A story has haunted Charleston for 200 years now. It may, or may not, be entirely true.
It is about bondage and freedom, fear and courage, and 35 Black men who gave their lives so that future generations might live free.
But like most stories in Charleston’s racially fraught history, White elites recorded this one, forever preserving a one-sided account of what happened during the sweltering summer of 1822.
We know this story by the name of one man: Denmark Vesey.
He was executed on July 2, 1822 — two days before the nation celebrated its freedom — for the charge of “attempting to raise an insurrection among the blacks against the whites.”
His death made him a martyr to Black residents, a freedom fighter whose legacy inspired generations to fight for equality, no matter how grave the risks. For Whites, he loomed a would-be murderer, a terrorist intent on killing them all.
Henry Darby, a Black educator, spent 18 years pushing to get a monument to Denmark Vesey built in Charleston. Darby learned about Vesey while attending Morris College, then decided to find a way to honor his legacy. "Every Black man in America is standing on the shoulders of Denmark Vesey," he said. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
The latter view is changing today, as more Charlestonians confront the city’s racial history. On this bicentennial anniversary of the planned uprising, prominent groups across Charleston's racial divides are even joining forces to host events that celebrate Vesey.
“He’s finally getting his due,” said Henry Darby, a Black educator who for 18 years, despite threats and stiff political headwinds, pressed to get a monument built in Charleston's Hampton Park to honor the man. “He’s a symbol — a symbol for freedom.”
Although Vesey's name has become synonymous with the rebellion, he was, in fact, one of nearly three dozen men hanged that summer for the crime of trying to break free. We remember his name above others because authorities of the day pegged him as the leader of a thousands-strong army that would have slaughtered Whites from the rural plantations to the city wharves.
Those White authorities wrote a lot about the events of 1822.
They left hundreds of pages of accounts that paint a detailed picture of what happened that summer — or, at least, what they say happened. They named names, quoted confessions, and summarized intelligence they gleaned through torture and threats of death.
Yet we only know what they chose to write down. Missing are their own agendas and whether they concocted any, or all, of the story to serve their pro-slavery purposes.
This is why the records, tucked away in archival libraries, have sparked bitter debates among historians who disagree over just how big the insurrection plot was — or if it existed at all.
Their hunt for truth persists, as Vesey’s inspiration grows.
Recruiting for rebellion
Denmark Vesey was born enslaved, perhaps in the Caribbean. He was around 14 when a ship captain and slave trader purchased him. Vesey traveled with the sea-faring merchant, learning to read and write and speak French and English.
In 1783, they settled in Charleston, where the captain hired out Vesey's labor and allowed him to keep some of the earnings. Tapping those funds in 1799, Vesey bought a lottery ticket. And won.
He used $600, almost half of his winnings, to purchase his freedom.
With some of the rest, he trained to become a skilled carpenter and rented a house on Bull Street, near today's College of Charleston campus.
This is what we know about Vesey. From there, it starts to get murky.
Much of what else we've been told comes from the court records created for White authorities, much of them documenting witness testimony and confessions almost certainly given under torture and threats of death.
Those records describe Vesey hosting clandestine gatherings of insurrectionists at his house.
LOCATIONS TO KNOW IN DENMARK VESEY'S LIFE:
1. Blake’s Lands | 5. Denmark Vesey’s home |
(SOURCE: ESRI)
If true, it was an audacious move.
Vesey lived in the thick of White power in a city that, not 15 years earlier, had been the nation’s busiest slave port. Charleston’s hard-line mayor lived a couple of blocks in one direction. The governor lived a few blocks down in the other.
Vesey could have left town to taste real freedom. But his children remained enslaved, and he wanted to “stay and see what he could do for his fellow creatures,” the court records quote a conspirator saying.
In late May, he reportedly welcomed a dozen enslaved men inside his home for a secret meeting. By summer’s end, most would be dead.
They hoped to recruit a man named Bacchus Hammet, whose enslaver stored hundreds of the local militia's bayonets and muskets in a backroom of his shop on King Street.
Bacchus had a key.
He soon arrived with a friend and, after some convincing, agreed to join. Each man then held up his right hand and pledged:
“We will not tell if we are found out. And if they kill us, we will not tell on anyone.”
An explosive charge
For a moment, leap forward to 1999, when the historian Michael Johnson received an intriguing proposition.
