church. Cynthia Hurd, fifty-four, was the branch manager of St. Andrews Regional Library. Depayne Middleton-Doctor, forty-nine, a longtime singer in the church choir, was an admissions coordinator at the Charleston learning center of her alma mater, Southern Wesleyan University. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, forty-five, also an assistant pastor at the church, was a track coach at Goose Creek High School. Myra Thompson, fifty-nine, a longtime churchgoer and Bible study teacher, was an active member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. Susie Jackson, eighty-seven, was a longtime member of the church. Felecia Sanders, fifty-eight, Jackson’s younger sister, was attending the service to be with her family. Tywanza Sanders, twenty-six, Felecia’s son, a 2014 graduate of Allen University, was an aspiring poet who was renowned for his broad smile. With them was Felecia’s granddaughter, five. Ethel Lance, seventy, was a longtime director of Charleston’s Gaillard Auditorium who had worked at the church for thirty years. Polly Sheppard, seventy-one, was a church trustee.
For nearly an hour the group discussed Scripture among themselves. Roof later told police that he nearly called off his plan because everyone “was so nice to him.” But he eventually steeled himself, deciding he “had to go through with his mission.”
No one is quite sure what set him off, but Felecia Sanders said later the group had just closed their eyes to begin the closing prayer when Dylann Roof stood up, began ranting that he was there to kill “niggers,” and pulled out his Glock. He turned and fired point-blank at Rev. Pinckney, killing him instantly.
Then he pointed it at Susie Jackson, the oldest person in the room. Tywanza Sanders stood up and pleaded with Roof not to take out his hatred on innocent people. “You don’t have to do this,” he said.
“Yes I do,” Roof answered. “I have to do it. You’ve raped our women, and you are taking over the country. You have to go. I have to do what I have to do.”
Sanders dove across his elderly aunt, Susie Jackson, trying to shield her, and Roof opened fire, killing him first. Then he shot Susie Jackson too.
The room erupted in the sound of gunfire and screams. Roof was between the door and everyone else, so they had nowhere to go but to cower on the floor. He methodically roamed about the room, shooting all of the other occupants—first Rev. Simmons, and then the rest, shooting each victim multiple times. He reloaded the Glock five times. He screamed racial epithets at his victims, and taunted them: “Y’all want something to pray about? I’ll give you something to pray about.”
Somehow, when it was all over, he had missed Felecia Sanders and her five-year-old granddaughter, who lay still on the floor, pretending to be dead, and Polly Sheppard, who also lay quivering on the floor. Roof stood over her.
“Did I shoot you?” he asked.
“No.”
He paused, then said, “Good, ‘cause we need someone to survive, because I’m gonna shoot myself, and you’ll be the only survivor.”
Then he turned away, pointed the gun to his head, and pulled the trigger—but it only clicked. He had run out of ammunition. So he walked out the door and into the night.
On the day after Dylann Roof’s rampage, the flags over the South Carolina statehouse in Columbia flew at half-staff except for one, the Confederate battle flag at the nearby Confederate Monument, which was affixed atop a pole by state law and could only come down at the behest of the state legislature. Half-staff wasn’t even an option. (The flag had been moved there after a controversy surrounding the flag’s flying over the statehouse itself.) But even before Roof was caught, the photos of him waving Confederate flags began to appear, along with his manifesto, and suddenly that flag’s position came into sharp focus.
Roof himself was captured the next morning in his car in Shelby, North Carolina. Another driver, Debbie Dills of Gastonia, North Carolina, spotted him while driving alongside him on US Route 74, and followed him for thirty-five miles while phoning the police with details of his whereabouts. Police surrounded his car and he surrendered without incident.
The massacre outraged and stunned the world. Most shocked were Americans, who had seemingly forgotten about the racial hatred that fueled white supremacism, both the street variety and the institutional kind. A number of acts of shocking terrorist violence had been committed for a variety of motives in recent years, but this one was fueled by pure old-fashioned racial hatred. It was as though Dylann Roof had summoned an ancient demon out of the American cellar that everyone had hoped had withered away out of neglect. Instead it had grown large and ravenous in the dark.
The shooting took place in the midst of rising racial turmoil in the United States. The Trayvon Martin shooting in February 2012 had sparked a growing national conversation about the disproportionate numbers of deaths of young black men while their murderers went free. Some of them had died while in police custody. The heated conversation turned into a bonfire when a young black man named Michael Brown was shot to death by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. The shooting sparked several days of civil unrest in Ferguson as large protest crowds confronted police riot forces. A grand jury’s decision in November not to charge the police officer triggered another week of riots and some looting.
There were other similar incidents of inexplicable lethal force applied to black men and boys. In July 2014, Eric Garner died in a New York City policeman’s chokehold. Tamir Rice, twelve, was shot in November 2014 by a Cleveland policeman for having a toy gun at a playground. Eric Harris was killed by Tulsa police detectives while trying to run away from an undercover sting in April 2015. Less than a week later, in Baltimore, Freddie Gray, twenty-five, died while in police custody after sustaining injuries to his neck and spine. The incidents kept mounting and drove the black community to become increasingly organized to push back. The movement called Black Lives Matter began making its presence felt in demonstrations around the United States.
South Carolina had had its own moment that spring in the unwelcome spotlight of racial strife—just weeks before Roof’s attack: On April 4, Michael Slager, a white North Charleston police officer, confronted Walter Scott about the brake lights on Scott’s 1991 Mercedes. Scott tried to flee; Slager caught up to him in a nearby vacant lot; Scott ran away again; Slager pulled his gun and shot him to death in the back. A bystander caught the shooting on video. Soon it went viral across the nation on social media and nightly newscasts.
But this time the policeman did not get away with it. After police viewed the video, Slager was arrested on April 7 and was indicted by a grand jury on June 8. Roof went on his rampage on June 17.
As it happened, Slager was Roof’s cell-block neighbor at the detention center in North Charleston where police took him after his capture (the two were unable to communicate). Roof reportedly confessed immediately to his crime and told investigators it was his hope that he would start a race war.
But nothing of the sort happened. The black community did not rise up in violence and anger in response to the murders. Instead, the survivors and the victims’ family members publicly forgave Roof and his fellow haters and urged the community to come together to heal. The black community chose to focus on helping that healing process happen. At the funerals for the victims, and in interviews with the survivors, forgiveness was the overriding theme.
“We welcomed you Wednesday night in our Bible study with open arms,” said Felecia Sanders in a public statement she read aloud to Roof at his first court hearing. “You have killed some of the most beautifulest people that I know. Every fiber in my body hurts, and I will never be the same. Tywanza Sanders is my son, but Tywanza was my hero … May God have mercy on you.”
Ethel Lance’s daughter said, “I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul. You hurt me. You hurt a lot of people, but God forgives
