Must You Forgive Your Mother’s Murderer?

[film reel rolling] [piano playing]

On June 17th, 2015, the world mourned with us

as we had to say goodbye to our families

who died that night because God needed them.

I didn't see God's plan right away.

I had so much anger in me,

I did not know what to do with it.

Yet, through all the grief, and heartache, and pain,

my mother left a legacy in spite of the storms

that she had endured in her life.

Like so many of you out of here today,

these things could be said about you.

But how valuable will your legacy be?

Will the legacy you leave be of God and faith?

[heavy breathing]

My prayer has been to not let me be up there

and be a crying idiot.

Let me be able to get up there

and talk about the secrets that they have to come out.

We can't continue to take those secrets

from generation to generation.

[Sharon crying]

[somber music]

[church bells ringing]

[Judge] All rise.

Thank you very much, please be seated.

Today is June 19th, 2015, Charleston County bond court.

I'm Judge James Scarsdale, the chief magistrate

of Charleston County.

This is the case of State vs. Dylan Roof.

On June 17th, 2015, my life changed forever.

While working as a chaplain in Dallas, Texas

in the ER, I went over to my phone

and I saw several missed calls from my daughter.

And that kind of put me on alert.

When I called her,

she said that there was something going on

at granny's church.

Mr. Roof is charged with nine counts of murder

and one count of possession of a weapon

during the commission of a violent crime.

I knew if something had happened in that church,

that my mother was going to be there

because she opened the doors of that church

and she was the one that closed up the church at night.

So, this 21 year old, he had gotten himself

to believe that he needed to do something

to cause a race war,

and went in there and shot and killed nine people,

which included my mother, Mrs. Zappa Lance,

and my cousin, Miss Susie Jackson, who was 87 years old.

And then my cousin Taiwan, so who was

the youngest that got killed, he was 26.

And all the others, Reverend Pinckney,

and Cynthia Hurd, and the names, and the names, and.

♪ Amazing grace how sweet the sound ♪

♪ That saved a wretch like me ♪

We have victims, nine of them,

and we're going to reach out to everyone, all victims,

and we will touch them.

I was just angry that black people still have to deal

with those kinds of thinking.

I was just, just totally morally wounded.

Yeah, yeah.

Would you like to make a statement

in regards to this hearing,

concerning Ethel Lance as a victim, ma'am?

48 hours after they were killed,

a lot of the family members were

at the bond hearing for Dylan Roof.

They televised the hearing.

I was still in Dallas, Texas,

so I was not able to make it.

And watching the news, when my sister Nadine walked up

to the podium,

I had no earthly idea that the words

I forgive you if God forgives you,

would even come out of her mouth.

You are representing the family of Ethel Lance,

[Nadine] is that correct? I am.

And you are whom, ma'am?

[Nadine] The daughter. The daughter.

I'm listening, and you can talk to me.

[Nadine] I just want everybody to know,

to you, I forgive you.

You took something really precious away from me.

I will never talk to her ever again.

I will never be able to hold her again.

But, I forgive you.

I was angry. How, how can you forgive this?

This, this person went in there and just killed them.

And, and you're talking about forgiveness?

[Nadine] But God forgive you, and I forgive you.

I felt like somebody had stabbed me in my heart.

I hadn't even had time to process what had happened,

yet alone talk about forgiveness.

I just couldn't see it.

With the Charleston story,

the world watched that courtroom.

I want to say it was the day after,

whenever he was taken in.

You saw a family member after family member forgiving him.

We just learned last week the prosecutor is indeed going

to seek the death penalty. Yes.

[Host] I would be remiss not to ask you.

Do you forgive him? And how do you feel about that?

I don't want to make this a black and white thing,

but I'm going to have to go there,

because you never see news people ask white people

after tragedies, do you forgive?

But here it is, we're black people,

Christian people, church people.

And the first thing that comes out of their mouths

is they're going to play up the forgiveness,

like what happened to us was not phenomenal,

like it didn't matter?

I just did not want to deal with that.

And I began to be very vocal about forgiveness.

I don't forgive him yet.

Being a pastor and a reverend,

I know that forgiveness is a part of life

and what we do as a world to get past.

But, I'm not there.

People are gonna look at me like,

well what kind of minister or pastor is she

if she can't talk about forgiveness?

But, that was the furthest thing away from my mind.

I don't want to forgive him.

I don't want to have to say I forgive you

for killing my mother.

I don't want to have to say that.

[worship music]

♪ Hallelujah ♪

Evil walked into a church and tried to kill people of faith,

tried to kill what they represented as black people,

tried to kill what they were as Christians.

