![]() It seemed that the cumulative detail of those images could tell them little that they did not already know: nine people were dead for no other reason than the color of their skin. ![]() Many in the courtroom, journalists and family members alike, averted their eyes. The root of their pain lay in the photographs’ gruesome specificity and its capacity to answer in precise detail questions that were too lurid to have occurred otherwise: how the bodies lay how the dead faces were contorted how the spatters of blood patterned the walls. The tableaux of death brought gasps and quiet sobs from those in attendance, some of whom were survivors of the attack, others relatives of the victims. But, as if to demonstrate the clear horror of its impact, the prosecution in Roof’s trial, in December, 2016, exhibited images from the crime scene. In the years since, his reasoning has become no less opaque, even as similar thinking has become more commonly articulated. When he was arrested, the following day, he confessed to the murders, citing a convoluted theory of defending white sovereignty as his rationale. ![]() Church on Calhoun Street, in Charleston, South Carolina, pulled a semi-automatic handgun, and murdered nine Black congregants, in the midst of their Bible study. On an evening seven years ago this month, a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist named Dylann Roof entered the Emanuel A.M.E.
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