Three new books were being published about Vesey and the 1822 insurrection plan. The editor of The William and Mary Quarterly, a premier journal of American history, asked Johnson to review them.
Johnson, who taught history at Johns Hopkins University, agreed.
He began familiarizing himself with the four historical documents that lay the foundation for the trio of books, and most everything else written about the planned uprising.
The four accounts appear to all be based on the same notes kept by a clerk in the courtroom, which don't survive.
The surviving documents detail what happened that summer when 131 Black men were arrested, 67 convicted, 37 banished and 35 hanged for conspiring to revolt. They are remarkably detailed, with sprawling casts of enslaved and free Blacks — and enslavers comprising a who’s who of elite White families.
James Hamilton Jr., the city’s mayor, wrote the first account just weeks after the last execution.
That fall, two magistrates who oversaw the court proceedings released a 202-page volume called “An Official Report of the Trials of Sundry Negroes.” It organizes intelligence the court gleaned about each man charged.
A month later, officials presented similar accounts to the state Legislature. Although called transcripts, they read more like meeting minutes.
Impeccably handwritten, nobody had yet typed up the Legislature’s versions for the digital world. One of the new books did just that.
Johnson started there.
He flew to Columbia and headed to the South Carolina archives. The originals survive there thanks to an archivist who slipped them into a railroad car before Sherman’s troops burned the city in 1865.
As he compared the originals to the new book, Johnson noticed minor, then not-so-minor, errors in the transcription.
“I just kept slapping my forehead,” he said.
He also noticed the court records themselves got facts wrong, like misnaming enslavers.
But a bigger issue gnawed at him. The documents were created for authorities who had their own pro-slavery agendas. Yet it seemed modern scholars relied on them as if they were impartial transcripts.
He called his editor, who had given him a 1,000-word limit. The piece he ultimately turned in spanned almost 35,000 words over 61 pages.
In it, he made an explosive charge: Perhaps Vesey and the others were the real victims of a conspiracy.
White authorities, namely the ambitious Hamilton, could have fabricated the plot, then used the words of tortured men to justify cracking down on Black residents.
“I think Hamilton seizes upon rumors that there is a slave conspiracy under way as a way to rehabilitate himself and center himself in the public eye,” Johnson told The Post and Courier in a recent interview.
Even better for the mayor, those rumors promised to humiliate Gov. Thomas Bennett Jr., a political rival who ran successful rice and lumber mills. Bennett, who had served as mayor and a longtime state legislator, held less extreme views on slave treatment.
The article earned Johnson accolades. It also sparked two decades of furious debate over how much to trust the White officials’ version of events.
Consider the plot’s discovery. And who it benefited.
Spikes line the top of a gate of the Miles Brewton House in downtown Charleston. The Chevaux-de-Frise ironwork was added after the discovery of Denmark Vesey’s plot of rebellion in 1822. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
Hidden motives
Mayor Hamilton's pamphlet was the first to describe how word of the rebellion leaked from two men who took incendiary news to their enslavers: They had each been asked to join an insurrection.
Hamilton wrote that the first happened in late May 1822 when Peter, a cook enslaved by Col. John Prioleau, strolled along a wharf at the city’s glittering waterfront. Another enslaved man named William Paul approached him.
William revealed a plan in the works to break free from bondage. Many had joined. Peter could, too.
Terrified, Peter rushed away. Five anxious days later, he told Prioleau, who, in turn, scrawled a hasty note about what his “favourite and confidential slave” had just told him.
He sent it to Hamilton. And if anyone would benefit most from what was to come, it was the 36-year-old mayor, or intendant.
Although William denied the story, Prioleau had him hauled to the Workhouse, a towering stone and brick fortress that once stood on Magazine Street near the Old City Jail. Black residents were sent there for “correction.”
The records don’t describe William passing the Workhouse’s sharply pointed iron bars or stepping beyond its heavy front gate or entering its ghastly world of whips, paddles and cat-o’-nine-tails. But another enslaved man sent there later wrote that he could imagine no worse hell.
Hamilton wrote that guards tossed William into its infamous Black Hole, a dark and solitary dungeon. Interrogated the next morning, William confessed.
He said two other enslaved men told him about the plot.
But when those men were arrested, they scoffed at the notion of an uprising in Charleston, then the nation’s second-largest city and a pro-slavery stronghold. Officials released them.
