‘Mother Emanuel’ explores history of AME church and flip side of forgiveness

Watching the TV coverage at home in Atlanta, New York Times reporter Kevin Sack’s first thought was that “this clearly was going to become a major moment in the country’s racial history.”

A decade later, Sack’s new book, “Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church” (Crown, $35), is the definitive account not just of the attack but also of the history of this important congregation. Sack will deliver the Elson Lecture on June 10 at the Atlanta History Center.

Credit: Crown

Credit: Crown

A Pulitzer Prize-winning former staff writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sack was a Times reporter at the time of the massacre, and “it wasn’t my portfolio to parachute into a big breaking news story,” he said.

“But I was so affected by what was going on in Charleston, not just the shootings themselves, but ultimately the expressions of forgiveness and then the unity march across the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge and Obama’s eulogy for Rev. Pinckney and the other victims, that it occurred to me that there was a way to use the story of this church as a vehicle to tell the broader story of African American life in Charleston over a two-century period.”

Sack covered the aftermath and eventually took a leave of absence from the Times to write “Mother Emanuel.” The book traces the histories of both American Methodism and the African Methodist Episcopal Church (the Episcopal in its name refers to the church’s reliance on bishops, not to Episcopalianism), which began in Philadelphia in the late 18th century.

But it was in the South, and especially Charleston, that AME churches flourished. Emanuel was established in 1817, and the current Gothic Revival building was built in the 1890s. Along the way, the church rose to exalted status within the Black church. Visiting speakers included Booker T. Washington in 1909, W.E.B. DuBois in 1921 and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1962. A familiar Atlanta name with a major role is Morris Brown, one of Emanuel’s founders, who was later honored posthumously with the naming of Atlanta HBCU Morris Brown College.

In researching the book, Sack exchanged what he calls “chilling” letters with Roof, who is on death row at a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, and reviewed transcripts of Roof’s prison phone calls with family members, but he did not interview Roof.

“I didn’t want the book to be about Dylann Roof,” Sack said. “I wanted the book to be about the church and the people of the church.”

Credit: Alan Weiner

Credit: Alan Weiner

 “Mother Emanuel” grapples with the conventional wisdom that church members “forgave” Roof. After a few members spoke up at a bond hearing for the shooter, “Mother Emanuel had become the forgiveness church, and Charleston a model for reconciliation, or so it was perceived,” he wrote.

The truth is more nuanced. Sack interviewed more than 200 people for his book. “The individuals who spoke at the bond hearing … did not speak for everybody in their families,” he said. “They did not speak for everybody in the church. They certainly didn’t speak for all African Americans in any way. And in fact, there was a lot of division within families, and there’s still tension within some of those families, because their siblings or parents were so quick to forgive.”

Sack’s research also shows a specific aspect to some parishioners’ forgiveness.

“Many say they did it not for Roof’s benefit, but for their own,” he said. “They make it clear that this was not a prayer for the soul of this unrepentant sinner. This was for them.

“It’s a time-tested psychological strategy that African American Christians have used in the last 400 years as a way to purge themselves of the toxicity of anger and resentment that is the natural, human response to the indignities and discrimination and oppression that they faced over the years,” he continued.

“I interviewed Anthony Thompson, husband of Myra Thompson, one of the victims that night. He’s also a pastor, and he said that forgiving had allowed him to move on, that it had ensured that Dylann Roof was not going to be his lifetime partner.”

Despite being neither Black nor Christian, Sack had some experience with Black churches. When he was an intern with the AJC in 1980, a fellow intern invited him to church where, she said, “My uncle Ralph is preaching.”

Uncle Ralph turned out to be the civil rights lion the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, and Sack was the only white person at West Hunter Street Baptist Church that Sunday morning.

“I’m the only white person in the building, and he made sure I felt it,” Sack recalled. “He had all the visitors stand up to be acknowledged, and then we all sit down. And then he points his finger at me and goes, ‘No, you, back up.’ He interrogates me in front of the congregation, who am I, where am I from, what am I doing in Atlanta, how do I know his niece? It was five minutes, but it felt like an hour.

“I can’t say what his intent was, but I know that I felt that feeling of being the outsider, of being looked at and judged. It occurred to me that he was letting me feel what all of his congregants feel every minute of every day in a white world.”

That Sunday morning started a lifelong fascination with the Black church that ultimately led to “Mother Emanuel.”

As important as Mother Emanuel is, her city of origin is every bit as crucial. Charleston is the port where nearly half of all enslaved Africans first set foot in their new world, and the church is a mere 4 miles from Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began a century and a half ago.

Sack researched and wrote most of the book while still living in Atlanta, with frequent trips to Charleston. He and his wife, Dina, lived there for several months of research in 2019.

“And then we came back in 2022 on Mother’s Day weekend, I had some research to do, and we decided to meet our kids here for Mother’s Day,” he said. “And while we were here, we went to an open house. You know, ‘just one open house,’”

They moved that year to the city that had come to dominate Sack’s life.

“And now we live in that open house,” he said.

EVENT PREVIEW

Elson Lecture: Kevin Sack. The author will be in conversation with Robert Franklin, professor of moral leadership at Emory’s Candler School of Theology and president emeritus of Morehouse College. 7 p.m. June 10. $12. Atlanta History Center, McElreath Hall, 130 W. Paces Ferry Road NW, Atlanta. 404-814-4000, www.atlantahistorycenter.com