“I realize these people are not criminal,” Roof said of the dead. “They’re in church.” Illustration by Brian Stauffer

Early on the morning of December 7th, a dozen officers from the Department of Homeland Security were stationed outside the federal courthouse at 85 Broad Street, in Charleston, South Carolina. It was warm out, and the officers looked both relaxed and alert, talking among themselves as they kept watch. The federal building is a bunker, all right angles and gray concrete, completed in 1987. Across the street stands the county courthouse, designed by James Hoban, the architect of the White House, and diagonally opposite is the city hall, built in 1801. The federal building would mar what the American Planning Association calls one of the nation’s “great streets,” except that it is hidden by a red brick antebellum structure that faces the street—an architectural sleight of hand that says much about the reasons that the Homeland Security officers were on Broad Street that day.

The federal trial of Dylann Roof was commencing, eighteen months after he shot and killed nine African-American congregants at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, during evening Bible study, a crime he had confessed to on video in horrific detail and without remorse. The authorities were concerned that Roof, who repeatedly stated that he had committed the murders as a call to action for persecuted whites, had become a cause célèbre for white nationalists. That movement had been exiled to the political fringes after the murders, but it had regained some visibility during the Presidential campaign.

Two days earlier, a jury had deadlocked in the trial of Michael Slager, a North Charleston police officer charged with murder in the death of Walter Scott, an unarmed fifty-year-old black man, whom Slager had shot in the back as he ran from a traffic stop. When the judge declared a mistrial, Scott’s mother invoked God’s will toward justice, and the state’s governor, Nikki Haley, cautioned patience until the state could retry the officer. Now some feared that, despite the confession and the overwhelming forensic evidence, something similar might occur in the Roof trial.

Judge Richard Gergel was presiding. He is an avuncular silver-haired man with a reputation for efficiency and a liberal bent; in 2014, he issued a ruling that same-sex couples have the right to marry in South Carolina, and he was responsible for installing a portrait of Jonathan Jasper Wright, the state’s first black Supreme Court justice, in the Court building. The courtroom was solemn as Roof entered, wearing a gray-and-black striped prison jumpsuit. He is now twenty-two, but, with his blond hair in a fresh bowl cut, he appeared younger. He is small to the point of fragility, and his frame swam in the jumpsuit. He was charged with thirty-three felony counts; twelve of them were hate crimes, and eighteen others, including firearm and religious-obstruction charges, were punishable by death.

The family members of the victims, their supporters, the church’s new pastor, Eric Manning, and other clergy filled the benches on the right side of the courtroom. Roof’s mother and his paternal grandparents sat in the second row on the left. Many people had assumed that Roof was a representative of the disenfranchised white population whose narrative of loss had come to play an unexpectedly central role in the election. Roof dropped out of high school after repeating ninth grade and then dropped out of an online alternative school before later earning his G.E.D., but he did not grow up in poverty. His grandfather is a prominent real-estate attorney in Columbia. His father, who attended the trial sporadically, is a building contractor and owned several properties around the state. At the time of the shooting, Roof lived with his mother in a spacious home in Lexington, across the Congaree River from Columbia.

He had chosen to drive two hours to Charleston to commit his crime, he told the police, because the city is “historic.” Mother Emanuel, as the church is known, traces its roots to 1816. It was a center of clandestine anti-slavery activity and, in 1822, when city officials discovered that congregants were planning a slave revolt, they burned the church to the ground. The current building was erected in 1891, on Calhoun Street, named for Vice-President John C. Calhoun, the intellectual progenitor of secession. The Calhoun monument, a column eighty feet high, topped by a statue of the statesman, is half a block away. The monument and the church, which came to play a central role in the Southern civil-rights movement, stand like a statement and its rebuttal. Roof had drawn up a list of half a dozen churches before settling on Mother Emanuel. “I realize these people are not criminal,” he said. “They’re in church.” He chose them, he explained, because killing a black drug dealer would not have generated the same attention.

The lead prosecutor was Jay Richardson, an Assistant U.S. Attorney, based in Columbia. He is a small dark-haired man who speaks in a commanding tone. Roof’s mother sank down on the bench as he delivered his opening statement, which contained details of the crime that had previously been withheld from the press. At a certain point, she slumped over. It seemed for a moment that she had fainted, but she was taken to a hospital, and it was later learned that she had suffered a heart attack. She survived, but did not return for the remainder of the trial.

Richardson reported that Roof pulled into the church parking lot and sat in his car for some time, “contemplating,” before going inside. He had loaded eight clips of hollow-point ammunition for his Glock .45 semiautomatic handgun, because, Richardson implied, he wanted to have eighty-eight bullets; the number is white-nationalist code for “Heil Hitler.”

The most well known of Roof’s victims was Emanuel’s pastor, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who also served in the South Carolina State Senate. (He became a member of the state House of Representatives in 1996, when he was twenty-three, the youngest African-American ever elected to the state’s legislature.) Pinckney welcomed the newcomer, gave him a Bible, and offered him a chair next to him in the circle where the twelve attendees of the study group sat. Roof’s motive was “retaliation for perceived offenses” against the white race, Richardson said. “He also talked about ‘the call to arms,’ the hope that his attack would agitate others, worsen race relations, increase racial tensions that would lead to a race war.”

Four months before the shooting, the Equal Justice Initiative issued a report on the history of lynching in the United States after Reconstruction. There were a hundred and eighty-four lynchings in South Carolina. The last occurred in 1947, when a mob beat, stabbed, and shot to death Willie Earle, a twenty-four-year-old black man who had been accused of murdering a white cabdriver from Greenville. Strom Thurmond, who was then the governor, pushed for those responsible to be brought to trial, perhaps worried that the incident would undercut efforts to recast the state’s brutish image. Thirty-one white men were charged; all were acquitted. Richardson, in his opening, seemed to suggest that lynching had not ceased in South Carolina; it had just been on a sixty-eight-year hiatus. Later in the trial, he made that connection explicit, charging that Roof was guilty of “a modern-day lynching.”