Campaign 2024: While Republicans crisscross Iowa, Biden heads to South Carolina.
But it is Joseph R. Biden Jr. who will become the first sitting president to speak at the storied church when he delivers a campaign address there Monday about threats to American democracy, including those posed by political and hate-fueled violence.
Mr. Biden will speak as president in the creaky old sanctuary itself, backed by towering stained glass one floor above the scene of the blood bath, a setting that conveys a mosaic of messages as he seeks to re-energize his African American base.
Mr. Biden is far from the first to make a political case from Emanuel’s pulpit. His predecessors include Booker T. Washington in 1909, W.E.B. Du Bois in 1922 and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1962.
The church’s founding pastor used it as a springboard to Congress during Reconstruction. Its civil rights-era pastor simultaneously led the local N.A.A.C.P. and staged anti-discrimination marches from its steps. The pastor who welcomed the perpetrator into Bible study and was first shot by him was also a long-tenured state senator, the youngest African American elected to the state’s Legislature.
The Biden campaign’s choice of Emanuel intends to show common cause with Black voters, who polls suggest have lost a measure of enthusiasm for the president. South Carolina, where African Americans make up about 60 percent of the Democratic electorate, hosts the party’s first-in-the-nation primary on Feb. 3.
Before the shootings in 2015, Emanuel stood as an exemplar of two centuries of Black resistance to enslavement, oppression and discrimination. Its long history highlighted the essential role played by the Black church in freedom movements across the 19th and 20th centuries.
The congregation began to form in 1817 in the commercial heart of the slave trade after a breakaway by free and enslaved Black people from white-controlled churches. Its first home was ordered destroyed by city officials in 1822 after they concluded that a foiled slave insurrection had incubated there. The congregation reconstituted as Emanuel immediately after the Civil War, when A.M.E. missionaries followed Union troops into a bombed-out Charleston.
After the murderous rampage by the perpetrator, Emanuel evolved into a different kind of symbol, of the persistence of racial violence in a post-civil rights age. And when family members of five of the victims showed up at the perpetrator’s bond hearing and expressed forgiveness for the unrepentant white supremacist, the church came to embody their expression of Christian grace.
Those families and survivors of the shootings have been invited to visit with Mr. Biden in the sanctuary after the speech. He also is expected to meet with ministers in the fellowship hall, which is little changed from the night of the attack.
By setting his speech at Emanuel, Mr. Biden emphasizes that there is still work to be done, a reminder that even though we’re in the 21st century we still have some outdated minds in America, said a prominent A.M.E. minister in Charleston and longtime Biden supporter.
Like many Americans, Mr. Biden was deeply affected by the events of June 2015. Seventeen days before the shootings, he had lost his elder son to brain cancer. As vice president, he and his wife attended the memorial service that featured the former President’s eulogy. Mr. Biden returned to Charleston two days later to worship with Emanuel’s congregants. He had come to show the administration’s solidarity, he said, but also ’to draw some strength from all of you.'
Mr. Biden recounted that experience at a key juncture in the 2020 campaign, shortly before the crucial South Carolina primary, in a poignant televised exchange. He characterized the forgiveness expressed by others as ’the ultimate act of Christian charity.'
Mr. Biden’s victory in South Carolina, owing largely to Black voters, righted his listing campaign after losses in earlier contests. Although he did not visit Emanuel during that race, eight of his Democratic challengers did.
Emanuel has become totemic in debates over combating hate crimes and gun violence, with the pastor and survivors of the attacks keeping high profiles. One of those survivors said of Mr. Biden’s visit that ‘it’s an honor that the victims and survivors are remembered by the president and people across the nation.’
More than eight years after Emanuel was thrust into an unwanted spotlight, the congregation remains in recovery. Church leaders now juggle weddings and funerals with the burdens of administering what has become an international shrine. Tour buses arrive during the week; visitors, nearly outnumber members in the pews some Sundays.
The congregation, already shrinking thanks to an aging membership and the gentrification of downtown Charleston, numbers only 576, down from more than 2,000 in the 1950s. The Covid pandemic converted many into Sunday-morning streamers. A fourth of the roughly 100 worshipers at this week’s service were visitors.
Pastor has led a multiyear effort to raise millions to repair severe termite damage in the trusses and start other renovations. The first phase, finished last year, made it safe to reoccupy the choir loft, but left the church $870,000 in debt. Separately, a foundation has been raising $25 million to build a memorial to the Emanuel shooting victims, designed by the architect Michael Arad, best known for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York. Ground was broken recently in the church parking lot.
The memorial’s purpose, and Emanuel’s story, dovetail with Mr. Biden’s political message, said a representative from South Carolina, an A.M.E. member whose district includes the church. There are lessons to be learned from the tragedy that took place on this holy ground.