One Mother Emanuel—
small pox epidemic.
Strength for the Journey . . .
Emanuel’s Beginnings
Emanuel AME Church is the oldest AME
Church in the South, founded in 1818, during
slavery. Emanuel’s history begins with the
founding of a 1797 prayer band. That band
became the Hampstead congregation of the
Bethel AME circuit, 10 years before Ft. Sumter
was built.
Disputes over collections and
administrative oversight flamed tensions in
1815 when Charleston’s black Methodists were
suspected of using their church funds to buy
the freedom of enslaved members. When
white Methodists in 1817 wanted to build a
hearse barn (a structure for storing horse-
drawn wagons built for transporting coffins) on
top of black burial sites, three slave
congregations, including 4,367 from Bethel,
withdrew from Charleston’s Methodist
Churches in protest.
Mercy and forgiveness poured out if this
congregation as it built is walls as a place to
call the faithful to worship, and the high
calling of mercy is present in its open arms
today.
Morris Brown, a
Charleston Methodist
leader contacted Richard
Allen in Philadelphia.
Allen, an ex-Delaware
field hand, was ordained
to preach in 1784. When
Francis Asbury
Morris Brown
consecrated him in 1816,
Allen became the first black Methodist bishop.
Brown requested Charleston’s three
congregations affiliate as a circuit of Allen’s
newly formed African Methodist Episcopal
(AME) church.
Allen, William White, Absalom Jones, and
others had been physically restrained and
beaten while praying: they refused to
segregate themselves in Philadelphia’s St.
George church balcony in 1787. Allen and the
others then formed the Free African Society as
a church and charity in 1787, meeting in a
transported blacksmith shop, using an anvil as
a pulpit. They organized an Episcopal church
1
in 1792, hailed for its service during the city’s
Allen, a devout Methodist, chartered
Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia in 1794.
President George Washington was among
those who gave Bethel a financial gift. Frances
Ellen Watkins Harper, an African-American
poet who worked with the Underground
Railroad in Ohio, (Bethel was also a stop)
taught Sunday school at Bethel.
New African-American churches were
opening north and south. Calls from faith
communities in other cities and states led
Bishop Richard Allen to an unprecedented step
in 1817. Allen convened a Philadelphia
conference and linked churches in New York,
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware,
Maryland--and Charleston, SC—into a new
Methodist denomination, the African Methodist
Episcopal (AME) Church.
Allen’s denomination adopted the
Methodist system of classes (small groups)
with lay class leaders guiding the moral and
social training of it members. (Allen though
this to be effective in developing Christian
character.) The oversight of the AME church
lay in the hands of consecrated bishops (the
Episcopate). “African” referred to the heritage
of its founding—the AME Church was and is
open to all. Never exclusively a “black “
church, it sought to transcend racial divisions
and prejudices in building the body of Christ.
Its 4th bishop, Paul Quinn, in fact, was born in
Calcutta, India.
In 1818, the Bethel Hampstead
congregation, its meetinghouse at Reid and
Hanover Streets in Charleston, became the
first AME church in the south.
Freedom’s First Sanctuary
The AME Church, a national church
established without European oversight, took
the courageous step to create an institution of
freedom and bind it to God. Allen’s AME
Church became a place where African-
Americans were not only free to practice their
faith; they could practice their faith in
freedom.
Faith is personal belief and
worship is public praise and thanksgiving for
God’s love and mercy. Both are inextricably
linked to freedom. The AME Church’s worship
affirmed God’s deliverance: through faith, God
delivered freedom to His church. With exactly
the same rights and self-governance as
European churches, inside the institution of
the AME Church (inside the rooms of the
mansion!), the enslaved were free. God
answered their gifts of faith with the gift of
freedom.
The Methodists tried to side step the
intertwined issues of faith and freedom by
advocating a “middle ground” that neatly
separated the functions of church and state.
The state regulated and subjugated persons to
slavery. The church struggled and existed only
to save souls through Christ; it should not
meddle in politics or the affairs of state.
