MOTHER EMANUEL: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church, by Kevin Sack
“Mother Emanuel” is a masterpiece in which Kevin Sack tells the story of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in Charleston, S.C., “the most historic Black church in the South’s most historic city,” now best known as the site of an egregious act of barbarism: the killing of nine congregants on June 17, 2015, by a white supremacist.
Sack, a former reporter for The New York Times, delivers a dense, rich, captivating narrative, featuring vivid prose, prodigious research and a palpable emotional engagement that is disciplined by a meticulous attention to the facts. His excavation is an essential addition to existing histories and ought to be recognized as a singular journalistic performance.
The book begins with two gripping chapters that describe the setting in which the murders transpired. On Wednesday evenings, devout parishioners gathered at Emanuel for Bible study. On this occasion, the study session began late because another meeting had run over. If the Bible study had begun on time, it is likely that no one would have been present when the mass murderer arrived. As it turned out, 12 participants stuck around despite the delay, heat, fatigue and hunger.
At 8:16 p.m. (thanks to surveillance cameras, the precise time is known), 21-year-old Dylann Roof walked into the church. Welcomed by the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Emanuel’s dynamic 41-year-old pastor, he was given a Bible and a study guide. He sat silently for about 45 minutes before suddenly brandishing a semiautomatic handgun filled with hollow-point bullets with which he methodically shot nine of the worshipers. Among those murdered were 87-year-old Susie Jackson, who was penetrated by at least 10 rounds; Cynthia Hurd, a librarian who had planned to skip the session but stayed at the urging of a friend; Tywanza Sanders, who died next to his mother after asking the gunman, “Man, why are you doing this?”; Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, a minister, speech pathologist and high school track coach; and Pinckney, who was also a state senator.
Roof was apprehended the next day. He made no effort to hide what he had done, stated that his purpose was to initiate a white rebellion against what he saw as African American domination, and refused to permit his defense team to argue that mental instability had played any role in his actions. He was sentenced to death on federal hate crime charges and to nine life sentences on corresponding state charges.
“Few can compete with Dylann Roof as an emblem of the sickening persistence of racial violence in the post-civil rights age,” Sack writes. “That the cosmos inflicted such a desecration, at the hands of someone so trifling, upon a people already steeped in such suffering, felt like the cruelest of twists.”
The final chapters of his book relate the aftermath of the killings. On the one hand were uplifting developments: More than 10,000 Charlestonians of all complexions joined together on the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge, holding hands aloft to honor the murdered nine; the Confederate flag was removed from the grounds of the State Capitol; and at a funeral service for the victims President Barack Obama delivered a Lincolnian eulogy that concluded with an electrifying rendition of “Amazing Grace.”
On the other hand, some reactions to the tragedy revealed ugliness and frailties that Sack, to his credit, exposes unblinkingly. Emanuel was beset by threats, with one caller warning tauntingly of a murderous “round two.” The church also struggled with internal difficulties. Sack notes that its casual, sometimes sloppy, handling of the money that poured in from across the country generated ill will and even suspicions of corruption (none of which were substantiated).
A group of survivors and relatives of murdered victims subsequently resigned from Emanuel, believing that the church had failed to be properly comforting. Some relatives fell out with other relatives over their responses to the killings. A daughter of one victim seethed inwardly when her sister publicly forgave Dylann Roof. Their relationship deteriorated so badly that they found themselves unable to collaborate on memorializing their mother and ended up installing competing headstones at her grave.
Between these harrowing accounts of the murders and their aftermath, Sack recounts the history of the A.M.E. Church, placing it within the tragic saga of the South and memorably illuminating the efforts by African American Methodists to maintain their religious commitments in the teeth of cruel adversity. He traces the sobering evolution of Methodism from an abolitionist denomination to one that accommodated and even championed slavery, and he chronicles the brutal repression of Black worship by authorities who feared that religious observance might camouflage insurrectionist conspiracies. He depicts the figures who were exiled from the state by dint of laws that prohibited the teaching of literacy or freedom of assembly absent white supervision.
By the early 19th century, Black Methodists were determined to create an autonomous church in which they could participate as equals and worship free of racial insult from their more numerous and powerful white coreligionists. In 1865, the founding fathers of Emanuel purchased the land on which the church was constructed from the imprisoned treasurer of the former Confederate States of America. Sack documents the church’s early years when it enjoyed the elevation of African American fortunes brought about by Reconstruction; its survival during the Jim Crow era as a “primary venue for the expression of Black indignation and advocacy”; and its transformation into a “movement church” that nurtured the activists who battled white supremacy during the 1950s and 1960s.
“It remains one of the great curiosities of American religious development,” Sack observes, “that enslaved Africans and their descendants so readily embraced the faith of their oppressors, and then so adeptly reshaped it into a liberation theology.” In creating “Mother Emanuel” over the course of a decade, he consulted a formidable array of scholarly sources and primary texts, and interviewed scores of Emanuel’s congregants along with historians and theologians. His pages teem with information often eloquently conveyed, leaving his readers as enthralled as he is with his expansive, inspiring and hugely important subject.
MOTHER EMANUEL: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church | By Kevin Sack | Crown | 461 pp. | $35
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