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Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church by Kevin Sack at Abbey's Bookshop,
Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church
— —
Kevin Sack

Mother Emanuel

Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

Kevin Sack

$78.95

Hardback

Not in-store but you can order this
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English
Crown Publishing Group, Division of Random House Inc
03 June 2025
History; Social & cultural history; History of religion; Christian Churches & denominations; Social discrimination; Black & Asian studies
A sweeping history of one of the nation’s most important African American churches and a profound story of courage and grace amid the fight for racial justice—from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kevin Sack

“A masterpiece . . . a dense, rich, captivating narrative, featuring vivid prose . . . expansive, inspiring and hugely important.”—The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)

“Race, religion, and terror combine for an extraordinary story of America.”—Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., bestselling author of Begin Again

Few people beyond South Carolina’s Lowcountry knew of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston—Mother Emanuel—before the night of June 17, 2015, when a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist walked into Bible study and slaughtered the church’s charismatic pastor and eight other worshippers. Although the shooter had targeted Mother Emanuel—the first A.M.E. church in the South—to agitate racial strife, he did not anticipate the aftermath: an outpouring of forgiveness from the victims’ families and a reckoning with the divisions of caste that have afflicted Charleston and the South since the earliest days of European settlement.

Mother Emanuel explores the fascinating history that brought the church to that moment and the depth of the desecration committed in its fellowship hall. It reveals how African Methodism was cultivated from the harshest American soil, and how Black suffering shaped forgiveness into both a religious practice and a survival tool. Kevin Sack, who has written about race in his native South for more than four decades, uses the church to trace the long arc of Black life in the city where nearly half of enslaved Africans disembarked in North America and where the Civil War began. Through the microcosm of one congregation, he explores the development of a unique practice of Christianity, from its daring breakaway from white churches in 1817, through the traumas of Civil War and Reconstruction, to its critical role in the Civil Rights Movement and beyond.

At its core, Mother Emanuel is an epic tale of perseverance, not just of a congregation but of a people who withstood enslavement, Jim Crow, and all manner of violence with an unbending faith.
By:  
Imprint:   Crown Publishing Group, Division of Random House Inc
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 239mm,  Width: 160mm,  Spine: 33mm
Weight:   680g
ISBN:   9781524761301
ISBN 10:   1524761303
Pages:   480
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Kevin Sack is a veteran journalist who has written about national affairs for more than four decades and has been part of three Pulitzer Prize–winning teams. A native of Jacksonville, Florida, and a graduate of Duke University, he spent thirty years on the staff of The New York Times, where he specialized in writing long-form narrative and investigative reports, often related to race. He has also written for the Los Angeles Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine. He was a 2019 Emerson Collective Fellow at New America.

Reviews for Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“Mother Emanuel begins as the tale of a vicious crime and a forgiving church, but turns into an epic story of Black life and becoming that spans 200 years. Beautifully written, a marvel of research, the book is set in one of the old corners of the South, peopled with 100 personalities and filled with as many subplots. Kevin Sack renders a portrait of Black Americans in every generation since the Revolution. Big in historical scale but granular in personal detail, Mother Emanuel transcends the church of its title and the crime that made it famous. It feels like a monument to Black America that takes the form of a book.”—Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family and Life of a Klansman  


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