Written by Antjuan Seawright
It was 8:16 p.m., five years ago today when 21-year-old Dylann Roof, a white supremacist trying to start a race war, stepped off Calhoun Street and walked into Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Local tempers were also frayed ever since 50-year-old Walter Scott had been shot and killed in the street by a North Charleston Police Officer Michael Slager just a few weeks earlier.
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The parishioners that night had no reason to invite him into their circle, but they did.
Those who died that day include Bible study teacher Myra Thompson, choir member Susie Jackson and her grandnephew Tywanza Sanders, pastor and school administrator Depayne Middleton-Doctor, library manager Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Greater Zion AME Church pastor Daniel L. Simmons, speech therapist and Goose Creek High School track coach Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, the church sexton Ethel Lee Lance and my friend, Mother Emanuel pastor and SC State Senator Clementa Pinckney.
Dylann Roof
Todd Sumlin/Charlotte Observer/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
It is with that crime and capacity for violence in mind that I think about Ahmaud Aubrey, gunned down in the middle of the day by white men for committing no crime.
