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 st

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