Hawes - GRACE WILL LEAD US HOME: the charleston church tragedy and the hard, inspiring journey to... forgiveness

It would be a late night. That much Felicia Sanders knew when she gathered her worn Bible and headed out into the swampy summer heat of June. She had a 5 oclock committee meeting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, where her family had worshipped since the days when Jim Crow ruled the old slave city she still called home. First, she would attend two meetings, one small and one large, to handle routine church business.

Last would come Bible study, her favorite.

She slipped into her black Toyota 4Runner, where she kept an extra pair of flats in case she was called to usher at the last minute. A day rarely went by that didnt bring Felicia to the place that many folks called Mother Emanuel, given its revered status as the Souths oldest AME church. Its members knew they could count on her to help with just about anything. Revivals. Mothers Day programs. Fundraising. Sunday school. Felicia, a fifty-seven-year-old grandmother and hairstylist, had served as a trustee, a steward, the usher board president. She even volunteered as Emanuels chicken fryer, although she herself was a vegetarian.

Felicia did it because she loved God, and she loved the congregation. Mother Emanuel was home.

A handsome woman with soft hips and high cheekbones, she had grown up with her siblings in Charlestons downtown projects, attending church with her strict grandmother after her own mother died young. Felicias husband, Tyrone, had also grown up among closely bound families in the working-class black neighborhoods near Emanuel. After years of hard work, however, they had been able to provide a suburban life for their own children, complete with a two-story house and the wide tree-draped front lawn that Felicia now drove past.

As she cruised along a winding road that led toward downtown Charleston, she wondered if her youngest child would make it to Emanuel that night. Tywanza also loved Bible study, but he was working a shift at Steak n Shake, one of his two jobs, and had warned her that he might run late. The thought meandered away as she crossed over a wide river, passed a marina adorned with gleaming white vessels, and merged onto downtown Charlestons thin peninsula.

Pedestrians crowded its thin streets, many lined with majestic old churches and finely restored antebellum homes. A few traffic lights stopped Felicia along a tourist-choked stretch of Calhoun Street, named after the countrys seventh vice president and one of its most ardent defenders of slavery. A 115-foot monument to the man towered over a verdant city square that bordered the street Felicia, a black woman, now navigated. It was so much a part of the place that she scarcely noticed it anymore. One building beyond the statue, she eased into a lot outside of Mother Emanuel and strolled inside, as she had thousands of times before.

As Felicia made her way into the church of her ancestors, a young white man, lean of frame, with a mop of bowl-cut sandy brown hair, sat one hundred miles away pecking at a keyboard inside his fathers house at the heel of a dead-end road. The young man sometimes slept overnight on the couch, although that wasnt his plan today. He was busy putting the finishing touches on his new website. Its subject: issues facing our race.

A couple of years earlier, hed Googled black on white crime, mostly out of passing curiosity, and stumbled onto a surprisingly robust realm of white supremacist websites. There hed discovered claims of grave threats to his racean epidemic of violence against whites, the overlooked inferiority of blacks, and a vast conspiracy to cover it all up. Writings on the sites hed plumbed after that search had fomented what he now considered his lifes great epiphany: his racial awakening.