Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah went to South Carolina to write about the trial of Dylann Roof. He’s the white man convicted of murdering eight black parishioners and their pastor at Charleston’s historic Mother Emmanuel AME church. She was planning to write about the people who died, but instead found herself writing about Roof.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is an essayist and author. Earlier this year, she went to South Carolina for the trial of Dylann Roof. He’s the young, white man who was ultimately convicted of murdering eight black parishioners and their pastor at Charleston’s historic Mother Emanuel AME Church in the summer of 2015. Ghansah’s idea was to write about the people he killed, but she told my colleague Kelly McEvers that as she sat there in the courtroom, her project changed.
RACHEL KAADZI GHANSAH: Dylann was very determined to keep all psychological and personal information out of the trial, and his silence struck me as…
