In 2015, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott attended the funerals of those slain by a racist gunman at Mother Emanuel AME Church. Scott would later tear up on the Senate floor recounting the faith of the fallen and their families. Haley would go on to write that she leaned on God and her faith deepened as she grappled with the trauma of the Charleston shooting.
If the state’s first Asian American governor and its first Black senator since Reconstruction embodied how far South Carolina has come on race, the murders of the Emanuel Nine showed just how far it has to go.
