Mother Emanuel’s long struggle
In his history of the Charleston congregation, Kevin Sack frames the 2015 mass murder as the culmination of 200 years of persecution.
Mother Emanuel
Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church
If White Christians in the United States read just one book this year, I hope it will be Mother Emanuel. Kevin Sack, who covered the nightmarish murder trial of Dylann Storm Roof for The New York Times, has gifted the nation with an exquisitely tended and cathartic yield seeded by the cataclysm of June 17, 2015.
On that sultry Wednesday evening, Roof, a 21-year-old White supremacist from Columbia, South Carolina, drove to the “Holy City” of Charleston—so nicknamed for its abundance of striking churches—and cooly entered a Bible study underway at Mother Emanuel AME, arguably the most historic Black church in the American South. He went, he later said, to spark a race war.
Within an hour of having welcomed their ill-fated guest, the group ended its discussion of the parable of the sower and stood to pray. When all eyes had closed, Roof pulled a Glock .45 from his waist. Shrieking racial epithets, he squeezed the trigger 77 times to shred the bodies of nine people, including a recent college graduate, his 87-year-old great-aunt, and their accomplished young pastor, then serving a third term in the state senate.
