Known as "Mother Emanuel," the Charleston church where nine people were shot dead Wednesday is one of the largest and oldest black congregations in the South. The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church's roots reach back to 1816, when black church members withdrew from predominantly white Charleston's Methodist Episcopal Church "over disputed burial ground," according its website. "The church was born in protest against slavery — against the dehumanization of the African people brought to the American continent as labor," the church's site says. Civil rights icon and co-founder of the NAACP W.E.B. du Bois called the A.M.E. Church a "social center of astonishing efficiency, where the poor and ostracized met in human sympathy, mutual charity and encouragement, to fight the battle of life."