But individual freedom is derived from
institutions and law, and the AME Church, as
an institution, offered the first breakthrough.
As the true believers gathered, their faith
brought freedom; the meetinghouse was Zion:
blessed, protected, transformed. The very
laws that made them enslaved protected
Zion’s walls, and set them free. The church
stood as a paradox that stood slavery on its
head.
Worship in the luxury of freedom often
extended to midnight, prompting an local
editorial: “Almost every night there is a
meeting of these noisy, frantic worshippers . .
. Midnight!”
Ill at ease, and unsure what to make of
the power and transforming grace of faith’s
freedom, tensions grew. Political freedom
awaited a devastating war.
With churches in San Francisco by 1850,
in Africa by 1891, (and with 2 million members
by 1995!), Richard Allen ‘s 42 member church
turned into an international institution of faith.
It was a living horn work to protect and defend
liberty, opportunity, education, and justice.
Allen’s vision of worship and freedom was no
different than America’s founding fathers. His
Church is the first American institution to fully
bestow American freedom on the enslaved.
Morris Brown--Charleston
Although he would not meet Bishop Allen
for another five years, in 1823, Charleston’s
Morris Brown shared his vision, and is a
founding father of American liberty no less
than Charleston’s Pinckneys, Rutledges, or
Henry Laurens.
As the Pinckneys and Laurens went abroad
in the service of American foreign policy,
Morris Brown carried the story of salvation
2
through Christ and the freedom of the AME
Church to Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and
Wisconsin; he convened the Canadian
conference, and went as far west as
Oklahoma. He then returned to pastor Mother
Bethel as Allen’s health declined. In 1828,
Morris Brown was selected the second AME
Bishop, having complete oversight and charge
of the Church’s affairs, convening its general
and area conferences from Allen’s 1829 health
decline to Brown’s own decline in 1844.
Emanuel AME Church is Charleston's most
important historic African-American physical and
heritage site.
If “Black” Harry Hoiser, a circuit preacher
(who met Richard Allen in 1784) can be
compared to St. John the Baptist (called
“America’s greatest orator,” Hosier exhorted
thousands to faith in Christ and fellowship in
the Methodist Church), Charleston’s Morris
Brown, a former shoe cobbler, was Paul to
Richard Allen’s Peter.
How important was the faith and freedom
offered by the AME Church?
The week before Morris Brown’s birth in
1770, the South Carolina Gazette reported a
meteor streaking across the sky, the color of
“living coal.” 42 slaves, many “tradesmen,”
were offered for sale. The victim of an
attempted robbery struck a slave running
away in the skull with a “musket lock,” killing
him. Upon the judge’s hearing and
recommendation, the slave’s head was
severed, foisted on a pike, and displayed “at
the cross roads, near Ashley Ferry.”
While Castile Selby (a noted 50 year
Methodist whose prayers once healed a dying
bishop) and other African-Americans remained
in Methodist congregations after what whites
called the “African schism,” Morris Brown’s
God-guided work was a “shout of triumph.”
First Shot
Ft. Sumter, with its 5 foot thick wall and its
70,000 tons of New England granite rising 50
feet above the sea’s low tide, began
construction in 1827, 5 years after the first
AME Hampstead congregation closed its doors
and watched its church destroyed and burned.
 The early clashes of the church, how to
accommodate a community both slave and
free, rich and poor, with opposing views of
liberty,
government,
and human
freedom,
influenced
by race,
grew to
occupy the
national
political
stage.
Cold Harbor, Va., 1864, named for a
crossroads tavern, left 15,500 dead, In
including Charlestonians from St. Philips.
1861, the
first shot fired at Charleston’s Fort Sumter
began a 4 year war that took 620,000
American lives and tested our survival as a
nation. The war embroiled complex issues—
states rights, slavery, taxation, wealth and
power.
5, On February 19, 1865, Charleston
thorit Civil authority for
Sumter
returned to the Union.