Authorities questioned William again.
And again.
After a week, fearing imminent death, William described a far more extensive plot — one that involved "an indiscriminate massacre of the whites," the mayor wrote. It was a chilling thought in a city home to so many enslaved people that Blacks outnumbered Whites.
With William still in the Black Hole, Hamilton set the city guard on high alert. Yet some officials remained skeptical.
That changed two weeks later when another enslaved man came forward.
George Wilson was a blacksmith whose enslaver allowed him to work away from his constant scrutiny. This type of more lenient arrangement had drawn criticism from people like the mayor.
George came forward with an alarming allegation. He too said he’d heard about plans for a slave uprising. But his source toiled in the inner halls of power: the governor’s house.
With the sun setting on June 14, George's enslaver rushed the news to Mayor Hamilton.
The plot he'd heard about was set to erupt in two days.
The notorious Workhouse once stood next to Charleston's Old City jail. A secret court in 1822 interrogated Denmark Vesey and the other alleged insurrectionists inside of the hulking structure. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
Uprising thwarted
The official records aren’t the only documents that describe what happened next. Gov. Bennett also wrote letters that provide evidence for the puzzle of truth.
In one, he described the contagion of insurrection rumors that spread through White homes and businesses over the hours to come. Nobody slept. Men retrieved their arms. Children and women cowered inside, every slave a suspect.
Armed guards fanned out across the city.
At the same time, the court records describe the conspirators' work intensifying toward the uprising's planned launch — and the hours when their hope turned into dread:
Two days after George came forward, when the clock struck midnight, recruits had planned to snatch their enslavers’ weapons and raid arms storehouses, killing Whites who stood in their way. Attacking the city from all sides, they would steal horses and money, then march to the wharves.
The Atlantic Ocean before them, they would hijack ships and sail for freedom in Haiti.
But first, one key thing had to happen: An enslaved man named Jesse Blackwood had to get a horse and travel to a plantation outside the city to notify people when to rise up. Thousands of plantation slaves would then flow into the city, bolstering the rebellion.
When the time came, Jesse got a horse. But he could not get out of town.
A huge patrol guard was out. He got through two of the guard's lines. But at the third, he was turned back.
Alarmed, plot leaders cloistered at Vesey’s house. One of them, a renowned conjurer named Gullah Jack Pritchard warned the “business” would have to wait.
Archibald Grimke, who was born enslaved near Charleston 27 years after the events, later published an essay “Right on the Scaffold, or The Martyrs of 1822.” In it, he described the 55-year-old Vesey’s response to news about Jesse’s thwarted mission.
“When this ominous fact was reported to the Old Chief, Vesey became very sorrowful," Grimke wrote. "He and the other leaders must have instantly perceived that they were caught, as in a trap, and that the end was near.”
They could only hunker down.
At midnight, launch time, nothing happened.
Bennett later described the “perfect tranquility which every where prevailed.”
When the sun rose, the city guard began making arrests.
They headed first to the home of Gov. Bennett.
House of Bennett
The guard arrested 10 enslaved men, including four of Gov. Bennett’s slaves: Ned, Batteau, Matthias and Rolla. The governor so entrusted Rolla in particular that he left his household in the man’s charge while he was away.
Police hauled the enslaved men to the Workhouse.
Meanwhile, Mayor Hamilton hastily selected a group of Whites to orchestrate what later would be called trials, although the proceedings wouldn’t much resemble due process.
Summer steamed in, pushing 100 degrees with suffocating humidity that bred disease and dehydration. Wealthier Whites fled to cooler vacation spots.
Inside the Workhouse, secret court proceedings began.
The accused men were dragged before the judges, chains clanking, to see what they would divulge. Hamilton often joined the judges and a clerk taking notes later used to compile the official records.
The first man put on trial was Rolla.
Dragged into the small courtroom to testify was William Paul, the man thrown into the Black Hole three weeks earlier.
This time, the court records indicate, William said what Hamilton wanted to hear.
He testified that someone had told him that “all those belonging to the African Church are engaged in the insurrection.”
Established five years earlier by free and enslaved Black Christians, the church’s thousands of members formed a constant thorn of White suspicion. Authorities had raided its building at Hanover and Reid streets twice, arresting hundreds and sentencing many to flogging.
