Most of the eulogy President Obama delivered today for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, one of the nine people killed in last week’s shooting at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, wasn’t about the shooting itself — which was appropriate. But when Obama did discuss the shooting, while he didn’t exactly call it terrorism, he did situate it within the history of racial terrorism in the US:
But he [the shooter] 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. A way to terrorize and oppress.
As Obama himself has said before, what’s important isn’t just that “Mother Emanuel” was a church, but that it was a black church. In the video above, Vox lays out the history Obama alluded to in today’s eulogy: one in which the black church, and any other symbols of black pride, have been targeted as an affront to white supremacy.
