Mother Emanuel’s forgiveness after massacre was act of resistance, author writes

In the two-century history of Mother Emanuel AME Church, two events stand out: the 2015 execution-style slayings of nine church members during a prayer meeting by white racist Dylann Roof and the surprising forgiveness days later by some church members after Roof’s arrest.

Seeking to understand those acts of forgiveness made 10 years ago this month, author Kevin Sack spent 10 years interviewing some 200 people, sifting through countless pages of dusty archives, attending numerous church services at Mother Emanuel, and even moving with his wife, Dina, to Charleston.

“I think that’s really what the whole book is about — how it was that those people had gotten up and said the things they did, expressed the forgiveness that they had for this 21-year-old white supremacist who less than 48 hours earlier had destroyed their lives,” said Sack, 65, whose book — “Mother Emanuel: Two centuries of race, resistance, and forgiveness in one Charleston church” — has just been published.

“It seemed to me that somewhere within the history of the church and the denomination I might find the answer to that,” Sack told an audience earlier this month at Allen University in Columbia, where he was interviewed by Bobby Donaldson, an iconic University of South Carolina professor who heads USC’s Center for Civil Rights History and Research.

Donaldson told the audience that 10 years ago, a month after the June 17, 2015, shootings, he’d gotten an email from Sack, then a New York Times reporter, saying that Sack was thinking about doing a book that “would place the massacre in the context of the church’s remarkable history” and could they have coffee?

“Almost 10 years later, this book that was just a possibility is now before us,” said Donaldson with a smile.

And what a book

Already called a “masterpiece” by a New York Times book reviewer, Sack’s book is marked by its “rich, captivating narrative, featuring vivid prose, prodigious research and a palpable emotional engagement that is disciplined by a meticulous attention to the facts,“ the review said.

Its 461 pages include a 14-page index with more than 1,000 entries, a 15-page bibliography listing more than 400 sources and 62 pages of end notes keyed to pages so readers wanting to know more about what they are reading can easily dial in to more detail as they go.

There’s also a handy map of downtown Charleston, a roll of Mother Emanuel’s 38 preachers from 1817 to the present and a list of Sacks’ approximately 200 human sources. His “deepest gratitude,” Sack writes, “goes to the people of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and to the survivors and families of the victims of the 2015 tragedy.”

Rivers flowing through time

The church’s journey through two centuries, Sack writes, “provided a unique vantage point” — long enough “to show the connectedness of eras and movements across a vast expanse of African American history, from enslavement and Reconstruction to Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement to the Obama presidency and the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020.”

Using such a framework, Sack is able to take the reader on a storm-tossed voyage not just of Black history, but of white history and American history as well, for these three rivers of events intersect and flow through time in relationship with each other.

Along with Mother Emanuel and African Methodism, Charleston — the “most caste-conscious of Southern cities” — is a major player, the city being the largest importer of slaves and the birthplace of the Civil War — “the epic tale of the Black church’s role in America’s uneven racial progress seemed to unfold all under one metaphorical roof,” Sack writes.

With his background as a journalist, Sack’s writing brings to life long-ago people whose lives were linked with the church, such as firebrand Denmark Vesey, who may or may not have been a member of Emanuel’s predecessor church. Vesey was said to have been the main organizer of a failed 1822 slave rebellion that frightened Charlestonians for decades and resulted in the hangings of 35 Black men said to have been involved in the plot. Nearly half of those hanged had been current or former members of the church, Sack writes.

Besides Vesey, a remarkable assemblage of pastors and others are tied to Emanuel through the years, including leaders during Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era, Sack writes. Events in the book also give rise to mentions of numerous contemporary issues, including gun control, hate crime laws, the death penalty, the Confederate flag, the nature of forgiveness and equal rights. But there are also stories about church money and power struggles.

The book opens with a vivid recounting of the deadly encounter on June 17, 2015, between Black parishioners at an Emanuel Bible study group, and the coming of Dylann Roof — “a scrawny young white man” who had saturated his brain with racist postings on the internet that convinced him he had to kill Blacks to start a race war. Roof had driven to Charleston in a black Hyundai Elantra with a decorative license plate reading “Confederate States of America.”

The killings and their aftermath are narrated in great detail by Sack, who covered Roof’s federal death penalty trial in Charleston in the winter of 2016-2017 for The New York Times. Extensive law enforcement and victim-related testimony and evidence at the trial were the foundation of much of Sack’s gripping minute-by-minute narrative of Roof’s crime and apprehension. The trial also gave Sack the opportunity to meet and cement relationships crucial to the book.

Who can tell the story?

At the Allen University event, Sack revealed he inventoried his strong and weak points in taking on a book project he felt compelled to do.

As a strength, in 2015, when the massacre happened, Sack was 55 years old and found he had a “passion for the subject, endless curiosity” and he was “charged up in ways that I have not been for anything else in the course of my career.” He also had 30 years of what he called “high-level reporting” and the ability to immerse himself in peoples’ stories with multiple interviews that reached depths of insight untapped by daily journalism.