William also mentioned something else: Denmark Vesey was the “Chiefest man & more concerned than any one else.”
With that, the hunt was on for the free Black man who lived down the street from Mayor Hamilton.
Quest for an Exodus
Rolla was found guilty — followed by two more of the governor’s slaves.
The court records describe more arrests. Hour upon hour, guards hauled more men to the Workhouse courtroom. Witness after witness constructed a narrative of a plot thwarted in the nick of time.
On a Saturday, the city guard seized Vesey at a house on Coming Street, near where Mayor Hamilton lived.
As the mayor later wrote, "It is perhaps somewhat remarkable, that at this stage of the investigation, although several witnesses had been examined, the atrocious guilt of Denmark Vesey had not been as yet fully unfolded."
Perhaps that is because, through his carpentry work and his faith, he had become so woven into the city’s Black and White communities.
Five years earlier, he had joined Second Presbyterian, a merchant church where Black worshippers had to sit in the balcony. His name remains written in its session book, a log of church activities.
Second Presbyterian Church’s session book from April 1817 lists Denmark Vesey with other people of color who received communion at the church that Sunday. The book is preserved in the South Carolina Historical Society Reading Room at the College of Charleston's library. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
How much he worshiped at the African Church, an institution Whites eagerly associated with the plot's leaders, is less clear.
No surviving church records place him there. At least one man testified that Vesey was a member of "our church," but Vesey himself didn't say so. More evident is that his son Sandy was a member.
But few doubted Vesey's Christian faith when guards hauled him from his cell.
Although he asserted his innocence, the court sentenced six men to death the following day. They included Vesey and three men Gov. Bennett enslaved.
Among Charlestonians privately tracking the events was Mary Lamboll Beach. A White woman immersed in Charleston's elite, she got inside information from those involved, then shared it in letters to her sister in Philadelphia.
In one letter, she wrote that Vesey complained he hadn't received a fair trial. His accusers had not been brought before him, a fact Beach confirmed in her letter.
Facing torture and death, he clung to his faith.
"I heard that Vesey said in the Jail that it was a Glorious cause he was to die in," Beach wrote. He sang Psalms and insisted "his spiritual enjoyment never had been as great or greater."
During those final hours, the condemned men were locked in a cell together. Mayor Hamilton quoted Peter Poyas, another alleged plot leader sentenced to die, urging his comrades: “Do not open your lips! Die silent, as you shall see me do.”
The six men did just that.
On July 2, under heavy guard, wagons carried the men to their executions. Although authorities didn't record the exact location of their hangings, clues point to a spot 2 miles from the Workhouse called Blake’s Lands, an untamed expanse that began roughly at Meeting and Line streets.
What happened to their bodies remains a mystery.
A massive plot
In 1999, among the trio of new Vesey book authors, Douglas Egerton was the most prominent.
He teaches at Le Moyne College in New York, although ghosts of Southern racism lurk in his family. His grandmother was born during Reconstruction; her father had owned slaves.
One day, she assured Egerton, “We were good to our people.”
He wasn’t so certain.
It drove him to plumb Southern history. He wrote his 1999 book about Vesey and, later, co-wrote an 928-page tome with historian Robert Paquette called “The Denmark Vesey Affair.”
He argued that professor Johnson stopped too soon in his research when he cast the court records aside because they were written for White officials.
As Egerton told students, “History is like doing a puzzle with a third of the pieces missing.”
“You have to use every possible document you have.”
As proof of a very real plot, he pointed to other historical evidence from the time, including letters written by White Charlestonians, comments by White ministers who visited the condemned men in prison and memories of Black residents who fled North.
Oral stories passed down through Vesey’s descendants also described a heroic freedom fighter. Plus, at least two accounts written by mixed-race Charlestonians of the day mention Vesey and the plot.
Even closer to the events, the Rev. Daniel Alexander Payne mentioned Vesey in an AME Church history published in 1866. Payne had served as personal secretary to the Rev. Morris Brown, a future bishop who served as minister of the African Church during that summer.
Payne, a free-born Charlestonian, described Vesey as “heroic, but luckless” in seeking “to overthrow the infernal system.”
As further proof, Egerton noted the sheer complexity of the plot described in the court records. He concluded it was “one of the most sophisticated acts of collective slave resistance in the history of the United States.”
