‘Remembering Charleston’ candlelight vigil planned for Sunday evening at Grangebel Park in Riverhead

There will be a candlelight vigil in Grangebel Park Sunday evening for “Remembering Charleston,” organized to both mourn the June 18 massacre at a Charleston, South Carolina church and support the movement to end the flying of the Confederate flag over the state capitol there.

“We must not stand on the sidelines immobilized by our grief and horror,” said Angela DeVito, one of the organizers of the vigil, which will take place in the bandstand area of the downtown park at 7 p.m. Sunday evening.

“We need to have conversations about these issues,” DeVito said, referring to race relations, gun violence and flying the flag she called “a symbol of a way of life and economy based on slavery.”

DeVito said she is one of several people looking to form a group that will spearhead such community conversations.

“We need in Riverhead to be engaged in what’s going on the rest of this country,” DeVito said. “And we need to have them in a venue that crosses ethnic, racial, cultural and economic lines.”

Conversations are happening in churches led by pastors in their pulpits, she said, “but they are separate conversations in separate church communities, held in isolation. We need to have them together, as a community.”

DeVito said she was personally taken aback by the Charleston massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, a city where she lived for six months in the early 1990s when she was part of a team conducting a forensic investigation of an industrial accident that killed seven people and injured 13 others.

“I’d never been there and I was surprised to find it was magnificently cosmopolitan,” DeVito said. “I expected to have a greater sense of separation of the races, but didn’t find that in Charleston — in other cities, including Columbia the capital, yes. But not in Charleston.”

DeVito recalled that at the time she lived there, the Charleston public schools were reintroducing Gullah, a language that had been spoken by slaves and their early descendants.

“We’re hoping that the people of Riverhead come together to embrace the victims’ families in their sorrow and stand with them, as we’ve witnessed their tremendous strength and love in the face of tragedy — and their willingness to forgive,” she said.

Town Supervisor Sean Walter said he commends DeVito for organizing the vigil. “We need to stand together in solidarity with the families of the murder victims,” he said.

The Confederate flag should not fly over government buildings in the U.S., the supervisor said.

“It’s a symbol of racism. South Carolina needs to relegate it to a museum and move on,” Walter said. “In this day and age, it’s just unacceptable because of what it means to so many people.”

Participants should bring a candle and chair and wear something orange in remembrance of victims of gun violence, DeVito said.

Organizers are reaching out to area clergy to invite them to attend and speak.