On June 17, 2015, nine people were shot to death during a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. On Saturday, Nov. 14, the city opens the memorial that carries their names.
The Emanuel Nine Memorial sits beside the church, the congregation known as Mother Emanuel. The nine were Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton and Myra Thompson. Dylann Roof, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, killed them in a Black church that had stood through slavery, fire and Jim Crow. He was convicted and sentenced to death, and a federal court denied him a new trial in August 2025.
Architect Michael Arad, who designed the National September 11 Memorial in New York, drew the plans. At the center is the Fountain of Grace, with the nine names etched around its edge. Two Fellowship Benches face each other. The Cross of Hope gives visitors a place to stop. The foundation behind the project describes it as a place for remembrance, reflection and education.
The money is not all in. As Capital B reported, the Mother Emanuel Memorial Foundation has raised $19.9 million of its $25 million goal, and a garden for the five survivors is still in development.
The families have said what they want the ground to do. “You don’t want people to forget why my mom and eight other people aren’t here anymore,” Chris Singleton, whose mother was Rev. Coleman-Singleton, told Capital B. Rev. Sharon Washington Risher, whose mother was Ethel Lance, put it this way: “It’s never going to go away, but if we can do something to try to curb the violence and save even one life, that’s better than nothing.”
That last request is the one a memorial cannot meet by itself. The nine were killed for being Black in a church, and the memorial names that plainly. A fountain, though, does not rewrite a state’s curriculum or stop the next person with a gun and a hatred. Eleven years on, school boards and legislatures are still fighting over how much of this history children may be taught.
The ground beside Mother Emanuel is now open to anyone who wants to learn it. The $5 million still to raise, and the survivors’ garden it would pay for, are the next test of whether Charleston and South Carolina finish what they started.
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