Honoring Mother Emanuel

Mother Emanuel explores the fascinating history that brought the church to this 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. 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. 

About the Author

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.