On June 17, 2015, a white supremacist gunman killed nine people during a bible study at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Reverend Sharon Risher was working as a hospital chaplain when she learned her mother and two cousins were among the dead.
Rev. Risher turned her mourning, anger, and pain into activism, choosing a path of transformation. She’s joined other survivors of gun-related violence and become a speaker for the social-justice movement. She’s even forgiven the convicted killer for his crime.
Rev. Risher has been invited by a South Dakota Mines student organization, the National Society of Black Engineers, to share her story via Zoom Wednesday.
The speech will be held February 16 at 6pm MST. To listen in, scan the QR code with your phone
The following transcript has been autogenerated and lightly edited.
Lori Walsh:
Reverend Risher, thank you so much for being here with us.
Reverend Sharon Risher:
Thank you so much for having me.
Lori Walsh:
I would love to hear something about your mother's life before we talk about the way she died. Tell me something about your mom.
Reverend Sharon Risher:
Well, I tell you one thing, my mother came from a very humble beginning. She was an unwed teenage mother with me after a horrible incident. I was a result of that incident. She had to quit school in order to take care of me, along with my grandmother, but always had a attitude and a perseverance of climbing out of her circumstances. And when I was in the 10th grade, she got hired by the city of Charleston. To her to have a city job, she knew that she had accomplished some of the things she wanted to. She went back to school, got her high school diploma, actually the same year I did. We graduated from the same school, her at night and myself during the day. She had been an usher at Mother Emmanuel for over 40 years. So she took her faith life very seriously, and she just tried to do the best she could, along with my stepdad, to raise us to be people that had faith, believed in God, and knew that anything you put your mind to you could do it.
Lori Walsh:
You're working as a trauma chaplain when this gunman enters the church and kills your mother and others. You have all these tools, and skills, and knowledge and experience at your disposal. You have your faith and now this violence has come to your door. What happened next to all those tools that you had? Did it change everything that you thought you knew?
Reverend Sharon Risher:
All those tools just kind of vanished from my brain.
Lori Walsh:
Oh.
Reverend Sharon Risher:
Because in that time I was not a chaplain. I was a grieving daughter. So my training in the immediate did not help me at all. One thing it did do though, while I was waiting for confirmation of the death, one thing in chaplaincy, when you have to tell bad news to a family, usually that family is waiting and waiting and waiting before the doctor actually gets in the room, along with a chaplain like me. And then I started to think about the amount of time it took, and that's when I really knew that she was gone. So that one thing I knew from my work prepared me a little bit to say she was gone. And I knew that, and the official confirmation wasn't going to really do anything for me because I already knew.
Lori Walsh:
In this situation, it is also a national story and it's gun violence. The shooter I said was a white supremacist. I'm not just throwing that term around lightly. He had a manifesto, he used racist language during the shooting and after the shooting. He's posted things online, his car was decorated with racist bumper stickers. So not only are you going through the loss, your personal loss, the loss of all these other people that you're carrying too. But you are also carrying the knowledge that this intersects with this really difficult national debate about guns, about gun violence. And then of course you are reliving all the racist words and ideology you're going to be confronted with from this shooter. Tell me a little bit about what it was like to be in the national spotlight with such a deeply personal grief.
Reverend Sharon Risher:
It was very complicated. It really was. For some reason, I don't know, I guess because I've always had a big mouth, I was very vocal in my feeling. And I know one of things that I thought about was, I had no idea that it was so many millions of people out there that had the same kind of nationalist white supremacist ideology as him. I just never paid attention to that. And after that happened to my mother, finding out all of these things, being in that courtroom and hearing about his manifesto, understanding that there was no remorse. I really can't explain the kind of deep wound and sadness that created in me. And I was very vocal about that. I don't think people thought that I would just be so raw and authentic in what I was feeling, but I felt like the public needed to know that this was just more than killing black people in a church.
Reverend Sharon Risher:
This was more about killing all black people in a place where a church has always been the foundation of Black people's faith and understanding of community. And for it to have that happen, it was just not me and Charleston. It was the whole world that looked upon this thing as how is it that the United States continue to allow these types of organizations to exist? And that the gun violence, how he got his gun was yet another slap in the face to Black people because he was allowed to buy his gun, even though he had a conviction. So the background check was not done properly. So it just continued to me at that time that the United States just didn't care about Black people.
