Three years before a gunman perpetrated a horrific massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, another bearer of heavily armed hatred entered the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C.

He had planned the attack for months, targeting the historic black congregation for its symbolic significance due to its commitment to abolitionism and civil rights. In his conspiracy-addled brain, the killer imagined he was triggering a needed racial showdown by showing up at a midweek Bible study, firing dozens of rounds and killing nine of the people who had just welcomed him.

He told one survivor he was leaving her alive to be a witness. Another woman survived with her granddaughter by playing dead and lying in the blood of her dying son and aunt. Two others — the wife and daughter of the slain pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney — survived hiding in an office.

Anyone watching news accounts of those days was left with indelible memories: the surveillance-camera photos of the boy-man killer with the bowl haircut; the bond hearing where victims’ relatives voiced forgiveness; the selfies posted by the killer with the Confederate flag; the subsequent removal of the Confederate flag from the State House grounds in Columbia after a contentious debate and vote by South Carolina legislators, which had lost one of its own in Rev. Pinckney, a state senator.

Then there was the memorial service where President Barack Obama broke into song, rousing those around him to their feet with “Amazing Grace.”

“Clementa Pinckney found that grace,” he declared. “Cynthia Hurd found that grace.” And so on: Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, DePayne Middleton Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel L. Simmons Sr., Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson. “... May grace now lead them home,” President Obama said.

Now we know much more of this complex story, thanks to the meticulously researched and poignantly written “Grace Will Lead Us Home: The Charleston Church Massacre and the Hard, Inspiring Journey to Forgiveness” by Jennifer Berry Hawes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Post and Courier of Charleston.

Ms. Hawes offers us multiple perspectives, most intimately those of the survivors and surviving relatives. She puts the events in the context of Charleston’s legacies of slavery, segregation and liberation. Such legacies overlap so tightly that when a stunned survivor called 911, she summoned first responders to Mother Emanuel’s address on Calhoun Street — as in John C. Calhoun, South Carolina’s pro-slavery champion, whose monument loomed nearby.

We like to think that congregations, like families, pull together in tragedy. But both can be torn by the psychic shrapnel of such atrocities. One survivor felt so neglected by the interim leadership at Mother Emanuel that she left for another church, and Mother Emanuel itself went through a succession of pastoral conflicts and replacements. Some family ties strengthened, others frayed; one victim’s grave is marked by rival tombstones.

What about those words of forgiveness?

From the start, the words were far from servile. “You took something very precious away from me,” one woman told the killer of her mother. “I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you! And have mercy on your soul.”

Such words flashed around the world quickly, drawing admiration as an astonishingly bold declaration of Christian grace.

But other relatives weren’t ready to forgive, then or later. To one, it “felt like the same old Charleston, where black people were expected to stand there and take every insult — even murder — with a gracious word and an acquiescent smile.”

At the killer’s sentencing hearing, some offered forgiveness, most dramatically when survivor Felicia Sanders held up her bloodied Bible. “When I look at the Bible, I see the blood that Jesus shed for me,” she said. “And for you, Dylann Roof. Yes, I forgive you. That was the easiest thing to do. But you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to help themselves. And that’s exactly what you are.”

Another three dozen people spoke. “They weren’t the homogeneous group of forgiving people the world wanted them to be,” Ms. Hawes wrote. “Some screamed at Roof, calling him evil. Several hoped he burned in hell for eternity. They called him a coward. Satan. An animal. A monster.”

Roof blankly said he still didn’t regret what he did. Now he’s on death row.

An emotionally and socially stunted product of a broken home, the young man had alternated between his parents’ homes, working sporadically, getting stoned and drunk while plunging ever deeper down an internet hellhole of white supremacy and racial hatred. Photos emerged of Roof posing with the Confederate flag. Gov. Nikki Haley, a Republican who had experienced racism as the daughter of Indian immigrants in South Carolina, said it was time to move the Confederate flag from the State House grounds to a museum.

Lawmakers agreed only after a fierce debate, vividly chronicled by Ms. Hawes. Soon many, but hardly all, Confederate monuments were coming down across the South. Ms. Haley’s gravity-defying political feat boosted her national profile, and she went on to serve as the Trump administration’s first ambassador to the United Nations. But recently, she faced criticism for saying the killer had “hijacked” the flag from those for whom it had meant “sacrifice and heritage.”

Critics said that the killer had, in fact, grafted himself onto a symbol of a centuries-old racist ideology that had once been enforced by the full power of the state.

One might have thought the events of 2015 had redemptively caused a state and a nation to reckon with the symbols of an oppressive history.

Such a reckoning may still be happening in some quarters, but the redemptive hope of Charleston seems as wistful these days as the memory of a president leading a unified chorus of “Amazing Grace.”

Peter Smith: petersmith@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1416; Twitter @PG_PeterSmith.

First Published: December 20, 2019, 3:00 p.m.