Then Freedom Came
That day, the 33rd Regiment USCT, SC V
—a regiment of South Carolina African-
American soldiers who were Union volunteers
—marched down Meeting Street before noon,
wearing red pants, shouldering Springfield and
Enfield or Remington “Zoave” rifles, and
singing Methodist hymns, in a cadence step
that took them pass the auction blocks where
some had been sold.
With the beating of pans and
washboards to shouts of dancing, followed by
high stepping and the singing of spirituals like
“Great Day,” the soldiers passed Calhoun
Street, beyond the city’s limits. One older
woman reminded a Union officer of her faith,
telling him “her Jesus” freed the city’s 18,000
slaves.
What Happened when Slavery Ended;
How Did Freedmen Fare?
The question loomed, with slavery
ended, what would freedom bring?
3
A
Boys sitting on Circular Congregational
Church’s Column, at Meeting St. St. John’s
Lutheran Church in the distance, 1865
thirst for education, for one. Within three
weeks, the new community of freemen
enrolled 3,000 students in jubilee schools.
The desire to praise God, for another.
By April, Rev. Richard H. Cain and 8 missionary
preachers sailed into Charleston under the
Union flag flying over Fort Sumter.
Daniel A. Payne, a Charleston native son
and the AME Church’s 12th bishop had arrived
earlier in the month, returning home almost to
the day for the first time in 30 years.
That night at Old Bethel Church on
Calhoun Street, Bishop Payne, Rev. Cain, and
the others celebrated a jubilee AME worship
service. It was the first public official AME
meeting in more than 40 years and many of
the original members sat in the pews. With
that service, the Charleston AME
congregation, having met in secret for 43
years, its members dispersed to other
churches, reclaimed its AME allegiance.
As the bricks toppled from Ft. Sumter in
fierce conflict, the brick walls of Emanuel
towered toward the horizon in thanksgiving
and peace. Its magnificent portions, its
original heart pine flooring, wainscoting, gas
lamps and chandeliers, embossed pressed
tin ceiling and pews still greet each visitor.
Already 3,000 strong, the congregation
gathered new members, purchased land on
the Calhoun Street’s north side, and built a
wooden church which soon served 5,000
members— the largest congregation of ex-
slaves, their family and children, anywhere in
the South, in the first years after the Civil War.

The Charleston congregation’s early action
built one of the largest jubilee sanctuaries:
completed by April 1866, it seated 3,000 and
cost $10,000. Renamed, Emanuel (“God is
with us”) became the Mother Church of
Southern Freedom.
Daniel A. Payne: “A Noble Life”
By April’s end, the Lutheran-trained
Payne, working from Zion Presbyterian, had
organized the South Carolina
AME Conference by May 25. He sent
missionaries throughout the south. A year
Daniel A. Payne
later, the AME Church had more than 50,000
members regionally.
Daniel Alexander Payne lived a “noble
life of wide influence.” But he crossed life’s
perils grabbing toeholds on a narrow rope
bridge of faith and fellowship strung across
the massive chasms of American society,
shaken and swaying by the landscape’s
changing social winds. That narrow bridge
spanned slavery, freedom, war, terror,
personal loss, prophetic trials, policy debates
about education and social justice, overseeing
southern and western AME expansion.
Faith was the substance of Payne’s
strength for the journey. Payne’s faith rested in
his humility. Payne’s humility, paradoxically
led to his ever expanding responsibilities. For
throughout his life, Payne’s humility “carried
the respect of the wise and the good.”
Payne, an extraordinary student,
educator, and scholar was born in Charleston
in 1811. His mother’s heritage was Catawba
Indian and African-American. His freeborn
father, descended from Massachusetts
4
Fort Sumter Flag Raising, 1865, Library of Congress
veterans of the American Revolutionary War,
was stolen from Virginia and sold into slavery.