Bloodthirst of July
The authorities in Charleston had certainly acted like they had unearthed and prevented a massive uprising.
Yet Gov. Bennett stewed. He had lost the lives of — and his investments in — three slaves.
He also grew frustrated over the court's lack of transparency or adherence to basic legal doctrine. His brother-in-law, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Johnson, agreed.
The two men made their concerns public.
But instead of generating support, they became objects of ridicule by local Whites.
So Bennett tried asking the state attorney general for an opinion about the secret court’s legality.
The response was just as disappointing: “If I had been asked whether a free white man could be lawfully tried by a Court sitting with closed doors and without being confronted with his witnesses I should have had little difficulty in giving the answer.”
The attorney general added, “But nothing can be clearer than that slaves are not entitled to these rights.”
Whites rallied even more strongly behind Hamilton and the court, who they believed had just saved them from slaughter.
When the judges reconvened for July, they pressed on with renewed zeal.
Dr. Tamara Butler, executive director of the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, will speak on a panel this month to honor the bicentennial anniversary of Denmark Vesey and the thwarted 1822 slave rebellion. "Some folks may seem him as a terrorist, I’m pretty sure people said the same thing about Martin Luther King, same thing about Malcom X, same thing about most of our freedom fighters,” said Butler. "I think the moment we’re living in right now where people are watching the Supreme Court overturn rulings they’re a little more hesitant to use the word terrorist. Folks are just fighting for the right to control their body, people are fighting for the right to be able to move freely through the country. So, I think people are starting to on all sides of the racial lines really trying to ask the question of like how have we weaponized people who are fighting for freedom." Gavin McIntyre/Staff
Story of relationships
Dr. James O’Neil Spady was a student working on his dissertation at The College of William and Mary in 2001 when Michael Johnson’s article was published.
He had planned to make Vesey’s story a central element. But the article, and resulting furor, forced him to rethink.
Johnson made good points, he thought, about the importance of reading White officials’ records with a critical eye. “He shows people taking claims too readily at face value,” Spady said.
But Egerton also raised an intriguing question: Why would the initial whistleblowers have lied?
Surely they didn’t fake a story that cost their friends’ lives just to bolster the mayor’s political ambitions. George Wilson, the second man to come forward, later died by suicide.
The question launched Spady on a journey.
Now an American history professor at Soka University in California, he just edited and contributed to a new book of essays, “Fugitive Movements,” and has another book about the 1822 plot in the works.
His research led him to recognize a group of insurrection leaders, not merely Vesey as chief, even though Mayor Hamilton and the court pushed that idea. “They really zero in on Vesey, Vesey, Vesey, Vesey,” Spady said. “We need to pay attention to the larger set of people.”
The leaders, all very different men, recruited and organized networks across distinct Black communities.
Vesey was a free Christian who likely spoke French and had traveled in the Caribbean with his enslaver. Gullah Jack Pritchard was an East African-born shaman with ties to plantation slaves. Monday Gell was a literate Ebo who worked in his own shop. Perault Strohecker, a prince who was captured in battle in West Africa, might have been Muslim.
Spady dug into the “much-neglected social relationships” among the men involved. They had prayed together, worked together, shared family and friends.
Take Monday Gell and Charles Drayton.
Someone left flowers on the workbag of a monument to Denmark Vesey in Charleston's Hampton Park on Wed., June 22, 2022. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
A man about to die
Monday worked as a harness maker in a shop on Meeting Street where Black men gathered to socialize, catch up on events, and learn about the plot, the court records say.
Given he was literate, he also read to them from the day’s newspapers. That allowed many to follow national slavery debates and hear the news that enslaved people in modern-day Haiti had revolted to form the first Black-run republic in the Western hemisphere.
Monday's close friend Charles Drayton, a cook enslaved by a judge and two-time governor, often joined him there.
As the net of accusations grew, both men were arrested.
Soon, both were sentenced to die.
Mayor Hamilton later described what happened after their sentencing:
Guards took the men to a common ward of the Workhouse, which was getting crowded. Facing imminent death on a scaffold, Charles became “overwhelmed with terror and guilt.” He lambasted Monday for getting him into this terrifying predicament, an outpouring that ended when a blacksmith arrived to put them both in irons.
Overnight, Charles begged to see the mayor, who later wrote that he found Charles “in a most lamentable depression and panic.”
