Last year, Frazier collaborated with Marjory Wentworth, South Carolina’s poet laureate, and Bernard Powers , a professor of history at the College of Charleston, on “We Are Charleston,” a book that puts the church murders in the context of the city’s racial history and records the responses to it.
The Civil War began in Charleston. The Ordinance of Secession was signed in Institute Hall, on Meeting Street, in December, 1860; the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, in the harbor, a few months later.
The current building was erected in 1891, on Calhoun Street, named for Vice-President John C. Calhoun, the intellectual progenitor of secession. The Calhoun monument, a column eighty feet high, topped by a statue of the statesman, is half a block away.