Payne’s father worked as a house and sign
painter in Charleston and repurchased his
freedom for $1,000. Both his church-going
mother, a member of Cumberland Street
Methodist mission, and his father, a leader of
the seeker’s and members classes, died early
in his childhood. Carried around town with his
legs straddling his father’s shoulders, leaning
on his mother’s side during services; when
small, Payne often prayed to God to help him
be “a good boy.” Sensitive and persevering,
Payne thrived mightily to improve himself and
the world around him. He learned “small gifts
of faith can have large returns.”
Orphaned by age nine, Payne’s fate was
cast upon an extended group of Methodist
families, the Westons (the family of his class
leader), Holloways (a family married into by
both Payne’s sister and his class leader’s
daughter), and Thomas Bonneau, a Methodist
and the preeminent teacher, schoolmaster,
and civic leader of Charleston’s non-slave
community.
Payne the Prophetic Pilgrim
Payne learned trades (carpentry,
tailoring) and the classics, but his early formal
education stopped at age eleven. At eighteen,
praying one afternoon after the Spirit set upon
him after a revival, Payne experienced a
prophetic calling. He heard God’s voice and
felt hands pressing heavily upon his shoulders.
The voice told him he had been sat aside to
become an educator.
At nineteen, completing wide ranging self-
directed studies in natural sciences,
languages, and mathematics, Payne opened a
local school on Tradd Street while his own
support (meals, small gifts) came from a
woman who was enslaved. After 6 years,
payne’s school had 60 students (both slave
and free), and had moved to larger building,
built and donated on Anson Street. The
authorities closed this school by legal fait in
1835.
Payne, supported by black and white
religious leaders from local faith communities,
enrolled in Gettysburg Seminary. He pastored
a Presbyterian church in East Troy, New York,
lost his voice, moved to Philadelphia, opened a
lower school with three students. His students
were the children of Joseph Corr from
Charleston’s Bethel Hampstead AME circuit.
Corr, now a general officer in the AME Church,
had come to Charleston with Morris Brown.
Robert Purvis: Freedom’s President
In Philadelphia, Payne also met another
Charleston native born a year before him, in
1810, Robert Purvis.
Purvis’ heritage defies modern beliefs
about the unbreachable 19th century
conventions of race, marriage, and income.
Purvis’ mother was Harriet Judah and her
mother was a Moroccan slave, Dido Badaraka.
Dido was the domestic partner of Hillel Judah,
the son of a German Jewish father and
Sephardic mother. She gave birth in
Charleston to Harriet an d a son. Harriet was
freed at 19.
Purvis’ father was an Englishman from
Northumberland who became a nauturalized
US citizen and a wealthy Charleston cotton
merchant. Certainly a free woman of North
African and Jewish descent courting, marrying,
and having a family with a wealthy
Englishmen would have been the talk of the
town in Charleston. Such a marriage would be
known to all, and especially bitter for those
who felt their own hopes dashed by a darker
skinned woman from a lower social class. The
“loss” would cast a shadow over the lessons
from the “taskmaster’s eye,” obscuring the
truth that all are equal in His love and gifted
by His mercy, that love is a first hope, not a
last gesture.
Purvis’ family moved to Philadelphia in
1819, shortly before
their father died. Robert Purvis
Purvis attended
Amherst College,
and he and his 2
brothers shared
their father’s estate
of more than
$250,000.
Purvis was an
activist in the underground railroad, and was
known by its close knit community as “the
President of the Underground Railroad.” From
1831 until 1861, Purvis helped one slave a day
achieve freedom—in total, he helped guide
more than 9,000 slaves to freedom—the
equivalent of half the number of slaves freed
by Charleston’s surrender. His son was one of
5
only eight black suregons to serve in the Union
army.
Payne lived among these Charleston
expatriates and saw their works. He was
inspired, no doubt, by the examples of fervent
abolitionistsSarah and Angelina Grimke,
Quakers, sisters from Charleston, and
daughters of the slave-holding Chief Justice of
the State’s Supreme Court. Lewis Tappan, Rev.
