Mother Emanuel
Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church
by Kevin Sack
ebook
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0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 4 weeks
“A masterpiece . . . a dense, rich, captivating narrative, featuring vivid prose . . . expansive, inspiring and hugely important.”—The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)
“Race, religion, and terror combine for an extraordinary story of America.”—Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., bestselling author of Begin Again
Few people beyond South Carolina’s Lowcountry knew of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston—Mother Emanuel—before the night of June 17, 2015, when a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist walked into Bible study and slaughtered the church’s charismatic pastor and eight other worshippers. Although the shooter had targeted Mother Emanuel—the first A.M.E. church in the South—to agitate racial strife, he did not anticipate the aftermath: an outpouring of forgiveness from the victims’ families and a reckoning with the divisions of caste that have afflicted Charleston and the South since the earliest days of European settlement.
Mother Emanuel explores the fascinating history that brought the church to that moment and the depth of the desecration committed in its fellowship hall. It reveals how African Methodism was cultivated from the harshest American soil, and how Black suffering shaped forgiveness into both a religious practice and a survival tool. Kevin Sack, who has written about race in his native South for more than four decades, uses the church to trace the long arc of Black life in the city where nearly half of enslaved Africans disembarked in North America and where the Civil War began. Through the microcosm of one congregation, he explores the development of a unique practice of Christianity, from its daring breakaway from white churches in 1817, through the traumas of Civil War and Reconstruction, to its critical role in the Civil Rights Movement and beyond.
At its core, Mother Emanuel is an epic tale of perseverance, not just of a congregation but of a people who withstood enslavement, Jim Crow, and all manner of violence with an unbending faith.
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Release date
June 3, 2025 -
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- ISBN: 9781524761325
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- ISBN: 9781524761325
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from April 1, 2025
Searching history of the Charleston church brought into the headlines by mass murder. In 2015, 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof took advantage of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church's open-door policy--"meant to affirm the place of the church as a refuge...not just from the universal stresses of life but from the particular ones born of four hundred years of enslavement, repression, and state--sanctioned discrimination"--and shot down nine parishioners and clergy. FormerNew York Times reporter Sack uses that horrific event as an entry point into the larger history of the Black church in America, from that open-door policy to involvement in the Civil Rights Movement over many decades and in local and national politics. In the last regard, one founding member of Emanuel, the oldest AME congregation in the South, "helped organize the 1865 statewide convention of Black South Carolinians that was called to set a postwar political agenda," an agenda thwarted by the failure of Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow. Indeed, by Sack's illuminating account, politics defined much of the Black church in relation to white society, though it was not always progressive; as he notes, the AME church in particular, though boasting a membership of 1 million in 1950, "rarely seemed in the vanguard, its voice often fainter than it might have been for a body its size and potential strength." In South Carolina, an epicenter of white supremacy, Emanuel tended toward gradualism in the interest of survival--as Sack notes, Emanuel has always struggled financially, with a declining membership and diminished post-pandemic attendance. Roof was not the only or final challenge or threat: Many other supremacists, Sack writes, are on the horizon, so Emanuel now has a squad of congregants who carry concealed weapons--and, tellingly, "the doors of the church are no longer always open." A sobering, expertly told history of the struggle for equality as waged from pulpit and pew.COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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