It was one of the last days before Mr. Riley planned to retire after 40 years in office, a remarkable tenure that has made his narrow, bespectacled face and professorial mien as much a fixture of this Southern city as any of its storied church steeples. He had been asked to reflect on his most horrific day on the job: June 17, when a white gunman, apparently motivated by racial hatred, massacred nine black churchgoers here.
Mr. Riley emphasized, as he had many times, that the suspect, Dylann Roof, was not a Charlestonian. “His hatred wasn’t incubated here,” the mayor said. And he offered a theory as to why the response to the killings was not violent or destructive, particularly among blacks. The reason, he said, was that they considered Charleston to be “their city.”