Alexander Crummell and many others who
fought for freedom and answered God’s
calling.
Emanuel’s founding and other events in
Charleston released unseen forces that
propelled far reaching social changes. Among
these was an expatriate community of
Charleston folk who saw their work for faith
and freedom as one, inseparable, part of the
oeuvre of the living God. To oppose slavery
was to oppose evil.
Philadelphia connected two
Charlestonians with biracial heritage whose
odysseys could be traced, directly and
indirectly to Bethel’s Hampstead
congregation. Morris Brown repeatedly
encouraged Daniel A. Payne to join the AME
connection. Joyously inspired, Payne agreed.
Payne was received on trial in 1841 and fully
accepted into the connection in 1843.
The Odyssey
After 30 years, Payne’s odyssey from
Charleston culminated with his return in May,
1865. In his autobiographical “Recollections”
he recalled “indescribable feelings,” as he
arrived in Charleston. Following the coast and
entering the harbor, he sailed past places now
“immortal in American history.”
But, as he landed, he noted, “destruction
marked every square through which we
passed. The holes made in the walls of the
finest residences; the burned, ruined walls of
the Circular and Cumberland Churches--all
showed the devastating hand of war.”
“It was Saturday afternoon, about four
or five o'clock, when I landed at Charleston.
Sunday morning I was in God's house, and
preached in the Presbyterian Church on
Calhoun Street. . . .and at night preached in
Old Bethel, the house of God in which I was
awakened . . . Monday morning I visited the
colored schools in which were gathered, it is
said, three thousand colored children . . .”
An apostle of education, Payne’s career
stretched from a one room school to becoming
President of Wilberforce University, the
nation’s first African-American college.
Working from Charleston, . . .
To measure Payne’s remarkable efforts,
by June 20,000 were straving, out of food
when government distribution stopped. By the
same month, 30,000 cart loads of debris had
been cleared and dumped. Yet Emanuel’s
cornerstone was set in September, and by
April 1866, Payne reported the church open for
worship.
At his 1866 . . .
Admired by Booker T. Washington and W. E. B.
DuBois, Payne is one of America’s greatest
advocates for education, social justice, and
the church as a multifaceted institution,
reflecting its role in his early life.
Emanuel’s Witness
Emanuel AME Church is a powerful
witness and answer to the fears and doubts
that haunted the character and actions of the
city’s ex-slaves. Its story includes men of
extraordinary vision and leadership.
Emanuel was the first American mega-
church. At its founding in 1817, its 5,000
members were the largest autonomous slave
meeting in the South, and the largest African-
American congregation in the nation.
It was disbanded, its meeting house
burned and destroyed in 1822, when a former
congregation member and lay leader,
Denmark Vesey, a carpenter, ship’s navigator,
and linguist (Vesey spoke 9 languages),
planned the largest, most elaborate American
insurrection ever organized (12,000 slaves!).
With a huge force marching in from the
countryside, and plans to attack the city’s
military arsenal and seize ships to sail to
freedom, the operation was foiled just hours
before it was signaled to begin.
Daniel Payne became the first African-
American college president, at Wilberforce
University, in Ohio. Richard H. Cain, Emanuel’s
new pastor, was twice elected to the US
Congress, and became the 14th AME bishop.
Cain once summed up the AME commission:
“Elevate the brethren; God ’s providence has
leveled the barriers and rolled way tyranny’ s
mountain—the pathway is cleared, lit by the
sunlight of liberty and God’s presence.”
6
A later Emanuel pastor, Moses B. Salters,
became the 21st AME bishop. Harry Bull was
an 1817 founder, remained friends with
Methodist nurse Mary Ann Berry and Nancy
Coates who once give a bishop a “mites” gift
of a dollar!
After segregation, Emanuel’s members
included a SC state senator and
representative, a state circuit court judge, and
a city council member.
