Aides told me that Booker worked through the night on the speech he delivered yesterday morning in an attempt to sound more didactic than in his usual emotional calls to action—“A reckoning with our past and present, and hope for a way out” is how a top aide summed up the thinking on the speech to me. He wasn’t going for tears. (These aides spoke anonymously to discuss the internal mechanics of the campaign.)

Peter Beinart: Cory Booker is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t

Booker preaches out on the trail, but at that church yesterday, for this speech between what was supposed to be a standard South Carolina campaign stop and a trip to the Iowa State Fair, he wanted to be more direct. It’s true, Booker said, Americans are just as conditioned to reactions to mass shootings—with Democrats speaking out, Republicans ducking comment for a few weeks, and pundits writing indignant columns—as they are to the shootings themselves. “You fail when you give up. And I refuse to fail,” Booker told me. (My full conversation with Booker is available on the Radio Atlantic podcast.)

Four years ago, inside the TD Arena at the College of Charleston, Barack Obama started singing “Amazing Grace” at a memorial service for those murdered at Mother Emanuel. Yesterday morning, Booker was at the church trying to believe there’s any grace left. Is Donald Trump, whose political sense of himself is still so much a reaction to Obama, a racist? Did Trump’s tweets about immigrants “invading” inspire the El Paso shooter? Booker made clear that he stands with most of the 2020 Democratic candidates in thinking that the answer to both is yes, but he warned the audience against letting “these conversations devolve into the impotent simplicity of who is or isn’t a racist. Because if the answer to the question ‘Do racism and white supremacy exist?’ is yes, then the real question isn’t ‘Who is or isn’t a racist?’ but ‘Who is and isn’t doing something about it?’”

The only way to end the nightmare, Booker told the room, is to shatter the fantasy of an America without horrors.

There’s a former slave market one mile from Mother Emanuel. Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired, is just across the water from all the beautiful wisteria-covered homes of Charleston. Mother Emanuel itself was burned down by an angry white mob in 1822, and the congregation met in hiding for years.

“The idea that we’re going to create some Disney-movie version of our history is offensive to me—it diminishes who we are by not telling the truth of who we are,” Booker told me. “Knowing the bloody, violent truth of our past empowers me and encourages my hope for what we have the capacity to do in our present. But it’s not easy. It’s not. What is easy is what Donald Trump does for short-term, pitiful political gain: to demonize ‘the other,’ other Americans, demean and degrade them. Politicians like this—this is a major part of our American story. I have no choice but to stay in this fight. Even if you lose day after day, [even if you] have to go to funeral after funeral after funeral, even if you lock—as I did—lock myself in the mayor’s office from time to time and just cry, you’ve got to get up off your knees and go back into the fight. That’s what this moment calls for. And none of us can show greater courage than those people in our past who saw more wretchedness, more violence, more hurt, and more pain, but kept on going, and bequeathed to us a nation that was better than when they found it.”