File Photo: Police stand outside the Emanuel AME Church following a shooting on June 17, 2015, in Charleston, South Carolina. (Associated Press photo)
The black church where a horrific shooting claimed the lives of nine people boasts a rich history echoing America's own painful passage through slavery, civil rights, and now, its racially turbulent present.
Many congregants refer to the Emanuel AME Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina as "Mother Emanuel" because of its storied past - as well as its central role as a place of worship and social gathering place for many in the city's African American community.
The church is one of dozens of African American Methodist (AME) churches across the United States, the oldest independent denomination founded by blacks - an offshoot from the white-run Methodist Church that once refused entry to black members.
The picturesque white brick Gothic church with its weather vane-topped steeple - one of the most recognizable structures in Charleston - has come to be seen as a symbolic beacon for African American worshippers not just in the city, but throughout the nation.
The oldest AME congregation in the southern United States, Emanuel has beginnings dating back to the late 1700s, when a handful of slaves gathered to worship with free African Americans.
It was formally founded as Emanuel AME church in 1816, one of several congregations that split from Charleston's Methodist Episcopal church and soon became one of the largest AME congregations in the nation at the time.
Officials in the city of Charleston, however, on at least two occasions in the years following its founding shut the church down for violation of slave laws that closely restricted when and for what reason slaves could gather.
One of founders of the church, Denmark Vesey, a former slave who had purchased his own freedom, tried to organize a slave uprising in 1822.
He plotted, along with several followers, to kill white slaveholders in Charleston, liberate the slaves and sail to freedom in Haiti.
The plot was discovered before it could be acted upon, however, and Vesey along with his co-conspirators were executed by hanging. The church where the plot was hatched was burned to the ground.
Challenge and tragedyEmanuel church met time and again with challenge and even tragedy.
Members of Emanuel worshipped underground until after the Civil War.
A rebuilt church was destroyed by an earthquake in 1886. It was built again in splendid and triumphant fashion, with soaring ceilings and an antique pipe organ imported from Europe more than a century ago and became an obligatory stop for civil rights activists over the years, including the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
Like most AME churches across the United States, Emanuel remains predominantly African American today, despite greater openness in other Christian denominations to black members.
The church enjoys a national historic designation and is on Charleston's list of historically significant building in its old town quarter.
Church worship services play a vitally important role as the social glue that binds much of the African American community, and it is not uncommon, in addition to Sunday morning worship, for congregants to gather Sunday and Wednesdays nights as well.
As is the custom at many white and black evangelical churches, worshippers at Emanuel often attended Wednesday night Bible study class - a more intimate setting for congregants to pray and commune together.
It was at one such gathering - where attendance is open to everyone, and visitors are even encouraged to take part - that the heinous shootings took place Wednesday evening.
Among the dead was the pastor of the church, Clementa Pinckney, 41, a married father of two and a state senator.
Pinckney reportedly went to a fundraiser for Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton just hours before the shooting, and was attending to his duties at South Carolina's State House in Columbia earlier in the day.