2015 Charleston Church Shooting

On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof (21) entered Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina and joined the mid-week Bible study group, sitting with them for approximately an hour before opening fire. He killed nine people, all Black parishioners. He allowed some individuals to survive explicitly so they could report what had happened. He fled and was arrested the following morning in Shelby, North Carolina, after a passing motorist recognized him from surveillance footage and called police. Roof stated that his goal was to start a race war. He was subsequently convicted on 33 federal counts and nine state murder counts, and was sentenced to death in both proceedings. Brenton Tarrant's 2019 Christchurch manifesto explicitly cited Roof as a proof of concept, making the Charleston attack the opening event in the documented accelerationist succession extending through Tarrant to Payton Gendron, Juraj Krajčík, Nikita Casap, and Cain Clark.¹

The Attack

Roof arrived at Emanuel AME Church, one of the oldest and most historically prominent Black churches in the American South, during Wednesday evening Bible study. He sat with the group for roughly an hour. He then opened fire on the worshippers.

The nine people killed were the church's senior pastor and South Carolina state senator Clementa C. Pinckney, Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lee Lance, Depayne Middleton Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and Myra Thompson.

After the attack Roof drove out of state. A motorist in Shelby, North Carolina recognized him from surveillance footage broadcast in the immediate aftermath and called police. He was arrested the following morning without resistance.¹

Radicalization

Roof described his radicalization in a manifesto he posted online before the attack. He stated he had been drawn into white nationalist ideology by reading Council of Conservative Citizens material online, particularly distorted and fabricated statistics about interracial crime. He wrote that he had decided that someone needed to take action, that no existing organized movement would, and that therefore he would do so alone.

His manifesto cited white South Africa as an aspirational model and framed the attack explicitly as a provocation: a high-profile act of racial violence intended to trigger a white nationalist response and accelerate the collapse of multiracial American society. Roof had no prior criminal record and no documented connection to any organized white nationalist group before the attack.²

Legal Outcomes

A federal jury convicted Roof on all 33 counts, including hate crimes resulting in death, obstruction of religion resulting in death, and use of a firearm to commit a violent crime. U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel sentenced him to death in January 2017. Roof waived counsel for part of the federal proceedings and continued to reject the legitimacy of the charges.

South Carolina state court convicted Roof on nine counts of murder and sentenced him to death on each count.

Accelerationist Succession

Tarrant's March 2019 Christchurch manifesto argued that Roof's attack had demonstrated that a single individual could shift political conditions through targeted racial violence. Tarrant cited Roof as a precedent and inspiration, retroactively incorporating the Charleston attack into the "saint" framework. The Christchurch attack in turn inspired Gendron (Buffalo, 2022), whose attack was named by Krajčík as his "final nudge" (Bratislava, 2022). The chain continues through Casap (Wisconsin, 2025) and Clark (San Diego, 2026), all of whom cited Tarrant's manifesto as foundational.³