Violence against Black churches continued unabated into the twenty-first century.

Evidence

After Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, the pastor of Flood Christian Church repeatedly called out police brutality. One week after Brown’s father was baptized at the church, the building was burned to the ground. The following year, the unthinkable happened: nine members of Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, one of the country’s oldest A.M.E. congregations, were murdered when a white supremacist named Dylann Roof opened fire in a Bible study group that included Reverend Clementa Pinckney, both the pastor of the church and a state legislator. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1019