Given the task definition and input, reply with output. In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.

A Charleston police officer places flowers in front of the Emanuel AME Church on Calhoun Street on Thursday. 
  
 Beyond the squad cars blocking roads and news trucks jamming sidewalks Thursday, Emanuel AME Church sat in the heart of historic Charleston, a sentry of faith roped off by police tape to all who were watching her. 
  
 A day earlier, as it has been for two centuries, it was a hub of friends gathering in prayer and community. 
  
 Now it stood alone, cordoned off from the bustle, silent in the day’s stifling heat after a mass shooting of its faithful the night before. 
  
 “It is heart-rending,” said Liz Alston, Emanuel’s church historian and an active member. 
  
 The historic Charleston congregation was born in 1816, the first African Methodist Episcopal Church in the South. It remains the oldest south of the Mason-Dixon Line. 
  
 Like many other black churches, it became a defender of freedom to worship — and much, much more. 
  
 “Emanuel has always been a focal point of social activity, religious activity, because churches were the only place in antebellum times where black people could assume leadership,” Alston said. 
  
 One of its founding members was Denmark Vesey. 
  
 Almost to the day 193 years ago, Vesey plotted a slave rebellion from the very church where so much blood spilled Wednesday when a band of worshippers gathered in the basement to study God’s word. 
  
 Vesey’s rebellion might have charted a new course for the lives of enslaved black residents, had someone not tipped off authorities. But someone did. And the 1822 plot was discovered, bringing harsh reprisals to the area’s black residents. 
  
 Vesey, a former slave but then a free carpenter, died with 34 others by the hangman’s noose. 
  
 The ensuing investigation forced the church’s pastor, the Rev. Morris Brown, to flee north to Philadelphia, seat of the AME Church. Mother Emanuel was burned. 
  
 Yet church members rebuilt — at least until 1834, when black churches were outlawed out of fear of black residents organizing, said Peter Beck, a local church historian and professor of Christian studies at Charleston Southern University. 
  
 Emanuel AME members were driven underground to worship in secret for decades until the Civil War freed them all. 
  
 “We do believe in a formalized structure, so we went underground,” Alston said. “But we couldn’t sing and pray like we usually do.” 
  
 Then it rebuilt again. 
  
 In 1865, at the close of the Civil War, the congregation also adopted the name Emanuel. It means “God is with us.” 
  
 “When nobody was there, they had their community,” Beck said. 
  
 And they still do, amid so much horror and grief. 
  
 Yet enough has changed in the ensuing 150 years that the nation elected its first black president. Now he, too, is left to mourn. 
  
 President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama knew the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor who was among the dead. 
  
 “Mother Emanuel Church and its congregation have risen before — from flames, from an earthquake, from other dark times — to give hope to generations of Charlestonians,” Obama said in a televised addressed on Thursday. 
  
 Pinckney took the helm of Mother Emanuel in 2010. 
  
 That year, he told a Post and Courier reporter, “Loving God is never separate from loving our brothers and sisters. It’s always the same.” 
  
 So the church will rebuild again, for one another, this time with the question of how to resanctify a holy place that has witnessed such horror. 
  
 To this question, the Rev. Joe Darby paused Thursday. He was the longtime senior pastor of Emanuel AME’s daughter church, Morris Brown AME, born when the mother church got too large. Now Darby is presiding elder of the church’s Beaufort District. But he and others remain committed to rebuilding Emanuel. 
  
 “We’re going to have to do that,” Darby said. “The family cries, and the family moves on.” 
  
 Reach Jennifer Hawes at 937-5563 or follow her on Twitter at @JenBerryHawes. ||||| "Mother Emanuel" A.M.E. Church History 
  
 The history of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church reflects the development of religious institutions for African Americans in Charleston. Dating back to the fall of 1787 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Richard Allen founded the Free African Society, adhering to the Doctrines of Methodism established by John Wesley. In 1816, black members of Charleston's Methodist Episcopal church withdrew over disputed burial ground, and under the leadership of Morris Brown. The Rev. Morris Brown organized a church of persons of color and sought to have it affiliated with Allen's church. Three churches arose under the Free African Society and were named the "Bethel Circuit". One of the Circuit churches was located in the suburbs of Ansonborough, Hampstead, and Cow Alley, now known as Philadelphia Alley in the French Quarters of Charleston. Emanuel's congregation grew out of the Hampstead Church, located at Reid and Hanover Streets. 
  
 In 1822 the church was investigated for its involvement with a planned slave revolt. Denmark Vesey, one of the church's founders, organized a major slave uprising in Charleston. Vesey was raised in slavery in the Virgin Islands among newly imported Africans. He was the personal servant of slavetrader Captain Joseph Vesey, who settled in Charleston in 1783. Beginning in December 1821, Vesey began to organize a slave rebellion, but authorities were informed of the plot before it could take place. The plot created mass hysteria throughout the Carolinas and the South. Brown, suspected but never convicted of knowledge of the plot, went north to Philadelphia where he eventually became the second bishop of the AME denomination. 
  
 During the Vesey controversy, the AME church was burned. Worship services continued after the church was rebuilt until 1834 when all black churches were outlawed. The congregation continued the tradition of the African church by worshipping underground until 1865 when it was formally reorganized, and the name Emanuel was adopted, meaning "God with us". The wooden two-story church that was built on the present site in 1872 was destroyed by the devastating earthquake of August 31, 1886. The present edifice was completed in 1891 under the pastorate of the Rev. L. Ruffin Nichols. The magnificent brick structure with encircling marble panels was restored, redecorated and stuccoed during the years of 1949-51 under the leadership of the Rev. Frank R. Veal. The bodies of the Rev. Nichols and his wife were exhumed and entomed in the base of the steeple so that they may forever be with the Emanuel that they helped to nurture. |||||

Wednesday night's massacre was just the latest tragedy for one of the most historic black churches in America—and members of Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church say they will once again emerge stronger, CNN reports. The first AME church in the South was founded in 1816, and historian Edward Ball tells the New York Times that it remains hugely important to black Southerners. "This church is much more than a place where people sing gospel," he says. "It's tethered to the deep unconscious of the black community." In its early days, the church's ministers faced arrest for violating laws on black people gathering without white supervision, CNN reports, and it was burned in 1822 after one of its founders, Denmark Vesey, plotted a slave revolt. Members were forced underground for decades when all-black churches were outlawed, the church's history page says. It adopted the name Emanuel after the Civil War, and it had to rebuild once again when the church building was destroyed by an earthquake in 1886. In the 1960s, it was a center of the civil rights movement, hosting leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. President Obama, who knew murdered pastor Clementa Pinckney, paid tribute to the church's history in an address yesterday, the Post and Courier reports. "Mother Emanuel Church and its congregation have risen before—from flames, from an earthquake, from other dark times—to give hope to generations of Charlestonians," he said.