Lori Walsh:
You mentioned this church, this Bible study, this prayer group that welcomes this man in and is praying with him and talking about scripture with him. After he shoots people, he is saying things like, I'll give you something to pray about. After the shooting, people "send thoughts and prayers." And some people say, well, that's not enough. I want to talk to you about prayer and forgiveness because Reverend Sharon Risher, I think a lot of people listening here right now are like, I don't think I have room for the word forgiveness in this conversation. Tell me about-
Reverend Sharon Risher:
And I truly understand that.
Lori Walsh:
Tell me where you started with the idea that forgiveness would be, I mean, it's pretty early among this group of parishioners that forgiveness as a word enters this conversation.
Reverend Sharon Risher:
Well, my sister was the first one to talk about forgiveness in his court arraignment 48 hours after he was apprehended.
Lori Walsh:
Wow.
Reverend Sharon Risher:
Let me remind people that when they captured him, there were no guns drawn. They walked up to his car, like he had a traffic violation. He was hungry. They stopped and got him Burger King. So the whole thing of Dylann Roof was just beyond comprehension. I was not one of the people forgiving him so soon. Being ordained and all of that, I felt real guilty about that because I felt like as a religious symbol, a religious person, that forgiveness should've been one of the first things that come out my mouth. But it didn't. Because I felt like, how was I going to forgive this man when he had did something that just, there was a mortal wound for me and I couldn't get to forgiveness.
Reverend Sharon Risher:
My faith did not go away, but I was not relying on my faith in the beginning. I was just relying on the fact that I was a daughter in grief. And the more I wade through that grief, my connection with my faith started to return. I really started to pray a lot. I think God was saying to me, that all of you all, the ones that said forgiveness in the beginning, the ones that are struggling through because of your belief in who you know that God is, you knew that forgiveness was going to be something that will eventually happen. So I knew because of who I am that I would get there, but that was hard. And see the basis of everything that made it click for me was that my understanding that God can forgive anybody. And that meant Dylann Roof had that same opportunity. And that was hard, but that's the basis of my faith. So I knew I would get there, but it was hard.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah.
Reverend Sharon Risher:
It was really hard.
Lori Walsh:
And-
Reverend Sharon Risher:
I still talk to people today that said they don't understand. And sometimes I try to explain, but sometimes there are no explanations when you talk about spiritual and the divine, you know what I mean?
Lori Walsh:
Yeah.
Reverend Sharon Risher:
It's a very personal deep process and you can't forgive unless you're willing, unless you understand what it is that you believe.
Lori Walsh:
I want to ask you this because it ties into what you believe. Beyond praying, beyond talking to people, you also stand up for things like background checks. You also have stood up against something like the death penalty. Tell me a little bit about what you think needs to change, and we're going to run short of time. So we won't be able to go over everything, of course, but one thing that you think can change regarding gun violence in America, what would be a step?
Reverend Sharon Risher:
Okay. I believe that our legislators and our senators, all the lawmakers really need to really dig deep and understand the crisis that gun violence has caused in this country. Gun violence does not just include Black people. Gun violence is attacking every space in our country. We have to be better about tracking where these guns are coming from. Our background check laws need to be tightened up. The law that's called the Charleston Loophole now will cause people who are wanting to get a gun to wait longer than three days for that background check to be done. That Charleston Loophole bill has been stalled in the Senate. I need people to use their hearts and their power to vote, to pay attention to how things are and not to look at a person's color of their skin because gun violence does not care.
Lori Walsh:
I'm going to jump in. I'm going to jump in there, Reverend Sharon Risher, because this is just the beginning of a conversation. You're going to be with the students at the South Dakota School of Mines and the National Society of Black Engineers. That's a student-run organization that has invited Sharon Risher to come talk with them on Wednesday. But she has a book, it's called For Such a Time as This: Hope and Forgiveness After the Charleston Massacre. Reverend Risher, I am deeply grateful that you came and talked to the people of South Dakota today. We appreciate your time.
Reverend Sharon Risher:
Well, thank you so much for wanting to have me and this opportunity. Thank you so much, South Dakota.