Emanuel AME Church is Charleston's most
important historic African-American heritage
site. Its long span of history, its personalities
and leaders, its local and nation connections
to notable people, events, and places, its
magnificent physical structure, and ongoing
tradition of worship make Emanuel one of
America’s most significant sites to bridge the
past and present of a house once divided (a
nation slave and free). Born in slavery,
Emanuel was built in freedom.
Like many churches, Emanuel was active in
the civil rights movement in the 1960’s. One
former youth remembered, “I became one of
many youth soldiers at Emanuel A.M.E. Church
under Rev. B.J. Glover who earned my respect
by facing down the threats of
Charleston's Sheriff Kelly.” Millicent Brown,
one of the first students to integrate
Charleston’s high schools in 1965, remembers
the unique “Chinese box,” a tactic local youth
demonstrators developed at Emanuel. and
used to legally tie up traffic at the busy
intersection of Calhoun and Meeting Streets
for hours.

The House of Emanuel
The present sanctuary completed in 1891, was
erected after the 1886 earthquake. As the
bricks toppled from Ft. Sumter in fierce
conflict, the brick walls of Emanuel towered
toward the horizon in thanksgiving and peace.
Its magnificent Victorian proportions magnify
the common faith. The unusually wide
sanctuary has original pews, heart pine
flooring, wainscoting, gas lamps and
chandeliers, balconies, embossed ceiling
panels, altar and rails to greet each visitor and
member. In the 1940s, Charleston artist John
Green painted dramatic murals that tell the
people’s witness of the crucified and
resurrected Christ. The massive gothic organ
pipe-case, with wooden spires among the
pipes, installed in 1908, nearly fills the rear
balcony. The single pulpit for reading scriptural
lessons and preaching the sermon has roots in
the AME tradition that God’s works, words, and
current message are united and inseparable.
Emanuel actively celebrates two of the
earliest practices of the American Methodist
Church. The
Thursday night prayer band continues the love
feast
first observed by John Wesley in Europe
among Moravian Christians (now in the Czech
Republic).
7
Emanuel’s monthly love feast maintains
this ancient celebration of the forgiving love of
Christ by singing praise hymns, offering
prayers, giving testimony of grace--and
sharing a non-eucharistic meal of broken
bread and water.
“Waiting for the hour” describes the
historic Methodist watch night service,
celebrated at Emanuel every New Year’s Eve,
followed by a mid-night dinner of “hoppin’
John” and collard greens,” traditionally
associated in Charleston with prosperity and
good fortune.
The lower level hall, once home to a
gigantic furnace, holds the kitchen , Sunday
school, and parish hall, and a giant screen for
Sunday worshippers. Its entrance has the
faces of four 1875 Charleston young men
rendered as the cherubs from Raphael’s
painting of the Sistine Madonna.
At Emanuel History Unites With Grace
Separated by land and sea, three blocks
and three miles in the harbor, Ft. Sumter and
Emanuel AME tie together America’s greatest
struggles of liberty and equality. Visitors
embark for Ft. Sumter from venerated site for
freedom’s journey, for patriots and those
enslaved.

Holy, Holy, Holy, 2008
Patriot Christopher Gadsden built a colonial
pier here, once America’s largest wharf. From
his wharf, the British sailed with 5,000 slaves
at the end of the American Revolution.
In 1808-- two hundred years ago —an Act
of Congress ended the importation of Africans
as slaves in the United States. The previous
year, 1807, saw Gadsden’s wharf (over 860
feet long, parallel to the land) serve as the
landing site for slave ships from Senegal to
Angola, with sales taking place directly from
the wharf.
The Africans confined to the wharf suffered
dysentery, small pox, other fatal ills, and daily,
carpenters build shells for the dead. As many
as 1600 Africans died in one 4 month period.
From the trade along this dock, just three
blocks down the street, Emanuel arose.
