Mother Emanuel

Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, the oldest AME congregation in the Deep South, has long proclaimed a gospel of the "open door," a metaphor carrying both spiritual invitation and an assertion of defiance against centuries of racial oppression. On the evening of June 17, 2015, those unlocked doors allowed a 21-year-old white supremacist named Dylann Roof to enter the church's fellowship hall, sit through 45 minutes of Bible study, and open fire with a semiautomatic handgun, killing nine worshippers. The victims included the church's pastor and South Carolina state senator, Rev. Clementa Pinckney, and ranged in age from 26 to 87. Author Kevin Sack, who covered the aftermath for The New York Times, uses the massacre as a lens through which to trace Emanuel's full two-century history, arguing that the church's journey from insurgent founding to global symbol of grace offers a singular vantage point on the African American experience in the South.

The book opens with a reconstruction of the day itself. Pinckney, a 41-year-old who had been ordained at 18 and elected to the state legislature at 23, juggled a packed schedule of committee hearings in Columbia before racing back to Charleston for the evening's Quarterly Conference, a routine denominational meeting. After the conference ended, only 12 people remained for Bible study, led for the first time by Myra Thompson, who taught from the Parable of the Sower in the Gospel of Mark. Roof arrived at 8:16 p.m., was welcomed by Pinckney, and sat in silence until the closing prayer, when he drew his weapon. He killed Pinckney first, then systematically shot the others, reloading six times. Felicia Sanders and her granddaughter, 11-year-old Ka'mya Manigault, survived by playing dead under a table; Pinckney's wife, Jennifer, and their young daughter, Malana, survived by locking themselves in an adjacent office. Roof spared one woman, Polly Sheppard, telling her he was leaving her alive "to tell the story" (20). He escaped into an empty parking lot and was captured the next morning in North Carolina.

Two days later, at a televised bond hearing, family members of the victims stunned the nation by offering forgiveness. Chris Singleton, the 18-year-old son of victim Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, told a reporter the night after the shootings, "We already forgive him for what he's done" (26). Anthony Thompson, the widower of Myra Thompson, urged Roof to repent and give his life to Christ. President Barack Obama delivered a eulogy for Pinckney that became his most pointed address on race, framing the tragedy through the theology of grace and closing with an a cappella rendition of "Amazing Grace." Roof's self-identification with Confederate symbols pressured South Carolina's Republican leadership into removing the battle flag that had flown at the State Capitol, igniting a nationwide movement to dismantle Lost Cause memorials.

Sack then reaches back two centuries to trace the conditions that gave rise to Emanuel. By the early 1800s, Charleston was a majority-Black city built on enslaved labor, with a three-tiered caste system of free white people, enslaved Black people, and a legally precarious class of free people of color. From this last group the church's founders emerged. In 1817, Morris Brown, a free mixed-race shoemaker who had been purchasing enslaved family members in order to free them, led thousands of free and enslaved Black Carolinians in a walkout from white-controlled Methodist churches. They formed an independent congregation called the African Church and affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, which Richard Allen, a formerly enslaved man in Philadelphia, had founded only a year earlier after leading his own walkout from a segregated white Methodist congregation. Allen's AME Church, rooted in Wesleyan theology but born of racial protest, insisted that spiritual liberation and physical emancipation were inseparable.

The African Church in Charleston faced immediate harassment. White authorities arrested worshippers, rejected petitions to worship independently, and in 1822 linked the church to a foiled insurrection allegedly masterminded by Denmark Vesey, a formerly enslaved carpenter and church member. Thirty-five Black men were hanged. The church was dismantled by its own congregation, its lumber sold at auction, and its leaders exiled. Brown fled to Philadelphia, where he became the second AME bishop. For the next four decades, African Methodists in Charleston worshipped in secret.

The Civil War brought liberation and revival. In 1865, Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne, a Charleston-born educator who had been forced from the state 30 years earlier by laws banning Black literacy, sailed back into the harbor and organized the South Carolina Conference of the AME Church. Rev. Richard Harvey Cain, an energetic minister from the North, led the effort to build a new church on Calhoun Street, purchasing the land from the imprisoned Confederate treasury secretary. The carpenter was Robert Vesey, son of the executed insurrectionist. Dedicated in May 1866 and named Emanuel, meaning "God with us" (165), the church quickly became the epicenter of African American life in Charleston. Cain used Emanuel as a political springboard, serving simultaneously as pastor, state senator, newspaper publisher, and eventually a two-term member of Congress. He advocated for land redistribution and civil-rights legislation, but the collapse of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, and the terroristic violence of the Ku Klux Klan extinguished those gains. Cain was elected an AME bishop in 1880 and died in 1887; Emanuel draped its pulpit in black mourning cloth for 60 days.

Through the Jim Crow era, the church endured natural disasters, including an 1886 earthquake that prompted the construction of the Gothic Revival brick edifice that still stands. Emanuel hosted mass meetings to protest lynchings and discriminatory laws, and welcomed both Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois to its pulpit, their visits bracketing the spectrum of Black responses to segregation. The civil rights era brought Emanuel's activist tradition to full flower under Rev. Benjamin J. Glover, who served as pastor from 1953 to 1965. As a young minister, Glover had been severely beaten for challenging racial norms, and he transformed Emanuel into a staging ground for sit-ins, boycotts, and marches. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke there in 1962. The fellowship hall served as a base for student demonstrators who picketed King Street department stores, and the resulting 1963 protests broke the backbone of commercial segregation in Charleston.

Clementa Pinckney inherited a church diminished by gentrification and an aging congregation when he arrived in 2010, viewing his pastoral and political roles as complementary in the AME tradition of minister-politicians. His murder at 41 cut short a life of extraordinary promise. Roof's federal trial in late 2016 and early 2017 produced the first federal death-penalty conviction for hate-crime offenses. Roof fired his defense team during the penalty phase to prevent any psychiatric defense that might undermine his self-image as a rational ideologue. The jury convicted on all counts and sentenced Roof to death.

Emanuel's recovery proved fractious. The church changed pastors three times in just over a year, and millions in unsolicited donations generated controversy over distribution. Survivors Felicia Sanders and Polly Sheppard, feeling neglected by church leadership, moved their memberships elsewhere. Rev. Eric S.C. Manning, appointed in June 2016, gradually stabilized the congregation, shepherding it through the trial, a bicentennial celebration, the Covid-19 pandemic, and a 2024 visit by President Joe Biden. The murder of George Floyd in 2020 triggered unprecedented civil unrest in Charleston, and the John C. Calhoun statue that had loomed over the city for 124 years was finally removed.

In the epilogue, Sack examines the meaning of the forgiveness offered at Roof's bond hearing, arguing that the family members acted for their own spiritual release rather than to absolve the killer. Sack traces this practice to a centuries-old survival mechanism within the Black church: an unburdening that restores personal agency, "trumping assertions of racial superiority with demonstrations of moral superiority" (339). Critics counter that such forgiveness lets white America off the hook. AME pastor William H. Lamar IV rejects the expectation that Black people serve as "magical Negroes" who absolve white society (348). The book closes with Emanuel enduring, its membership below 600, its doors now locked, but its electronic carillon still chiming "Amazing Grace" each evening in remembrance of the Nine.