Charles offered to give up names.
But Monday, a key plot leader, knew far more of them. Despite enduring two weeks in the Workhouse, he remained silent.
So guards locked the two alone in a cell. Perhaps Charles could convince his friend to cooperate — for both of their sakes. It’s hard to imagine the desperation of that conversation.
When it ended, Monday agreed to talk.
“I come out as a man who knows he is about to die,” the court records quote him saying.
He soon revealed more than any other witness.
Man after man was hauled in for interrogation. Many were skilled craftsmen — carpenters, carters, porters, drayman — whose enslavers allowed them to work away from them, earning money, some of which they kept. A few even lived on their own.
Arrests topped 100.
In late July, the court made a shocking announcement: Another 22 men would be hanged, marking one of the largest mass executions in Charleston history.
Execution day
At dawn on July 26, thick crowds gathered to witness the hangings.
Carts carried a column of prisoners up Meeting Street. A child who watched later described the “ghastly procession” of 22 condemned men seated on coffins.
“A death like silence reigned in the City,” local resident Mary Lamboll Beach wrote to her sister.
The procession ended at The Lines, a row of dirt fortifications revamped during the War of 1812. They stretched near modern-day Line Street from the Ashley to the Cooper rivers. An enormous gallows waited.
Bacchus Hammet, the man with the key to a cache of militia weapons, grinned as an executioner pulled the hood over his head. With the rope around his neck, he then threw himself forward and lifted his feet, a final act of control, the Senate’s account says.
Other men died slowly. Standing on benches, they fell only about 6 inches.
Many gasped and twisted.
A city guard captain — the same man who had arrested Vesey a month earlier — loaded his pistol and shot the hanging men one by one.
Gov. Bennett's niece wrote in a letter, “I can hardly think speak or act there is a look of horror in every countenance.”
Historians don’t know what happened to those bodies either. Some reports suggest they were given to local surgeons for dissection.
Legacy marching
A third court convened in August. A week later, William Garner became the last man executed.
Local newspapers didn’t cover the trials, other than to announce executions. One White woman wrote to her nephew that “every thing has been kept a profound secret.”
That fall, the official reports came out, defending the court’s actions and attempting to cast the events as fair and necessary trials.
By then, White officials were busy cracking down on Black residents again.
The city expanded its police. They built an arsenal and guardhouse that later became The Citadel, South Carolina’s military college. And a new state law required free Black seamen be jailed while their ships docked in Charleston to keep them from spreading insurrectionist ideas.
Officials also ordered the African Church torn down. On Aug. 16, its members sold the remnants of their beloved house of worship for lumber.
Charlestonians elected Mayor Hamilton to Congress.
Not 40 years after that summer, the Civil War began. Word of Vesey’s courage reached Frederick Douglass, who summoned Black soldiers by invoking: “Remember Denmark Vesey of Charleston.”
Four years of war carnage later, Black Union troops marched up Meeting Street to the tears and cheers of once-enslaved people, now free.
Henry Darby, who later led the push for a Vesey monument, sees a direct line from the insurrection plans to the war that freed enslaved people.
“It was Denmark Vesey who lit the spark to Fort Sumter,” he said. “Every Black man owes a debt to him.”
Henry Darby (center) greets people after speaking at an event to honor the legacy of Denmark Vesey at Second Presbyterian on Saturday, June 25, 2022, in Charleston. Darby was a key leader in an 18-year push to get a monument to Vesey built in Charleston. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
Overcoming fear
As a child, Michelle Vesey heard stories at the dinner table from her paternal grandparents.
Denmark Vesey, her grandfather’s ancestor, had been executed for leading a thwarted slave revolt, his legacy scrubbed from the city whose Black residents he had tried to liberate. Their family was left to preserve the story.
“We were taught the premise of: You come from great people, and we’ve never been afraid,” Michelle Vesey, who lives in Detroit, said.
For generations, Black Charlestonians couldn’t utter his name, she said, without fear that White officials would deem them co-conspirators and send them to the gallows.
“They weren’t just trying to stamp out the existence of a man. They were trying to stamp out the existence of hope, of a movement,” Michelle Vesey said.
Indeed, Henry Darby grew up in North Charleston but had never heard of Denmark Vesey. He was a 16-year-old freshman at Morris College, a historically Black school in Sumter, when he first heard the name.
