Every Hero Has A Story

A strained sense of normalcy returned Saturday to the St. Andrews Regional Library off of Sam Rittenberg Boulevard three days after its manager, Cynthia Hurd, 54, was shot to death by a 21-year-old white supremacist with a checkered past.
Hurd was one of nine black attendees gunned down at a Bible study at one of downtown’s most storied churches, “Mother” Emanuel AME Church on Calhoun Street.
The church’s pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who also served in the state Senate for the past 15 years, was leading the study as he, too, was shot to death.
Outside Mother Emanuel, flowers have piled up as national media trucks huddled to report from the scene of one of the nation’s worst church massacres in decades.
Outside the front door of the West Ashley library, a colorful printed sign is stuck in the ground that reads, “Every Hero has a story.” It’s the theme of the library system’s summer reading program.
Inside the library’s front door sits a temporary homage of a table covered with flowers from well-wishers and a photo of Hurd. Arrivals at the table soon overwhelmed the space Saturday morning and vases and pots filled with flowers and hydrangeas are moved inside.
Outside the library and across the nation, opinions swerved to the right and the left of the shooting.
Presidential candidates have weighed in, one with a monumental slip of the tongue. A national gun advocate blamed the pastor for having voted against a state law that would have allowed him to carry a concealed weapon into church.
Pundits charge that a local judge may have gone too far, or been too stringent in his tone, reminding those in attendance at the shooter’s arraignment that the shooter’s family was also suffering.
A manifesto reportedly penned by the shooter, Dylann Storm Roof, 21, has surfaced detailing why he left his Columbia-area home to carry out the killings he now stands charged for.
Supposedly inspired by the Trayvon Martin shooting, which he blamed on the dead teen, the bowled-cut Roof describes his journey to racial radicalization via a series of traditional racist arguments and exposure to hate groups.
Roof is currently inside the Charleston County jail, arraigned, and waiting for the next step in his legal process. If Gov. Nikki Haley has her way, his path would include an intersection with the death penalty.
Inside St. Andrews Library, it looks like a normal Saturday at the library.
Kids talk too loudly. One teen rolls his eyes in a practiced manner when his mother suggests adding a certain book to his checkout load.
A recent transplant signs up for a library card. A middle-aged woman sporting a teal-blue streak in her hair and a tank top which shows off the coiled cobra tattoo on her upper arm sits in front of a computer terminal, reading a posting about American bulldogs.
In the library’s meeting room, a line of well-behaved kids, white and brown, sit still, waiting for the “Caped Crusaders” superhero book-reading event to start, while their parents sit on the back row.
And yet, beyond Hurd’s obvious absence, something is missing.
Workers from the Mt. Pleasant branch man the desks, so Hurd’s colleagues could take another day off. They wear black lace ribbons on their nameplates.
Marijya Sanderling, Hurd’s assistant for the past month, tries to manage. ”Nothing will … nothing could … make what happened make sense. This isn’t fair for anyone,” she says.
Hurd, Sanderling says, was more than a boss to many of her employees and co-workers. “She was a mentor to a lot of young women. They looked up to her; they turned to her for advice on their lives and their work.”
Hurd had earned a master’s degree in library science at the University of South Carolina.
Sanderling tells one of the workers to take a break at 10 a.m., even if she doesn’t think she needs one. “I want everyone to breathe; you got through the first hour.”
In a Friday interview, Hurd’s brother, former North Carolina legislator Malcolm Graham, described his older sister as a “book nerd.” He said she loved inspiring kids to read and read more, and eventually to read to their own children.
He also described her as the “Dr. Phil” of the downtown Dart Library on Upper King, where she had worked before being given the reins to St. Andrews in 2011.
Graham began weeping so profoundly during the interview that his brother came over and cradled his head.
Composed, Graham said his family, which includes her widower and a large extended family in Charleston, was struggling. But they’ve gained a measure of strength knowing she passed away in a church “that gave her the most peace and satisfaction,” he said.
Efforts to honor Hurd and the other victims, to find some silver lining in the massacre, have already begun. The cry to remove the Confederate battle flag, a racially contentious icon, from its place on the grounds of the S.C. Statehouse has renewed and increased in volume.
Everywhere you look on social media, a host of icons have been launched commemorating the shooting. One has morphed the palm leaves in the state flag into heaven-bound doves. Another has a heart growing outward from Charleston, beginning to fill the entire state.
County Council chairman Elliot Summey has floated the idea of naming a library in her honor.
While that takes a process to be completed, especially with the library system in the beginning stages of an ambitious building campaign, it’s an idea library board trustee and chair Janet Segal says many seem to like.
Symbolism surrounds the shooting, which occurred at roughly 9 p.m. the night before the anniversary of the Sofa Super Store fire, which claimed the lives of nine city firefighters. Eight years separate those two disastrous incidents.
Three-and-a-half feet separate two disparate books in the library’s social issues section. One is a collection of autobiographical writings by Mohandas Gandhi, the father of non-violent protest.
On a facing shelving unit, the other is Richard Poe’s “The Seven Myths of Gun Control: Reclaiming the truth about guns, crime, and the Second Amendment.”
A local tennis pro who grew up in Israel and who now coaches in West Ashley said the shooting was front-page news in his hometown of Tel Aviv. Now, he says, the world knows the difference between Charleston and Charlotte.
No matter if her name is eventually placed on the outside wall of a library, Hurd’s story will stand as a reminder to the world that, in the words of Helen Keller, “The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of tiny pushes of each honest worker.”
“Every hero has a story.” Cynthia Hurd is West Ashley’s hero.