On the minus side, “I’m not African-American” and “I didn’t grow up in the church. In fact, I am Jewish.” And he wasn’t from South Carolina.

“So I came at it as a total outsider in a lot of ways,” Sack said, “and I hope that it means that I proceeded with a lot of humility and a lot of caution and a lot of diligence... I was very sensitive to the fact that I would get things wrong, that there would be things that I didn’t know. Most importantly, I knew that there would be things that I would not feel or experience in the way that the people that I was writing about often experienced them.”

To help him tell the most in-depth and accurate story, Sack said he submitted the manuscript to many early readers “including a paid sensitivity reader to go through the manuscript and look for places were I might have fallen short — that was a really valuable process.”

Sack continued, “Who has the right to tell a story?... I don’t think that only certain people have the right to tell certain stories, but I think there’s a real obligation to do the work necessary to earn the right to tell the story.”

Untold stories

Plunging into the subject, interviewing and re-interviewing people and plowing through archives allowed Sack at times to achieve the kind of multi-dimensional portraits of main Emanuel actors after the style of Robert Caro, the great biographer of former President Lyndon Johnson in his Pulitzer Prize-winning portrayals of Johnson and his era. Just as Caro had moved to the Texas hill country to work on his books about Johnson, so Sack moved to Charleston.

With such reporting, the reader of Sack’s book will learn about untold sides of state senator and beloved Emanuel pastor Clementa Pinkney, including his creative craftiness in using his state position to figure out a way in 2014 to get $135,000 in state funds for an elevator to help the elderly at the church who could no longer navigate the steps up into the sanctuary. (The sanctuary sometimes was a place for events sponsored by a historic archive operated by the College of Charleston, a state-funded institution. The money thus went to a state-approved purpose — the archive, which then gave the church the money for the elevator, for the church was a historic building too.

The book tells about Benjamin J. Glover, civil rights activist and Emanuel pastor from 1953 to 1955, who “led the Charleston branch of the NAACP, helped integrate the city’s schools, and made Emanuel a staging ground for mass meetings and marches,” Sack writes in a remarkable chapter that contains much of South Carolina’s 20th century civil rights history.

At a time when blacks could be beaten or arrested for asserting any rights at all, Glover once went to an upscale Charleston laundromat with a pillowcase full of white sheets and linen. When white patrons complained to a police officer that a Black was using the laundromat, the officer threatened to arrest him. But Glover pointed to a sign on the wall that said, “White only,” and proceeded to keep stuffing his white sheets in the washer and putting coins in the slots.

“Officer, I have only whites,” said Glover. At that, the patrolman gave up. From that day forward, “the launderette effectively desegregated as neighbors and friends heard his story and followed his lead,” Sack writes.

The wheel turns

At Allen, Donaldson noted that Sack’s book begins with a sentence about Mother Emanuel’s doors always being open.

And it ends with the sentence, “The doors of the church are no longer always open”

As Sack notes, today’s church has a group of hand-selected congregants, some with police or military training, who now “carry concealed handguns in the House of the Lord.” There are more surveillance cameras, and visitors are required to announce themselves over an intercom before being allowed into the fellowship hall.

Early in his reporting on Mother Emanuel, not long after the shootings, Sack writes, two church trustees “watched anxiously from the choir loft as I unzipped my black canvas briefcase, large enough to conceal a weapon, and then exhaled when I removed only a laptop. Who can blame them?”

Who is book for?

Donaldson said in an interview that the book is written for people who are interested in history, especially in its highlighting the people and organizations who played a role in the 20th century civil rights struggle in South Carolina.

“But I also think it will be instructive for those who are members of the African Methodist church because it really is a tutorial into the history of the denomination, and that was something I didn’t anticipate when I first opened it.”

In one particularly long and compelling paragraph, on page 337, Sack manages in 22 short sentence fragments to sum up the different kinds of injustices suffered by South Carolina Blacks over the centuries, beginning with their forced removal from Africa and continuing through the ruthless murder of nine faithful churchgoers.

“The weight of it all, the duration of it all, takes the breath away,” Sack writes. In that context, forgiveness becomes “primarily a “psychological mechanism. long utilized by African American Christians to purge themselves of self-destructive toxins.”

In other words, forgiveness of Roof after the massacre was an act of agency, a statement that an obsession for vengeance for his killings was not going to dominate their lives. “It was an unburdening, not an undoing... Because the choice to forgive is one dignity that cannot be taken away... it is also a path to empowerment,” Sack writes

Donaldson said it’s a book that should find a wide audience.

“It’s written for everyone.”

This story was originally published June 17, 2025 at 5:30 AM with the headline "Mother Emanuel’s forgiveness after massacre was act of resistance, author writes."