And what happened was evil came in

and killed the body of those nine people,

but evil didn't kill the soul.

Some people believe that forgiveness

should be an automatic thing if you're a Christian.

Christians are expected to be miraculously above hurt

and pain because Jesus is just gonna fix everything.

While I believe forgiveness is a process where

whoever has done something wrong to you,

you can get to a point

where that does not hold power over your life.

And people like me need to have time

to come out of the dark space.

[worship music]

[somber music]

What can I say about my mother?

She was a giver.

You cannot go and visit my mom's house

without walking out of that door with something in your hand

or you would leave with the full belly of good,

Charleston cooking.

My mom was a strict disciplinarian.

She was not like real warm and fuzzy kind of person,

she was formidable.

She was a young, unwed, teenage mother that came up

through some very hard times,

in 1958, and to have a biracial child.

She ended up having four girls.

So, when we would get dressed and go to church,

she would line us up and spray us with her perfume.

She'D say, Oh, y'all smell good.

God is good. God is sweet, just like y'all.

She was always about making sure

that all of her children were doing

the best that they could for themselves.

And you worked hard, and you tried to be honest,

and you tried to be good to other people.

During my teenage years, you know,

I was thinking I was a little, mini-hippie, you know?

So, I was kind of rebellious.

You know, she threatened to put me in reform school

cause that's what they call it back then.

On the other end of that, I was a good student

because I wanted to move forward in my life.

I had dreams of going to college

and I'm going to be somebody.

She put that spirit in me

that you can have anything you want if you work hard

and if you want the right thing.

The plan was that I would graduate college,

I would go to law school,

be a lawyer, and then eventually get into politics.

That was the dream.

Well, my senior year in college, I met my ex-husband.

I ended up getting married.

I did get accepted into law school, but I did not go.

After she got over all of that,

we were on the phone one Sunday and I said,

Mama, do you actually know who my father is?

And there was just dead silence.

And she said, you know,

I thought I was going to take this to my grave,

but let me tell you what happened.

And she told me about working

in a furniture store after school,

having been sent upstairs to get something,

and being raped by three white men.

Keeping that inside of her, all of that shame and guilt.

And I thanked her.

I thanked her for going through nine months.

I thanked her for not aborting me,

because who would have blamed her if she had tried?

I was hurting for her to have to have carried all that

all these years,

to have to look at me

and love me after all that had happened to her.

[woman crying]

I don't think I ever got a chance to really tell her.

I don't think she knew how much I loved her.

Yeah.

When you look at, from an African-American perspective,

it seems as if within the African-American church,

we have done a lot of forgiving.

That is of course very true.

But at the same token, that forgiveness does not say

that we then go quietly into the good night.

It says that we still have to take a stand

for the various things that are wrong.

If someone wrongs us, we can forgive them,

but then we need to go to the ballot box, so to speak,

and cast our vote, and be engaging in the process

to change the way that the laws may be written

to ensure that the same atrocities

that have taken place before do not take place again.

[light music]

This journey that I've been on, it's been hard.

It's been complicated.

It's been lonely.

It's been fraught with anger at God.

I didn't lose faith,

I just kind of lost hope in humanity.

I lost hope in the goodness of people

even though people were reaching out all over the world.

I was just really angry at everybody

and I had to learn how to temper that.

And even when I was speaking,

you can hear the anger in my voice.

And my daughter Asia would say, mom, you're so hostile.

You're so angry and it's coming out when you talk.

And that's when I kind of stopped,

and kind of did some self-reflecting,

and saw that she was right.

You know, anger moves you to take action.

So that anger was what helped propel me

into getting out there in the public eye

and talking about gun violence prevention.

But, it took me a long while

to reconcile that this was God's plan.

So, now that I'm in this place and in this time,

I'm going to use that voice that God has given me

and I'm going to sing from the rooftops

about how this has changed my life

and how I'm able to help somebody else

be able to go through a process and be authentic.

I hope that's what I'm doing.

[somber music]

Going around this country,

my goal is to educate people about their gun responsibility.

I don't see where a person would need an AR-15

or a semiautomatic weapon.

Not all of us who are survivors have ever been involved

in such a public thing.

I have yet to get professional counseling.

My son is a clinical psychologist,

and he said, Mom, when are you going to stop running?

[somber music]

But I see myself continuing

to go across this country speaking.

I see myself being international.

I see myself writing a book about grief.

I see myself selling a million books.

I just don't know what else to say,

but dig in your heart, tell your story every chance you get,

one person at a time, y'all.

