Chris Singleton remembers vividly how one phone call and a horrific act upended his life in South Carolina.
On June 17, 2015, the collegiate baseball player had recently finished a successful freshman season. As he relaxed on the couch, a woman called from his mother’s phone, urging him to get to Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. The 18-year-old sensed that something terrible had happened.
Earlier that evening, a white supremacist had entered the Charleston church, known as Mother Emanuel, and fatally shot his mother, the Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and eight other worshippers after sitting with them for an hour during Bible study.
More than a decade after the attack, Singleton, now 30, will witness the unveiling of the Emanuel Nine Memorial. Established by the Mother Emanuel Memorial Foundation, the ceremony on Nov. 14 will feature tributes to the victims and performances of gospel, jazz, and poetry. Located near the church at 120 Calhoun St., the memorial is intended not only to honor the slain worshippers but also educate visitors about the ongoing terrors of racism — work that the community says is especially vital at a time when Black history is being erased.
“You don’t want people to forget why my mom and eight other people aren’t here anymore,” Singleton told Capital B. “We need to address why it happened and how we’re going to stop it from happening in the future.”
The other victims of the shooting were Cynthia Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, the Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney (who also was a state senator), Ethel Lance, Tywanza Sanders, the Rev. Daniel Simmons, and the Rev. Myra Thompson.
The memorial was a long time coming, its completion not always assured.
It began as a labor of love among Mother Emanuel members and the wider Charleston community, who wanted to establish a permanent site to commemorate the victims. But development was slowed down by construction delays. After breaking ground in 2023, the foundation hoped to finish the memorial in 2025, the 10-year anniversary of the shooting. The project, however, took longer than expected, as the foundation sought to close its fundraising gap and as supply shortages impacted the timeline.
To bring its vision to life, the foundation tapped Michael Arad, the architect behind the National September 11 Memorial in New York City. He worked with victims’ families, church members, and other Charleston residents to get it right and forge a space that the community would deem worthy of the nine victims. Arad drew inspiration from Mother Emanuel’s history of resisting racial oppression. This includes periods when Black worship was prohibited but Mother Emanuel still offered fellowship, Lee Bennett Jr., the church’s historian, told Capital B.
At the heart of the memorial is the Fountain of Grace, with the names of the victims etched around the edge. There are also two Fellowship Benches facing each other like protective wings, and a Cross of Hope, designed to be a place of solemnity where visitors can pause and reflect. A Survivors’ Garden, intended to honor the five survivors, is soon to come. The foundation has so far secured about $19.9 million toward its $25 million goal. The additional funds are needed to help complete the garden and maintain the memorial.
“The same way the families and survivors showed resilience, the foundation has had to show a good deal of resilience to get this project completed,” Deona Smith, the foundation’s executive director, told Capital B. “For so many young people and future generations, this will be history, and so the memorial ensures that we won’t forget.”
More than a place to remember
Memory, though, is about more than preserving the past, some in the community say. It’s also about reckoning with the forces — the white supremacy — that shaped the past and continue to shape the present.
The foundation’s goal is to fuel that reckoning through its Crossroads Education and Outreach program, intended to bring people together to discuss how communities might confront racism, including the kind of online radicalization that incubated the gunman’s hatred. (In 2025, the U.S. Supreme declined to hear an appeal in a lawsuit against Meta alleging that its algorithms had a hand in radicalizing the shooter by exposing him to racist propaganda.) The foundation hopes that its programming will reach not just older generations but also those who have no real memory of the massacre.
“These programs will allow us to hold conversations that will probably make some people uncomfortable, but they’re absolutely necessary,” Smith said.
As the Rev. Sharon Washington Risher sees it, these conversations are overdue. She was comforting a grieving family at a Dallas hospital when she began receiving calls about the shooting. Her mother, Ethel Lance, was one of the nine people killed. Since then, Risher, 68, has become a vocal gun control advocate, devoting her time to challenging policies that contributed to the massacre. She has worked with organizations such as Everytown for Gun Safety to focus attention on the consequences of gun violence and to push for stronger firearm regulations.
While she acknowledges that these measures can’t completely eliminate gun violence, she insists that not doing anything isn’t an option.
“It’s never going to go away, but if we can do something to try to [curb] the violence and just save even one life, then that’s better than nothing,” Risher told Capital B.
The memorial’s focus on confronting the roots of violence also raises questions about how the massacre has been remembered. For Risher, one of the most troubling aspects of the aftermath was the national fixation on the forgiveness that some victims’ families offered the killer. Within days of the shooting, this grace had seized the country’s attention. But Risher worried that this behavior allowed people to move on without actually wrestling with the hatred behind the slaughter.
Risher, who also lost two cousins and a childhood friend, recalled that she was nowhere near ready to forgive.
“I was very hurt and angry. It took me a long time to get to thinking about forgiveness,” she said. “I felt like the media latched onto that [narrative] to make themselves feel better about what had happened.”
Her concerns echo what other relatives of the Emanuel Nine have told Capital B. In a 2025 report, several family members — including Malcolm Graham, whose sister, Cynthia Graham Hurd, was killed in the shooting, and Alana Grant, a granddaughter of the Rev. Daniel Simmons, another victim — expressed frustration with the country’s fascination with forgiveness. They saw it as coming at the expense of hard conversations about racial hatred and the political changes that might help to prevent another massacre, such as enacting state hate crime legislation.
Those in the Charleston community say that the need for a fuller reckoning has only grown in importance as efforts to undermine Black history threaten to make it more difficult for younger generations to understand the country’s long struggle with racism. The Trump administration this year removed and later replaced exhibits about nine people enslaved by George Washington from a historic site in Philadelphia, drawing criticism that it was sanitizing history.
The Charleston memorial stands as a counterweight to such efforts, ensuring that the story of the Emanuel Nine won’t be erased.
Singleton has seen firsthand why that education matters. Since his mother’s death, he’s traveled across the country speaking with students about racism and inclusion. While he’s encouraged by the progress he’s witnessed, he knows that the hatred that killed his mother hasn’t disappeared.
Seven years after the shooting, a white gunman traveled to a predominantly Black area of Buffalo, New York, and killed 10 shoppers — all of them Black — at a supermarket. And in 2023, another white gunman killed three Black people at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida.
“There’s still work to be done,” Singleton said. “There’s still kids who grow up to hate people who look like me, just based on something I don’t control and you don’t control.”
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