RIP Reverend Pinckney

[Content Note: White supremacist violence. Video may autoplay at first link.]

Yesterday, the body of South Carolina State Senator the Reverend Clementa Pinckney was carried to the South Carolina State House for a public viewing ahead of his funeral tomorrow, at which President Obama will deliver the eulogy.

The casket was brought "by horse-drawn caisson Wednesday into the South Carolina State House, past a Confederate battle flag that flies outside. In the second-floor lobby of the Capitol, where the body of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney lay in honor, a black drape was placed over a window, blocking view of the rebel flag."

Rev. Pinckney may have been obliged to travel past symbols of hatred, but he was received inside by thousands of mourners with an outpouring of love and respect:

Thousands of mourners on Wednesday streamed past the open casket of Clementa Pinckney, the esteemed pastor and state senator who lay in state under the Capitol dome a week after he and eight others were slain at a historic black Charleston church.

Pinckney's widow, Jennifer, two young daughters, Eliana and Malana, other family members and lawmakers he served with during nearly two decades in the Legislature stood by the casket greeting those paying their respects. Portraits of Pinckney, who was dressed in a black suit and red tie, stood on either side of the casket.

As Pinckney's casket disappeared inside the Statehouse, mourners, including Edna Nesbit of Hollywood, called out, "God bless you."

"We were just so heartbroken that we had to come here," Nesbit, 67, said later. "It's just so nice to see the respect given to a man who died too early and for no reason — just racism."

...Pinckney made history as the youngest African-American elected to office when he won a House seat at age 23. On Wednesday, he made history again — he is the first African-American to lie under the dome since Reconstruction.

Sob.

Some of the people who knew and loved Rev. Pinckney are saying that he will not have died in vain, that changes will come as a result of this heinous act of violence. Which is a thing that we say, to make sense of losing someone to hatred, to give a reason with which we can live to an entirely unreasonable death.

And we have to make sure that's true. We have to make sure that, for the people who survive Rev. Pinckney—and who survive Ethel Lance, Tywanza Sanders, Cynthia Hurd, Rev. Depayne Middleton Doctor, Susie Jackson, Myra Thompson, Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., and Sharonda Coleman-Singleton—changes will come.

Among those changes must be this: That we elevate the voices of and listen to people like Rev. Pinckney. That it doesn't take death at the hands of a white supremacist to value what they had to say about social justice in life.