On June 17, 2015, a terrorist mass shooting and anti-Black hate crime occurred in Charleston, South Carolina. Nine people were killed and another was injured during a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest black church in the Southern United States. Among the fatalities was the senior pastor, state senator Clementa C. Pinckney. All ten victims were African Americans. At the time, it was one of the deadliest mass shootings at a place of worship in U.S. history, tied with the Waddell Buddhist temple shooting. Both incidents were surpassed by the Sutherland Springs church shooting in 2017.
Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist and neo-Nazi, had attended the Bible study before opening fire. He was found to have targeted members of this church because of its history and status. In December 2016, Roof was convicted of 33 federal hate crime and murder charges. On January 10, 2017, he was sentenced to death for those crimes. Roof was separately charged with nine counts of murder in the South Carolina state courts. In April 2017, Roof pleaded guilty to all nine state charges in order to avoid receiving a second death sentence, and as a result, he was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. He will receive automatic appeals of his death sentence, but he may eventually be executed by the federal justice system; Roof was one of three inmates on federal death row whose sentence was not commuted by President Joe Biden prior to leaving office.
Roof espoused racial hatred in both a website manifesto which he published before the shooting, and a journal which he wrote from jail afterward. On his website, Roof posted photos of emblems which are associated with white supremacy, including a photo of the Confederate battle flag. The shooting triggered debates about modern display of the flag and other commemorations of the Confederacy. Following these murders, the South Carolina General Assembly voted to remove the flag from State Capitol grounds and a wave of Confederate monument or memorial removals followed shortly thereafter.
Background
Founded in 1816, the church has played an important role in the history of South Carolina, including the slavery era and Reconstruction, the civil rights movement, and Black Lives Matter. It is the oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church in the South, often referred to as "Mother Emanuel". The AME Church was founded by Richard Allen in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1814 as the first independent black denomination. It is a historically black congregation, one of the oldest south of Baltimore.
When one of the church's co-founders, Denmark Vesey, was suspected of plotting to launch a slave rebellion in Charleston in 1822, 35 people, including Vesey, were hanged and the church was burned down. Charleston citizens accepted the claim that a slave rebellion was expected to begin at the stroke of midnight on June 16, 1822, and it was expected to erupt the following day (the shooting in 2015 occurred on the 193rd anniversary of the thwarted uprising). As the rebuilt church was formally shuttered with other all-black congregations by the city in 1834, the congregation met in secret until 1865 when it was formally reorganized, and it acquired the name Emanuel ("God with us"). It was rebuilt based on a design which was drawn by Denmark Vesey's son. That structure was badly damaged in the 1886 Charleston earthquake. The existing building dates from 1891.
The church's senior pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, had held rallies after the shooting of Walter Scott by a white police officer two months earlier, in nearby North Charleston. As a state senator, Pinckney pushed for legislation requiring police to wear body cameras.
Several commentators noted that a similarity existed between the massacre at Emanuel AME and the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of a politically active African-American church in Birmingham, Alabama, where the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) killed four black girls and injured fourteen others, during the civil rights movement. This attack galvanized support for federal civil rights legislation.
Numerous scholars, journalists, activists and politicians have emphasized their belief that the attack should not be treated as an isolated event because in their view, it occurred within the broader context of racism against Black Americans and racism in the United States. In 1996, Congress had passed the Church Arson Prevention Act, which considers the damaging of religious property a federal crime because of its "racial or ethnic character", in response to a spate of 154 suspicious church burnings which had occurred since 1991. More recent arson attacks against black churches included a black church in Massachusetts that was burned down the day after the first inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009.
Shooting
At around 9:05 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, June 17, 2015, the Charleston Police Department began receiving calls of a shooting at Emanuel AME Church. Dylann S. Roof, a man described as white, with sandy-brown hair, around 21 years old and 5 feet 9 inches (175 cm) in height, wearing a gray sweatshirt and jeans, opened fire with a Glock 41 .45-caliber handgun on a group of people inside the church at a Bible study attended by Pinckney. He had first attended the meeting as a participant that evening. Roof then fled the scene. He had been carrying a total of eight magazines when he entered, holding 11 hollow-point bullets each, for a total of 88 bullets. The event was finished by about 9:11 p.m.
During the hour preceding the attack, 13 people including the shooter participated in the Bible study. According to the accounts of people who talked to survivors, when Roof walked into the historic African-American church, he immediately asked for Pinckney and sat down next to him, initially listening to others during the study. He disagreed with some of the discussion of Scripture. After other participants began praying, he stood up, and aimed a gun he pulled from a fanny pack at 41-year-old Reverend Pinckney. He shot Pinckney five times. Reverend Daniel Simmons rose up from his seat and shouted, "Let me see my pastor. I need to check my pastor!" Roof aimed at Simmons and shot him five times as he was attempting to reach the side door to escape. Roof walked up to Simmons, who was lying down just in front of the side door, and fired one more shot into him at point-blank. Roof started opening fire at the rest of the people in the Bible study. He fired at the other victims, shouting racial epithets. He paced around the room, repeatedly fired at the churchgoers' bodies, and reloaded. He shot people hiding under the tables and also shot a bible. At one point, Roof overheard Polly Sheppard praying and told her to "shut up," saying he would leave Sheppard alive as a witness to the shooting. Just after Roof talked to Sheppard, 26-year-old Tywanza Sanders, while injured, stood up from the floor. He tried to talk Roof down and asked him why he was attacking churchgoers. The shooter said, "I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over the nation. And you have to go." Roof shot Sanders multiple times. Roof reportedly said, "Y'all want something to pray about? I'll give you something to pray about." Throughout the shooting, Roof reloaded his gun seven times. After Sanders was critically wounded, Sheppard used a cellphone to call 911. As the call was made, Roof decided to leave the church. He exited through a side door, reloaded his handgun again, and left the scene by car. Sanders' mother and his five-year-old niece, who also attended the study, survived the shooting by pretending to be dead on the floor. Sanders later died at the scene.
