Protesters were right to interrupt Joe Biden at Mother Emanuel AME

Around the same time a trio of pro-Palestinian protesters were escorted out of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on Monday afternoon for interrupting President Joe Biden’s speech to parishioners, I was in Columbia, listening to state senators Shane Massey and Brad Hutto argue about South Carolina’s not having a hate crime statute, even now. Hutto, who is for a hate crime statute, said not having one, as 48 other states do, “hurts our industrial recruitment” and discourages tourism. Massey said such legislation is unnecessary because people are already being sufficiently punished without specific hate crime legislation.

The coincidence of Biden’s being interrupted in the church where white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine Black people at Bible study as South Carolina lawmakers were debating whether the state needs hate crime legislation was profound. For better and for worse, South Carolina has long been a cradle of protest. The state government grounds are a monument to the Confederacy and white supremacy, honoring names such as John C. Calhoun, Wade Hampton and segregationist Strom Thurmond, the late U.S. senator whom Joe Biden eulogized in 2003.

By contrast, as the history on its website proudly proclaims, the African Methodist Episcopal denomination is the result of a protest from Black Methodists who weren’t being treated equally by white congregants. Denmark Vesey, a freedman, joined the AME church in 1817 and planned a slave rebellion in 1822 at Mother Emanuel. Vesey was executed by hanging, and the church where he plotted the attack was burned to the ground.

What’s more appropriate, then, in the sanctuary of Emanuel AME? The head of the government making a campaign speech or people yelling out for the freedom of people who are being oppressed? “The truth is under assault in America,” Biden said during his campaign stop at the church. “As a consequence, so is our freedom, our democracy, our very country, because, without the truth, there is no light. Without light, there’s no path from this darkness.”

“If you really care about the lives lost here,” those protesting Biden’s speech yelled at him, “then you should honor the lives lost and call for a cease-fire in Palestine. Cease-fire now!”

Some people, including those associated with the church, have taken issue with the protesters’ decision to confront Biden there. Some people inside the church leaped to defend the president with chants of “Four more years!” Calls for a cease-fire, much like the calls for hate crime legislation in South Carolina, are the least that politicians can do to promote peace.

That history of Mother Emanuel and its history of protesting the established order has been largely glossed over by both sides of the aisle since Roof unleashed the massacre in 2015 that claimed the lives of eight parishioners and the Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Instead of being remembered for its history of radical protest, the church has been a refuge for politicians to score points. Biden was at Emanuel in the first place in an attempt to appeal to Black voters, who, according to poll numbers, are growing cool to his candidacy.