Emanuel’s mission has always gone beyond
guilt to grace. For it celebrated the full grace
of love and mercy as it remembered those lost
and sold; for it offered thanksgiving and praise
when the jubilee of freedom came by soldier’s
feet. Mercy and forgiveness poured out of this
congregation as it built its walls as a place for
the faithful to worship, and the high calling of
mercy is present in its open arms today.
Emanuel’s Neighbors
Visible and invisible giants of faith and
history surround Emanuel. Second
Presbyterian Church stands a block away, led
for 55 years by Thomas Symth and awarded
the designation, Presbyterian historical site
number one. Zion Presbyterian, built in 1859,
its members drawn from Second Presbyterian,
stood at the corner of Calhoun and Meeting
Streets. Now torn down, Zion was once the
city’s largest sanctuary.
8
St. Matthew’s across Marion Square on
King Street is the state’s largest Lutheran
congregation and the state’s tallest steeple. It
is one of the city’s most beautiful altars, with a
“wineglass” pulpit and a brass eagle lectern
(Psalm 91), and magnificent stained glass
designed in New York and built in Germany.
Citadel Square Baptist
is Emanuel’s closest
neighbor. Its evangelical
origins are seen in the
1856 church sanctuary, Citadel Square Baptist,
Emanuel steeple right
built for a 1,000, when
two years before its
membership totaled 14!
In 1856, 119 of its 217
members were slaves!
Joyful Noise
The near-by Episcopal Cathedral of St.
Luke, on Charlotte Street, with its 37 foot
Gothic windows and fan-ribbed vaulted
ceiling became the 1880’s home of the New
Tabernacle Fourth Baptist Church, whose
minister, Daniel Jenkins, sent a brass and
drum orchestra to play in two Presidential
inaugural parades.
A block away, on Anson Street, is St.
John’s Reformed Episcopal, the home church
of Philip Simmons, the master ironworker and
Charleston blacksmith. In the next block of
Anson is St. Stephen’s Episcopal, the first
American Episcopal church without pew rent.
On Wentworth Street is a marker for St.
Peter’s Catholic parish, an African-American
parish and school formed in a former Jewish
synagogue purchased by the Catholic Church
in 1867 for Black Catholics who were “stored
away in every kitchen and alley and lane” of
the city. Macedonia AME stands nearby.
Emanuel stands in the center of this
circle of history. The story of Emanuel recounts
the winding trail of grace through the nation’s
and city’s triumphs and trails. Ironically,
tragedies often lift up answered prayers, and
victories can bear witness to a blind eye and
deaf ear.
Visits to Emanuel
In the center of history, come experience
Emanuel’s amazing witness first hand. The
“Ring-the-anvil prayer” offers an opportunity
to ring an historic anvil for general, specific, or
personal prayer or proclamation. Prayer is also
available in the sanctuary. Tours include a
review of the church’s history, architectural
features, and of its leaders; or an honor roll of
stories how liberty and freedom are connected
by faith. Finally, in-depth details, wide
knowledge, and expert insight guide relaxed
discussions of how the African slave became
an American Christian.

As the artillery shells boomed in terror

during the British siege, as the naval captains
barked the command to “hoist sail,” as auctioneers
swilled bids in fast paced banter, as the silence of
men in chained coffles spoke to the passing heart
and eye; as the whispers telling of the dead passed
to each ear, as the echoes and cheers of the
raising of freedom’s flag crossed the waters, as the
thump of feet hitting the dock’s graying planks
took measure of change in the air, as the anvil’s
pounded fire spoke in the tongues of the spirit, as
the carpenters hammered the heart pine in place,
as the preacher proclaimed the lessons, and the
organ pealed beneath the voices raised in praise,
and the prayers recalled ancient rhythms--
Come ring the anvil and visit the church the
captives built. Throughout our nation’s history,
Emanuel’s hearts have fixed steadfastly on God’s
love and his loving-kindness--whether slave or free.
Emanuel AME church stands as tower of freedom,
celebrating God’s abiding spirit and his strength for
the journey.