'Some blacks feel fatigued after barrage of racial incidents' (understated AP headline...) [View all]

[Surya Gayatri]

WASHINGTON (AP) — The weariness, the rage, the depressing conviction that black life is stuck in a murderous loop fueled by racism — these emotions resounded in black America after the deadly shootings at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
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People attend a prayer service to mourn the lives lost at the shooting in Charleston, S.C., Thursday, June 18, 2015, at St. John African Methodist Episcopal Church in Huntsville, Ala.

The Rev. Anthony Evans of the National Black Church Initiative said he planned to travel to Charleston to help churches learn to defend themselves. He said the attack evoked "a point of deep moral frustration that cannot be explained."

"At the same time, they want individuals such as myself as clergy to preach peace and coming together," he said. "They only want us to not let the people get out of hand, and I'm not willing to stand in front of that angry crowd anymore and tell them that their anger is the wrong emotion to feel."

Threats came, too, on U.S. campuses. At Duke University, a noose was found hanging from a tree. Spray-painted swastikas and nooses were found at dorms on the State University of New York's Purchase campus. Just Thursday, a man pleaded guilty in federal court to threatening African-American students and employees at the University of Mississippi by helping place a rope around the neck of the statue of James Meredith, the school's first African-American student.

Those events unfolded against a backdrop of above-average black unemployment, crime-stricken communities, criticism of the state of the black family, black culture and education, and even debate over the meaning of blackness itself. In the days before the Charleston shooting, the nation had been riveted by the saga of Rachel Dolezal, who resigned as head of the NAACP's Spokane, Washington, chapter after her parents outed her as a white woman pretending to be black.