By the time the third victim of the Mother Emanuel Church massacre was laid to rest, I was back from two visits to Charleston and on Martha’s Vineyard, the thankfully welcoming place where so many of my friends have weighed in, expressing the pain felt around the world about what happened there. It’s why I love the Vineyard. We are family here.

And I also claim family in the AME church, which created the many layers of armor that have enabled me from an early age to walk and never get weary, as its choirs have always sung. Walk and never get weary, even when life’s circumstances threw obstacles in my path or challenges I needed to overcome.

My father Charles and grandfather Shep (known by his abbreviated middle name Shepherd) were both pastors in the AME Church. My grandfather was a presiding elder who traveled the state preaching and teaching preachers. Both my grandmothers were saints who lived the church’s teachings. My mother Althea, who joined the AME Church after marrying my father, was also spiritual and saw to it that I learned from those teachers, as well as from her.

I was actually born in South Carolina — Due West — a ways from Charleston, but we didn’t live there long. My father was then an Army chaplain and stationed in Riverside, Calif. So we soon left Due West so he could get to know his new baby girl. My mother traveled not only with the fat little hairless infant that I was, she traveled with the values embraced by the black people of Due West and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Values that helped African Americans keep on keepin’ on, in spite of the fact that the society around them every day in every way kept on keepin’ on trying to hold them down and enforce white superiority through Jim Crow laws and attitudes.

And while my father was serving his country in an army that segregated him and all who looked like him, he wore the armor of values crafted in the AME Church, armor that enabled him to tend other black soldiers dying in his arms on the bloody battlefields of World War II and Korea, fighting for a country that didn’t recognize them as full class citizens. And yet they were able to give their lives, if necessary, because they understood better than those who segregated them the American promise of freedom and justice for all. And that enabled those who didn’t die on the battlefield to come home and continue the fight for their rights at home, guided as they were on the battlefield by the values in their head, heart and history. Values that my father, my mother and my grandparents and my segregated community used to create my own suit of armor, values that spoke to the notion that all God’s children were equal in His sight (as I grew older, I wondered about that pronoun although never aloud in the AME Church). These values were principles by which we were taught how to live as good citizens, even as the larger society refused to recognize us as such. What the AME Church and its black families did was give black children like me a first-class sense of ourselves. Religious, but also simply human values.

When I learned that the massacre took place in an AME Church during a bible study session, I was transported back to St. Augustine, Fla., and many other locations in Florida where my grandfather was stationed, where my mother used to send me when I was a little girl to become further steeped in our values, and to be outfitted in more layers of moral armor.

My father’s mother, my grandmother Alberta Hunter, was a mighty crafter of the mission of creating moral armor for me. Every day at noon she walked the few feet from the parsonage to pray in the church. And each day, despite my tomboyish efforts to elude her, she would eventually find me and make me learn a Bible verse. Her favorite was the 23rd Psalm: “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me all the days of my life.” I was later shielded by that armor when as a 19-year-old I entered the previously all-white University of Georgia, under a court order, and was confronted with a mob screaming and throwing rocks at my dormitory window, shouting for me to leave what they saw as their institution of white privilege.

As I read about 26-year-old Tywanza Sanders who threw his body onto Susie Jackson, his 87-year-old aunt, to shield her from the demented assailant’s bullets, I wondered if he, too, was able to do that because he was clad in that mental armor, taught to him during another Bible class at Mother Emanuel. It seemed so to me and I hope as they perished, they felt the comfort of the rod and the staff protecting them.

My grandmother also taught in other ways, telling me: “Never mistreat anybody, no matter how nasty they might be to you. They might be the very ones who are feeding you. We have to live from the people, and you have to show them your gratitude.”

She was speaking, of course, of other black people in the segregated neighborhood. Black lives mattered, even when there were disagreements.

Today, as I reach back to my history in the AME Church, I understand the forgiveness of those who have lost loved ones. It’s about enveloping themselves in the armor of their values to heal the hurt in their own souls, as Nelson Mandela did when he forgave those who had imprisoned him for 27 years and waged brutal, vicious war on his people. But that kind of forgiveness doesn’t preclude seeking justice. And as a child of the AME Church, I am sure that those who are in pain in Charleston, will use their tears in the days to come to polish their armor, so that they, like those of us who mourn with them, can endure and prosper like so many generations before, not least those who did Bible study at churches like Mother Emanuel.

They are needed to help America meet its most enduring challenge — racism — and its role in failing to help America keep its promise to all its citizens, whose lives matter.

Charlayne Hunter Gault is a journalist and author who has been coming to the Vineyard since she was a young girl.