On a humid Charleston evening ten years ago, a ninth-grade dropout with a bowl haircut named Dylann Roof walked into a Bible-study class at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church, home to the oldest historically Black congregation in South Carolina. Roof, twenty-one, carried a .45-calibre Glock semi-automatic and eight magazines of hollow-point bullets. He settled into a seat near Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor and a state senator, who was leading a discussion of a parable from the Gospel of Mark. Around them sat a dozen parishioners, all Black, mostly women decades older than Roof.
Roof had set down his creed on a website he called “The Last Rhodesian”: a lonely, seething hatred of Black people, Jews, Asians, and Hispanics. He posted photographs of himself holding a Confederate flag and standing at Sullivan’s Island, where hundreds of thousands of Africans had once been sold into bondage. “We have no skinheads, no real K.K.K., no one doing anything but talking on the internet,” he wrote. “Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”
In the Bible-study class, Roof sat quietly for forty-five minutes. When the assembled bowed their heads in prayer, he stood, drew the Glock, and began to fire—pausing only to reload, then firing again. He loosed some seventy-five rounds. Tywanza Sanders, a young barber who had come with his mother, collapsed to the floor. As he lay dying, he asked, “Why are you doing this?”
“Y’all are raping our women and taking over the country,” Roof replied.
He spotted a woman praying under a table. “Shut up. Did I shoot you yet?”
“No,” she said.
“I’m going to let you live,” he told her, “so you can tell the story of what happened.”
What lingers in memory from Charleston, beyond the horror of the massacre, are the funerals that followed—above all, Barack Obama at the service for Clementa Pinckney, closing his eulogy by singing the first verse of “Amazing Grace.” That unscripted hymn may have been the most moving moment of his Presidency. Yet another moment was still more poignant, and, for many, beyond comprehension. Two days after the murders, at Roof’s bond hearing, the families of the dead spoke through their grief. They did not renounce him. They forgave him.
Felicia Sanders, Tywanza’s mother, addressed Roof directly: “We welcomed you Wednesday night in our Bible study with open arms. You have killed some of the most beautiful people that I know. Every fibre in my body hurts, and I will never be the same. But, as we say in Bible study, we enjoyed you. May God have mercy on you.” The daughter of Ethel Lance, who died at the age of seventy, told him, “You took something very precious away from me . . . but I forgive you.” Obama later said that the “decency and goodness of the American people shines through in these families.”
It was impossible not to recall those words of mercy while watching the memorial service,