, she can’t even come down.” And it was like, their whole thing was just like, “This flag cannot”–
Lee: That’s crazy.
Newsome Bass: –“cannot touch the ground.” We’re not even treating human life with that kind of–
Lee: Wow.
Newsome Bass: –reverence.
Lee: With Bree’s feet planted firmly on the ground, James untethered her from the pole and people around her (APPLAUSE) erupted.
Newsome Bass: It is our duty to win.
Voices: It is our duty to win.
Newsome Bass: We must love and protect each other.
Voices: We must love and protect each other.
Newsome Bass: We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Voices: We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Newsome Bass: And of course they arrested us. And as they were leading us away, that’s when I started praying the 23rd Psalm. You know, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. I shall not want. (CHEER) He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside still waters.
Archival Recording: In the word of God. What are they arresting you for?
Lee: Almost immediately Bree knew she’d done something important. As she was being arrested, one of the officers, a Black man, paused.
Newsome Bass: As we were being taken down into, like, we had, like, a holding area there at the capitol. And that’s when one of the officers asked me, like, “Why did you do that?” Like, I could tell, like, even in him, it was like, there was this part of him that was the officer, like, he has on the uniform.
He has his job, it’s to, like, guard the flag and do what he has to do. But even in that moment I think, I felt like something was shifting for him too, because he was kind of, like, “What did I just experience? Like, what did I just see?” And the tone of his voice, it was like he was thinking about it in a different way for the first time, maybe.
Lee: Wow.
Newsome Bass: It wasn’t like, “Why did you do that?” You know, it wasn’t like that. It was like, “Hmm.”
Lee: Bree and James were charged with defacing monuments on state capitol grounds. The charges were later dropped, and Bree became an icon of the movement. But more importantly, her action worked.
Lester Holt: Today, in the shadow of the South Carolina State House, it took an honor guard just 36 seconds to lower a symbol that has divided this nation for a century and a half. The applause was thunderous and sustained.
Lee: Less than two weeks after Bree climbed that pole, removing this symbol of hatred, the change was made permanent. On July 9th, 2015, then-Governor Nikki Haley signed a bipartisan bill to remove the flag from state house grounds. The next day, the flag was lowered for the very last time and sent a mile away to the Confederate Relic Room, the state’s military museum.
Newsome Bass: I am not convinced that they ever would’ve taken it down had we not done what we did.
Lee: Bree’s climbing gear from that day now sits on display at the Smithsonion’s Exhibit on Reconstruction. You see her black pants and t-shirt and the helmet she wore. And there’s an ordinary navy blue JanSport backpack with climbing carabiners. Clipped onto a series of cords were a pair of scissors, a wrench, and a pair of pliers, all hanging. Practical, ordinary tools that helped her do something extraordinary.
Newsome Bass: I was just tremendously honored. I mean, it’s so interesting how things become historic artifacts, because those (LAUGH) were, I mean, prior to them being historic artifacts these were just things I had in my closet that I’m pulling out and trying to decide, “What am I gonna wear as I do this action?”
Lee: With her climbing gear in the museum, Bree’s place in history is cemented. But Bree’s not just concerned about what was or has been. She’s guided by the faith of what could be.
Newsome Bass: I think that, you know, it is as much about the present as it is about the past. In fact, it’s more about the present, because the question is what are we building now? You know, I also view the flag removal as a form of Afrofuturism. It’s about imagining a Black future that has yet to exist.
We have to talk about the past because the past is what informs our understanding of today. But I really wanna talk about the future. I wanna talk about what we are imagining in the aftermath. And that, to me, is the power of that image as well, of the flag coming down. Because it symbolizes the toppling of these things. Like, it was here and now it’s gone.
Lee: I asked Bree how she sees herself fitting into this long history of Black faith and freedom fighting.
Newsome Bass: I absolutely place myself in that tradition where our resistance is not just political, it is spiritual. It is about the Black prophetic tradition. Because the belief that we will be delivered from white supremacy is a prophecy. That’s not something that has happened yet.
That’s a prophecy. So we’re operating in this prophetic belief that Harriet Tubman was truly a prophet, right, and that she was guided by the Holy Spirit when she was leading people to freedom. I mean, I identified that as the tradition that I came out. I grew up with them telling me about my great, great, great grandmother and how she would pray to God that we would see freedom, and now her children have seen freedom. So it’s very much this sense of people being led by faith.
Lee: A lot has changed for Bree since that day in 2015 when she climbed that flagpole and snatched down the Confederate flag. She got married and became a mother, but she’s still an activist. And it’s that moment 30 feet off the ground, racist battle emblem in hand, that gives her the strength to keep pushing today.
Newsome Bass: I had an experience of the divine. And it was love and peace and selflessness, and can only hope that at the end of my life that that is what I get returned to.
Obama: This whole week I’ve been reflecting on this idea of grace. When a friend of mine, the writer Marilyn Robinson, calls “that reservoir of goodness.” If we can find that grace, anything is possible. (APPLAUSE) If we can tap that grace, everything can change. Amazing grace. Amazing grace. (SINGS) Amazing (APPLAUSE) grace, how sweet the sound.
Voices: That saved a wretch like me; I once was lost, but now I’m found; was blind but now I see. (APPLAUSE)
Obama: Clementa Pinckney found that grace. Cynthia Hurd found that grace. Susie Jackson found that grace. Ethel Lance found that grace. DePayne Middleton-Doctor found that grace. Tywanza Sanders found that grace. Daniel L. Simmons, Sr. found that grace. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton found that grace…
Lee: As Bree Newsome continues to live her life, fueled by faith and activism, justice, and grace, she thinks about the sacrifices that so many Black people have made along the way, willingly or not. Bree told us earlier her work, like so many activists, has been fueled in large part by the death of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old boy shot and killed by a vigilante in Sanford, Florida, ten years ago. Over the past decade, the legacy of Trayvon’s death has left us and this country forever changed. The tragedy of his senseless killing and all of the injustice baked into it is one of the more visceral legacies of reconstruction.
Crew: What Travyon Martin’s experience and his death illustrates is that there are these certain places where people probably should be that are acceptable continues to be an important part of how our lives are defined today.
Lee: More than just anguish and loss, Trayvon’s killing signaled a new era in the movement toward truer freedom in America, an era when a generation rose and proclaimed loudly, unapologetically, that Black lives matter. Next week in the fourth and final installment of our Reconstructed series, we bring you The Book of Trayvon.
Remember to follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook using the handle @IntoAmericaPod. That’s @IntoAmericaPod. And you can tweet me @TrymaineLee, or write to us at IntoAmerica@nbcuni.com. that was IntoAmerica@nbc, and the letters uni.com.
Powell: Keep the faith, baby.
Lee: Into America is produced by Isabel Angell, Allison Bailey, Aaron Dalton, Max Jacobs, and Joshua Sirotiak. Original music is by Hannis Brown. Our executive producer is Aisha Turner. Special thanks this week to Stefanie Cargill along with Tom Craca, Jim Long, Tom Staton, and Andy Scritchfield.
Shout out to Fleur Paysour, Melissa Wood, and the entire team at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. And thank you to the Mullikan Law Firm in Camden, South Carolina, for giving their permission to use their recording of Reverend Pinckney. I’m Trymaine Lee. We’ll see you next Thursday for Reconstructed Part Four: The Book of Trayvon.