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Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church
by Kevin Sack
A sweeping history of one of the nation's most important African American churches and a profound story of courage and grace amidst the fight for racial justice—from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kevin Sack.
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 the first A.M.E. church in the South in order 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 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. We'll meet unsung heroes like Denmark Vesey, the former slave whose aborted rebellion plot led to his hanging and the destruction of the original church; Rev. Richard Harvey Cain, Emanuel's first pastor after the Civil War, who also won election to Congress during Reconstruction; Rev. Benjamin J. Glover, who served simultaneously as pastor and a crusading NAACP leader during the 1960s; and Reverend Clementa Pinckney, a respected state legislator, whose murder in 2015 inspired President Barack Obama's memorable "Amazing Grace" eulogy.
At its core, Mother Emanuel is an epic tale of perseverance, not just of a congregation, but of a people who withstood enslavement and Jim Crow and all manner of violence with an unbending faith.
"[Mother Emanuel is a] searching history of the Charleston church brought into the headlines by mass murder ... A sobering, expertly told history of the struggle for equality as waged from pulpit and pew." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Mother Emanuel begins as the tale of a vicious crime and a forgiving church but turns into an epic story of Black life and becoming that spans two hundred years. Beautifully written, a marvel of research, the book is set in one of the old corners of the South, peopled with a hundred personalities and filled with as many subplots. Kevin Sack renders a portrait of Black Americans in every generation since the Revolution. Big in historical scale but granular in personal detail, Mother Emanuel transcends the church of its title and the crime that made it famous. It feels like a monument to Black America that takes the form of a book." —Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family and Life of a Klansman
"This book shook me with its power and beauty. Kevin Sack tells the story of a moment of racial terror that turned into an opportunity for grace—and from that terrible story produces an insightful and inspiring work of history. Mother Emanuel is a book of enormous ambition, meticulously researched, gorgeously written, and deeply fulfilling." —Jonathan Eig, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for King: A Life
This information about Mother Emanuel was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kevin Sack is a veteran journalist who has written broadly about national affairs for more than four decades and has shared in three Pulitzer Prizes. A native of Jacksonville, Florida, and a graduate of Duke University, he spent thirty years on the staff of the New York Times, where he specialized in writing longform narrative and investigative reports, often related to race. He also has written for the Los Angeles Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine. He was a 2019 Emerson Collective Fellow at New America.
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