Clementa Carlos Pinckney[a] (July 30, 1973 – June 17, 2015) was an American politician and pastor who served as a Democratic member of the South Carolina Senate, representing the 45th District from 2000 until his murder in 2015.

In 1996, Pinckney became the youngest African-American man elected to the South Carolina General Assembly at the age of twenty-three.

In 2015, Pinckney was assassinated by white supremacist Dylann Roof in a racially motivated terrorist mass shooting at an evening Bible study at his church.

His mother, Theopia Stevenson Aikens (née Brooms; 1945–2005), was an early childhood development educator, and his father, John Pinckney, was an auto mechanic.

His maternal great-grandfather, Reverend Lorenzo Stevenson, brought a lawsuit against the state's Democratic Party to end unintegrated primaries.

During the Civil Rights Movement, Pinckney's maternal uncle, Reverend Levern Stevenson, worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to desegregate school buses, and sued South Carolina Governor John C. West to create single-member districts to help elect more blacks into the South Carolina General Assembly.

[21] Historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. featured Pinckney in interviews for his award-winning PBS series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.

[22][23] Pinckney was among several South Carolina pastors to hold rallies after the shooting of Walter Scott in 2015, attracting some local controversy.

[26] Pinckney represented Allendale, Beaufort, Charleston, Colleton, Hampton, and Jasper Counties in South Carolina.

[9][29][30] In April 2015, Pinckney gave an impassioned speech[31][32] on the topic at the South Carolina Senate, citing the fact that national news had come to North Charleston because of the video tape of the incident.

[33] In 2001, Pinckney, along with senator Maggie Glover, proposed a bill for the black nationalist Pan-African flag to be displayed at the South Carolina State House.

[13] He spent the earlier part of that day campaigning with Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in Charleston.

[36] That evening, he led a Bible study and prayer session at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where he was senior pastor.

[37] While the FBI investigated the mass shooting as a hate crime,[9][38] which NBC 5's Eric King considered the attack a racially motivated act of terrorism, and criticized law enforcement and the media for not labeling it as such.

[63] In 2020, Allen University announced that their renovation of the Good Samaritan Waverly Hospital would include a memorial that will prominently feature the names of Pinckney and the other eight individuals slain at Emanual African Methodist Episcopal Church.