This summer’s racially-motivated shooting deaths of nine black worshippers inside Emanuel AME Church first affected Charleston’s mayor’s race by shutting down the campaigns for weeks as the city dealt with the funerals and widespread grief.
On Friday, it shaped the race in a different way before more than 225 people at Burke High School.
All six mayoral candidates appeared together on stage there to discuss many of the city’s persistent racial disparities and how they would address them, if elected.
If the Mayoral Forum on Race Equity was not organized directly in response to the Emanuel shootings, the crime gave its organizers a renewed sense of urgency.
Read it all from the local paper.