Grace and Disgrace

"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."

"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."

On a humid Charleston evening ten years ago, Dylann Roof, a twenty-one-year-old with a bowl haircut and a history as a ninth-grade dropout, entered a Bible-study at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church. He carried a .45-calibre Glock and eight magazines of hollow-point bullets and sat near Pastor Clementa Pinckney. After sitting for forty-five minutes, he stood during prayer, opened fire, reloaded, and fired again, loosing about seventy-five rounds. Nine Black parishioners were shot; Tywanza Sanders died after asking why Roof was doing it. Roof had posted racist, white-supremacist material online and expressed a desire to turn internet hatred into real-world violence.

Read at The New Yorker