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

A sweeping history of one of the nation’s most important African American churches and a profound story of courage and grace amid the fight for racial justice

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 worshippers. Although the shooter had targeted Mother Emanuel—the first AME church in the South—to agitate racial strife, he could not have anticipated the aftermath: an out­pouring of forgiveness from victims’ families and a reckoning with the divisions of caste that have afflicted Charleston and the South since the earliest days of European settlement.

In Mother Emanuel, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kevin Sack explores the inspiring 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. Sack, who has written about race in his native South for more than four decades, uses the church’s history 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 the Civil War and Reconstruction, to its critical role in the Civil Rights Movement and beyond.

At its core, Mother Emanuel is an epic account 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.