Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

FAIN: FZ-261349-18

Kevin Sack
Unaffiliated independent scholar

Writing a history of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

I'm writing a book for Crown Publishing about the remarkable story of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., site of one of the nation's most horrific hate crimes. On a Wednesday night in June 2015, a 21-year-old white supremacist, Dylann Roof, murdered nine Bible study worshipers in the church fellowship hall with the delusion of inciting a race war. He had picked his target, the oldest A.M.E. church in the South, for maximum impact. Through extensive interviews and archival research, I plan to trace the church's history from its founding around 1818 in a bold breakaway from white churches to its central place in the second term of the first black president. The book's conceit is to examine two centuries of African-American life as an ongoing narrative that unfolds within a single congregation. Its ambition is to be an enduring case study, both scholarly and accessible, of the black church's role in resisting oppression at every stage of the freedom struggle.

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Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church (Book)
Title: Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church
Author: Kevin Sack
Editor: Kevin Doughten
Abstract: 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.
Year: 2025
Primary URL: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/557131/mother-emanuel-by-kevin-sack/
Primary URL Description: Penguin Random House pre-order link.
Access Model: Retail purchase
Publisher: Crown Publishing
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781524761301
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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