The lessons a historic Black church teaches

For Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kevin Sack, the process of writing about the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., began after hatred and tragedy struck the historic religious site.

During an evening Bible study in 2015, a white supremacist opened fire and killed nine Black attendees, including the senior pastor. The shooter espoused racial hatred in his online manifesto and a journal he wrote from jail after being arrested.

“Just a couple of days after the shootings, a variety of family members of the victims publicly forgave this unrepentant white supremacist mass murderer,” says Sack. “You know, how in the world could these people be forgiving this man who had walked into church and killed their loved ones while their eyes were closed in prayer and had zero remorse? In fact, the opposite, he acted with deliberateness and almost pride. 

“And I guess the lesson that I really learned from interviewing all of those who had forgiven in some way was that the forgiveness that they expressed wasn’t for him. It wasn’t a prayer for the soul of this unrepentant sinner. On the contrary, it was for themselves,” he adds. “It was a form of release that has been used over and over and over again across this history of centuries of mistreatment and injustice. It is encouraged by the Black church almost as a psychological survival mechanism in the face of incredible tragedy.”

This lesson led Sack to write “Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church.” On Thursday, he will give a lecture at Rochester Institute of Technology on the book, the church’s extraordinary history, and its impact on this era.

“It’s a book that melds together (Sack’s) incredible accomplishments as an investigative journalist and his more recent interest in being an historian,” says Richard Newman, an RIT history professor and expert on Bishop Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. “He really takes all different parts of the past into account when constructing an historical narrative and creates a beautiful blending of those two disciplines.”

“(The book is) an attempt to be sure that a church with an incredibly rich history, both an actual history and a symbolic history, isn’t forever known for its lowest moment,” Sack says.

The Mother Emanuel Church, as it is colloquially known, was founded in 1817 and is one of the oldest independent Black denominations in the country. The religious tradition itself started as an act of subversion when Black congregants walked out of white-controlled Methodist churches to form their own.

That tradition of resistance has endured throughout Mother Emanuel’s history. In the Charleston church’s earliest days, it was found to be associated with a plot for a widespread slave rebellion and faced immediate violence and was forced underground through the end of the Civil War.

“It was destroyed, its leaders were exiled and 35 men were hung,” Sack says. “Then (at the end of the Civil War), AME missionaries follow right on the heels of Union troops into Charleston and reestablish this congregation very quickly. 

“Because of the loyalty that the church had from its previous incarnation,” he notes, “it quickly wins this land rush for the souls of the newly emancipated and South Carolina’s low country. Almost overnight, it becomes the single largest Protestant congregation anywhere in the city.”

This resilience is constantly reflected in the church’s 200 years of history, Sack says. Once again in 2015, he says the congregation’s actions followed that tradition.

Newman, who helped Sack in researching AME for the book, draws a connection between the anti-Black mass shooting at Mother Emanuel and the Western New York region. In 2022, a self-proclaimed ethno-nationalist gunned down 10 people at a Tops market in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo.

“This, as I think people in Western New York know, was no accident. The killer drove up from the Southern Tier near Binghamton to go to an area where he thought there was a dense Black population and could inflict maximum damage. But he also looked at Rochester and its Black community,” Newman says. “This is not an abstract issue for people in Western New York.”

Sack says he feels strongly that “the history I tell in this book is our real history. It’s not whitewashed history. It’s, at times, inglorious, but also, at times, inspirational. 

“Most important of all,” he adds, “it’s our shared history, regardless of who you are, where you are, or where your people came from or when they got here. It’s only once we start to acknowledge this part of American history as our shared history that we’ve got a new, real chance of making progress towards a just and equitable nation.”

The Kevin Sack lecture on “Mother Emanuel” will be held at Room 2180 in RIT’s MAGIC Spell Studios from 7 to 8:30 p.m. on April 2. The event is free to the public.

Jacob Schermerhorn is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and data journalist.

The Beacon welcomes comments and letters from readers who adhere to our comment policy including use of their full, real name. See “Leave a Reply” below to discuss on this post. Comments of a general nature may be submitted to the Letters page by emailing [email protected].