Funerals honor 3 more victims of South Carolina massacre

CHARLESTON, S.C. — A day after President Obama called on Americans to end the deep hold of racial discrimination in the country, the lives of three more victims of the church massacre were celebrated and their deaths transformed Saturday into a clarion call for change.

“I am sorry this happened on my watch,” Gov. Nikki Haley said at the funeral service for Cynthia Hurd, 54, a librarian and housing rights advocate, but we will make this right.

Speaker after speaker who walked to the altar of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church — where services were held Saturday for longtime members Hurd, Tywanza Sanders and Susie Jackson — discussed the powerful example they had set not just in their daily lives but in their deaths.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson and others said Saturday that the deaths of the “Emanuel 9,” as the victims are now called, had joined the pantheon of civil rights touchstones, including the killing of four girls in the church bombing in Birmingham in 1963 and the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Mayor Joseph Riley Jr. of Charleston described how Hurd had traded her college degree in math for a career devoted to books, and helped thousands of people embrace learning and reading.

Nearly two weeks ago, on June 17, a young white man walked into the first floor of the Emanuel Church, where a Bible study group was discussing a verse in the Gospel of Mark.

Law enforcement authorities have called the shootings a hate crime.

On Saturday afternoon, Sanders, 26, a college graduate who was full of ambition and pursuing a career as a record producer, and his aunt, Jackson, 87, a longtime devotee of Emanuel, were remembered in the same church, their flower-draped coffins sitting side by side.

Despite the heat, the chorus sang hymn after hymn.

[...] yet again the Rev. Norvel Goff, the president elder at Emanuel, set aside his own exhaustion and grief and stood in the pulpit, guiding the mourners through grief and jubilation.