Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence

On June 17, 2015, a white supremacist entered Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and sat with some of its parishioners during a Wednesday night Bible study session. An hour later, he began expressing his hatred for African Americans, and soon after, he shot nine church members dead, the church’s pastor and a South Carolina state senator, Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, among them. The ensuing manhunt for the shooter and investigation of his motives revealed his beliefs in white supremacy and reopened debates about racial conflict, southern identity, systemic racism, civil rights, and the African American church as an institution.

In the aftermath of the massacre, Professors Chad Williams, Kidada E. Williams, and Keisha N. Blain sought a way to put the murder―and the subsequent debates in the media―in the context of America’s tumultuous history of race relations and racial violence on a global scale. They created the Charleston Syllabus on June 19, starting it as a hashtag on Twitter linking to scholarly works on the myriad of issues related to the murder. The syllabus’s popularity exploded and is already being used as a key resource in discussions of the event.

Charleston Syllabus is a reader―a collection of new essays and columns published in the wake of the massacre, along with selected excerpts from key existing scholarly books and general-interest articles. The collection draws from a variety of disciplines―history, sociology, urban studies, law, critical race theory―and includes discussion questions and a selected and annotated bibliography for further reading, drawing from such texts as the confederate constitution, South Carolina's secession declaration, songs, poetry, slave narratives, and literacy texts. As timely as it is necessary, the book will be a valuable resource for understanding the roots of American systemic racism, white privilege, the uses and abuses of the Confederate flag and its ideals, the black church as a foundation for civil rights activity and state violence against such activity, and critical whiteness studies.


This book is dedicated to
Cynthia Hurd
Susie Jackson
Ethel Lance
DePayne Middleton-Doctor
Clementa Pinckney
Tywanza Sanders
Daniel Simmons Sr.
Sharonda Singleton
Myra Thompson

Chad Williams (Editor)
CHAD WILLIAMS is an associate professor and chair of African and Afro-American studies at Brandeis University and is the author of Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era.

Kidada Williams (Editor)
KIDADA E. WILLIAMS is an associate professor of history at Wayne State University and the author of They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I.

Keisha Blain (Editor)
KEISHA N. BLAIN is assistant professor of history at the University of Iowa. Her work has been published in the Journal of Social History; Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society; and Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International.