A coach summoned him in front of a school assembly. Knowing Darby was from the area of Vesey’s home, the coach asked if he’d heard of the man.
Darby had not.
Embarrassed, he ran to the library. As he read Vesey’s story, he cried. And vowed to do something for him.
That moment launched an 18-year quest to get a monument built in a city of Confederate statues. Darby, now principal of North Charleston High School, led a group that pressed forward, despite intense political backlash and threats.
“If there’s anything Vesey taught me, it’s courage,” Darby said.
Dr. Bernard Powers has spent decades studying Charleston’s Black history and shared his knowledge during a 26-year career teaching history at the College of Charleston. He has long considered Denmark Vesey a freedom fighter. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
Professor Bernard Powers, the city’s premiere historian of Black history, joined the effort. He had begun teaching at the College of Charleston in 1992, when most Whites considered Vesey a terrorist.
In 2002, shortly after professors Johnson and Egerton clashed over the official records, Powers invited both to Charleston for a symposium.
The event was so controversial, someone suggested he needed police protection.
“There was a real fear, and a real apprehension, that we had embarked on this terrain that was so, so dangerous,” Powers said.
In 2014, the monument group won their crusade. Hundreds gathered in Hampton Park to cheer the unveiling of a life-sized statue honoring Vesey.
Awareness of his legend began to grow, spreading from Charleston across the nation.
Story that inspires
After the Civil War, remnants of the African Church resurrected as Emanuel AME Church, now a grand house of worship on Calhoun Street.
In 2015, a year after the Vesey monument’s unveiling, racist violence struck the congregation.
A white supremacist gunned down nine worshippers gathered for Bible study. It happened on June 17, precisely the day when the uprising would have launched through the city streets 193 years earlier.
There’s no evidence the killer knew that. But it provided a dramatic layer to a devastating tragedy.
The loss of so many innocent Black lives sparked new efforts to confront Charleston's legacy of slavery — and uplift Vesey’s story.
That continues today.
A cast member from the opera Omar walks down the stairs during a special concert Spoleto Festival USA sponsored for the congregation of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston on Saturday, June 4, 2022. The concert honored the bicentennial of Denmark Vesey's death. Henry Taylor/Staff
On a drizzly Saturday evening early last month, Polly Sheppard arrived inside Emanuel’s sanctuary. She was one of only three people who survived the massacre.
Sheppard, who grew up during segregation, sees the city as a complicated place.
Around Emanuel, where a vibrant Black neighborhood once bustled, gentrification has pushed antebellum home values into the stratosphere. Longtime residents, and the Black churches where they worshiped, have been forced off the peninsula. Racial disparities in wealth, education, incarceration and health outcomes persist.
But Sheppard came on this evening for an uplifting event.
Spoleto Festival USA had sponsored a gift to the church: a Denmark Vesey Memorial Concert.
The poet Robin Coste Lewis stepped into the pulpit. She is the first African American to win the National Book Award in poetry, an honor given the year the gunman opened fire in Emanuel’s fellowship hall, right beneath her feet.
“When I got the call to come here, I dropped everything,” she said.
Robin Coste Lewis shares the story of Denmark Vesey before reading a poem to begin a remembrance concert sponsored by Spoleto Festival USA for the congregation of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston on Saturday, June 4, 2022. Henry Taylor/Staff
She began with a recitation of Vesey’s popular narrative, peppered with sticking points that historians might debate for another 200 years as they parse the one-sided court records: Vesey recruited thousands, corresponded with the president of Haiti, led Bible study at the African Church, and organized the massive plot there, among other disputed facts.
For many, those particulars miss the point.
Vesey was among nearly three dozen men who gave their lives in 1822 on a quest for Black freedom, whatever the details. His story, his essence, is the essence of Black struggle in America. It's one of courage and sacrifice.
“This history — your history — is too powerful,” Lewis told those gathered at Emanuel.
Two centuries later, Vesey's example continues to inspire. A new generation of activists emblazon his name on Twitter handles. They chant it at protests. Black Lives Matter leaders invoke it to rally activists fighting for equal justice, as Frederick Douglass once did to inspire Black soldiers fighting for freedom.
For many in the crowd at Emanuel, this is what matters. Vesey stands for a fight that continues.
The crowd, Black and White, rose for a standing ovation.