[speaker introducing Sharon]

[somber music]

Senators, everybody, we can build a safe future

and spare other communities from experiencing tragedy

by someone who should have never had access to a gun.

[Protestors] Take it down! Take it down!

[Sharon] After the shooting in Charleston, South Carolina,

the Confederate flag that flew at the State House

in Columbia, South Carolina became an issue

for the state and all over the country.

Yet again, there was a symbol

of African-Americans being oppressed in America.

And what that flag represented,

it did not represent history to us.

It meant oppression.

It meant that we were sold.

But we are not going to allow this symbol

to divide us any longer.

The fact that people are choosing to use it

as a sign of hate is something that we cannot stand.

It's time to move the flag from the Capitol grounds.

[audience applauding]

The Confederate flag came down on July 10th, 2015,

which just happened to be my birthday.

I saw that flag come down and I was like,

Mama, look what you have help accomplish.

You, the person who never wanted to be in the spotlight,

the person that always felt like she wasn't good enough,

everybody in this country, Mama, knows your name.

I'm just proud to know that my mom

and those nine angels had a part in doing something that

the people of South Carolina could not do on their own.

It took death to bring that flag down.

On Saturday, the worst antisemitic attack

in this country's history, 11 people killed in cold blood.

The alleged shooter is an anti-Semite.

So right now, I'm headed to a studio

to appear on CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, oh.

I want to let America know that what has happened

in Pittsburgh and what happened in Charleston,

that there's a common thread and there's a bond,

and how this tragedy won't keep people like me

from stop trying to get the message out

that hate is not going to take over our lives.

Do you think that this president should visit Pittsburgh?

You think it will comfort the community at this moment?

Leave them be for right now.

Let them be able to cling to each other as a community

and as family members try to navigate

through how they will be able to go on

for the next days and weeks following this.

[organ music]

Now, when I see a gun, automatically I think of violence

because that's what a gun does.

A gun is an instrument that causes personal bodily harm.

I didn't look at it like that before

because I never really thought about guns.

But now, I look at a gun

and I know that nothing good could come out of using a gun,

even though I believe people have the right to own a gun.

I stand here today as one of the many,

many accidental activists who are using their voices

to invoke change.

I don't know if I had my head buried in the sand,

but before the deaths of the nine in Charleston,

I didn't realize so many people believed

and followed a white supremacist,

white nationalist ideology.

We have had these kinds of vigils almost every day.

I was invited to speak for the worship service,

and in my sermon, I said something about forgiveness.

And it was like this warm,

kind of sensation came over my body.

And it was like, I was saying, you're ready.

You've done all of this work.

You've been authentic about your feelings.

You've said it to any and everybody that would listen.

I feel satisfied that you have gotten to the point

where you could forgive him.

It wasn't like a big epiphany, like, bam, I forgive him.

It was because I had done the work.

I was able to say the words out loud,

I forgive you, Dylan Roof.

I beg you to take whatever means necessary

through the power of your heart,

through the power through your vote.

And I just kinda went on and finished my sermon.

Then I don't ever have to deal with the forgiveness again,

because that's done with.

So now, I don't really carry that ache

in my heart that I carried around for so long.

And, I had stuff to do.

[soft music]

I have no idea about where this journey that I've been

on will take me,

I just will continue to ride it out

and see what the end's going to be.

To be confident in who I am, I just feel empowered.

I feel like I could just do anything.

I'm proud of the fact that my children are proud of me.

I'm proud to have my daughters say, Mom, you're a badass.

If you listen real close,

you can hear the people in power shaking.

They've gotten used to being protective of their position,

truancy, the safety of inaction.

96 people die every day from guns in our country,

yet most representatives have no public stance on guns.

And to that, we same no more.

[spectators cheering]

No more silence!

[Protestors] End gun violence!

If you work to be the best person you can be,

God will allow you to do things that you never

in your wildest dream think that you're going

to be able to do.

No, not everybody will get to speak on Capitol Hill.

Not everybody will meet Presidents, and Senators,

and be on the news.

But wherever you are,

you still can use your voice

to bring hope to somebody else and invoke change.

Yeah.

[light music]

So, I'm going to start this reading with chapter two.

Our tiny home was situated in a black neighborhood

on the East side of Charleston.

We lived in a two bedroom place back then.

Can I get a book? You sure can.

And we were always on top of each other.

Ethel and McDaniel Lance reared five children,

myself, Sharon, Terry, Gary, Esther, and Nadine.

All of us kids got along,

mainly because we didn't have a choice.