Dot Scott, president of the local branch of the NAACP, said she had heard from victims' relatives that Roof spared one woman (Polly Sheppard), saying that she could tell other people what happened. He asked, "Did I shoot you?" She replied, "No." Then, he said, "Good, 'cause we need someone to survive, because I'm gonna shoot myself, and you'll be the only survivor." According to the son of one victim, who spoke to that survivor, Roof allegedly turned the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger, but discovered he was out of ammunition. He left the church, reportedly after making another "racially inflammatory statement" over the victims' bodies. The entire shooting lasted for approximately six minutes.
Several hours later, a bomb threat was called into the Courtyard by Marriott hotel on Calhoun Street. This complicated the police investigation of the shooting, as they needed to evacuate the immediate area.
Victims
The mortally wounded victims, six women and three men, were all African-American members of the AME Church. Eight died at the scene; the ninth, Daniel Simmons, died at MUSC Medical Center. They were all killed by multiple gunshots fired at close range, with 54 projectiles being recovered from the nine bodies. Five people survived the shooting unharmed, including Felicia Sanders, mother of slain victim Tywanza Sanders, and her five-year-old granddaughter, as well as Polly Sheppard, a Bible study member. Pinckney's wife and youngest daughter were inside the building during the shooting, but were in the pastor's office with the door locked. A tenth victim was initially stated to be injured in the event. However, no official record indicates a wounded survivor in the Bible study. Those killed were identified as:
- Clementa C. Pinckney – the church's pastor and a South Carolina state senator.
- Cynthia Graham Hurd – a Bible study member and a branch manager for the Charleston County Public Library system; sister of former state senator Malcolm Graham.
- Susie Jackson – the oldest victim who was a Bible study and church choir member.
- Ethel Lee Lance – the church's sexton.
- Depayne Middleton-Doctor – a pastor who was also employed as a school administrator and admissions coordinator at Southern Wesleyan University.
- Tywanza Sanders – the youngest victim who was a graduate of Allen University; grandnephew of victim Susie Jackson.
- Daniel L. Simmons – a pastor who also served at Greater Zion AME Church in Awendaw.
- Sharonda Coleman-Singleton – a pastor; also a speech therapist and track coach at Goose Creek High School.
- Myra Thompson – a Bible study teacher.
The victims were later collectively referred to as "The Emanuel Nine".
Perpetrator
Dylann Storm Roof was named by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as the suspected killer after his father and uncle contacted police to positively identify him upon seeing security photos of him in the news. Roof was born in Columbia, South Carolina, and was living in largely African-American Eastover at the time of the attack. Roof had a prior police record consisting of two arrests, for trespassing and drug possession, both made in the months before the attack. According to then FBI Director James Comey, a police report detailing Roof's admission to a narcotics offense should have prevented him from purchasing the weapon used in the shooting. An administrative error within the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) excluded Roof's admission (though not the arrest itself) from appearing on his mandatory background check.
His Facebook page included an image of Roof wearing a jacket decorated with two emblems popular among American white supremacists: the flag of the former Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe) and the flag of apartheid-era South Africa. Roof reportedly told friends and neighbors he intended to kill people, including a plot to attack the College of Charleston, but his claims were not taken seriously. On June 20, bloggers discovered a website called "The Last Rhodesian" (www.lastrhodesian.com); it had been registered to a "Dylann Roof" on February 9, 2015. The website included what appeared to be an unsigned manifesto containing Roof's opinions of East Asians, Blacks, Jews and Hispanics as well as a cache of photos, including an image of Roof posing with a handgun and a Confederate Battle Flag. In this manifesto, Roof says he became "racially aware" as a result of the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, writing that when he learned about the incident, he read about it, concluding that George Zimmerman had been in the right. He did not understand the controversy about it. He said he searched for "black on White [sic] crime" on Google and found the website of a white supremacist group, the Council of Conservative Citizens, where he read "pages upon pages" of cases involving black people murdering white people. Roof wrote that he had "never been the same since that day".
According to web server logs, Roof's website was last modified at 4:44 p.m. on June 17, the day of the shooting, when Roof noted, "[A]t the time of writing I am in a great hurry."
An unidentified source said interrogations with Roof after his arrest determined he had been planning the attack for around six months. He had researched Emanuel AME Church, and targeted it because of its role in African-American history. A friend who briefly hid Roof's gun from him said, "I don't think the church was his primary target because he told us he was going for the school. But I think he couldn't get into [sic] the school because of the security ... so I think he just settled for the church."
Roof's cellphone and computer were seized and analyzed by the FBI. According to unnamed officials, he was in online communication with other white supremacists, who did not appear to have encouraged the massacre. The investigation was said to have widened to include other persons of interest.
Federal prosecutors said in August 2016 that Roof was "self-radicalized" online, instead of adopting his white supremacist ideology "through his personal associations or experiences with white supremacist groups or individuals or others".
Manhunt and capture
The attack was treated as a hate crime by police. Officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were called in to assist in the investigation and manhunt.