Charleston, United States---The pews inside "Mother Emanuel" were packed for a Sunday service like none other in its nearly 200-year history, but the emotions were no less raw.
Several hundred people filled the street outside Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church where, four days earlier, a young white man with visions of race war walked into a Bible study class and shot dead nine blacks.
It was a diverse crowd, white and black, young and old, mainly Christian but with the odd Muslim here and Sikh there, braving the sweltering South Carolina heat and humidity on the first day of summer.
"Just because you're outside doesn't mean you're not inside with them," shouted Brenda Peart, wandering through the crowd with a selfie stick, as loudspeakers relayed the songs and sermons from the pulpit to the street.
Peart, who moved from New York to Charleston five years ago, said Wednesday's massacre would not drive a wedge through a city that, in another era, was the American capital of the transatlantic slave trade.
One reason, she said, is that everybody knows everybody in Charleston, whose metropolitan area's population of nearly 500,000 is 65 percent white and 30 percent black.
"Other places have six degrees of separation," she told AFP. "Charleston has one to 2.5 degrees, max."
- Seeds and cookies -
At the foot of the stairs up to the church, a young white Charleston woman gave out cookies and an older Illinois man passed out sunflower seeds.
"You get children to relate weeding a garden to weeding out hate," explained Marc Daniels as he whipped out seed packets from his yellow apron.
With the thermometer hitting 94 degrees Fahrenheit (34 Celsius), which felt like 104 in the humidity, volunteers easily found takers for ice-cold bottles of water.
Some people lifted their hands up in prayer. Others embraced each other or held hands. Some came dressed in their Sunday best, others in more sensible shorts and T-shirts.
From time to time, a voice in the crowd would shout out: "Amen." Or "Hallelujah." Or "God have mercy."
Stretched over Calhoun Street, named for a 19th century US vice president who championed slavery, a banner for last week's World Elder Abuse Awareness Day still hung in place.
Thick rows of flowers lined the front of the white Neo-Gothic church that gleamed in the sun. One wreath with the Koran stood next to a big but sad-looking teddy bear.
On a notice board along the church facade, Clementa Pinckney -- one of the shooting victims, and also a state senator -- was still identified as Emanuel's chief pastor.
AFP
