Good writers are a pleasure to read. Great ones are so evocative that you often tingle to get to the next page.
Veteran journalist Kevin Sack’s new book, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church, is the latter, a masterpiece of great reporting, writing and storytelling. It hits bookstores June 3, just two weeks before the 10th anniversary of the massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston where a racist madman gunned down nine worshippers on a sultry night in 2015.
The work is the kind of relatable, highly-researched historical narrative that will win a lot of prizes, perhaps such as the Pulitzer Prize, which Sack has shared thrice. In 2001, he was among the staffers at The New York Times to share the national reporting prize in a series on race. In 2003, he and Alan Miller won it for national reporting for The Los Angeles Times on a probe of a military aircraft linked to the deaths of 45 pilots. A dozen years later, he and six others at The New York Times won the prize for international reporting for coverage of the 2014 Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa.
Sack, who now lives in Charleston, spent almost 10 years doing detailed research that included more than 175 interviews and a slog through hundreds of documents. The story fills 354 pages. On top of that, the endnotes take up 62 pages. The bibliography is 16 pages. To say the work is well-researched is an understatement.
But it’s the writing and gripping story that captivate. Perhaps only Sack would describe the soaring black top of the Calhoun Street church as a “brilliant white facade and witch’s hat steeple recognizable around the world.” Or murderer Dylann Roof’s attack, fueled by online hate, as being “video-game detachment of his savagery.” Or how a federal judge concluded there wasn’t enough evidence of Roof being incapacitated to keep him from representing himself at one point “even if it felt like suicide by jury.” Or how the forgiveness by families and victims of the shootings burned the church and Charleston “into the world’s consciousness as symbols of an otherworldly grace.”
The book may snare you on its second page in what may be the best description ever of the span and breadth of Charleston’s antebellum history, steeped in business, racism, fear and cruelty that manifests broadly today:
“What happened that night — the mass murder of nine innocent worshippers in one of the most horrific racist attacks in American history — catapulted “Mother Emanuel” into global prominence, its brilliant white facade and witch’s hat steeple recognizable around the world. What happened two days later, when five family members volunteered public expressions of forgiveness for the unrepentant killer, and two days after that, when 10,000 people of varied hues linked hands across the two-and-a-half mile arc of the Ravenel Bridge, and five days after that, when the first Black president of the United States delivered a eulogy unlike any in the country’s experience, made for defining markers in America’s ongoing struggle with the psychosis of race. Once again, history had been made in Charleston, the slave port where nearly half of all captive Africans disembarked in North America and where the Civil War began at Fort Sumter.”
Most meaningful work
Sack, in an exclusive early discussion with the Charleston City Paper, said his first book is his life’s most meaningful work.
“It was work I could only have done after the rather long and varied career I’ve now had, which has included its share of immersive, narrative writing about race and faith in the South,” said Sack, a 65-year-old native of Jacksonville, Fla. “It also, obviously, was very intense, both in the heartbreak of the subject matter, the volume of work required to master it, and the complexity of structuring a two-century narrative that is hopefully readable and engaging.”
He recalled poring over records at the Charleston County Register of Deeds office, thrilled to find records of handwritten deeds in thick volumes of property of the nascent Black church in 1818 and later in 1865, when Emanuel AME was built.
And this surprise: “The latter, for the current site on Calhoun Street, showed that the property had been sold by George Alfred Trenholm, the imprisoned former secretary of the Confederate treasury. Quite a reversal of fortunes.”
He conducted a statistical analysis of the links between the “so-called Denmark Vesey insurrection plot of 1822” and what then was simply called the African Church — Charleston Blacks in the 1700s often worshipped in White-run churches, despite making up a majority of worshippers.
“When you look at the numbers, it’s hard to not conclude that the church itself was a primary target of the investigation and subsequent trials mounted by city authorities. … Suspects connected to the church were more than twice as likely to be convicted, to be sentenced to death and to be executed without a pardon as those who were not.”
And Sack used South Carolina’s open records law to learn about the psyche of Roof by getting access to more than 10 hours of non-privileged recordings with his mother and grandparents.
“I limit their use in the book, but they provided insight into just how detached he seemed,” he said. “He shows zero concern for the impact of his actions on them and is full of demands. At one point, to his mother’s disbelief, he insists that she send him a French primer.”
Lots of sadness
Sack admits the book is filled with sadness.
“My opening chapter, which is about the life of the church on the day of the massacre, is based substantially on recordings from a security camera mounted outside of the church,” he said.
“They were shown during Dylann Roof’s trial, and I have watched them repeatedly since, and I’ve never shaken how demolishing it is to see each of the victims come into the building during their last hour or two of life.
“You actually get a sense for who they are, just from those few seconds of tape. You see (the Rev.) Clementa Pinckney interacting with his parishioners and can tell that Myra Thompson dressed up to teach her first Bible study session. It’s heart-wrenching.”
Another example: how it felt to sit behind Roof’s grandparents during his trial.
“Without their saying a word you could feel their suffering, and it was a reminder that Roof had devastated not only the victims’ families on the other side of the courtroom, but also his own.”
Learning about forgiveness
A central theme of the book surrounds the forgiveness that family members shared with the world two days after the slaughter. The book’s epilogue, he said, tries to make some historical and theological sense of the concept of forgiveness by family members for the “remorseless murderer.”
Forgiveness is part of the African American church’s core, a message that builds throughout Sack’s book.
“I argue that those who believed that the forgiveness expressed toward Dylann Roof was for Dylann Roof likely misinterpreted the intent. I think it was more self-preservationist, a modern iteration of a time-tested psychological tactic that African American Christians have utilized to purge themselves of the destructive toxins of fury and rage.
“It has helped African Americans withstand enslavement, forced migration, captivity, indentured servitude, segregation, discrimination, denial of citizenship and the constant threat of racial and sexual violence with their souls still, somehow, intact. In Charleston, it served as an unburdening, not an undoing, a means not only of moral practice but of emotional self-care. Because the choice to forgive is one dignity that cannot be taken away, it also served as a path to empowerment, a restoration of agency to those who had been robbed of it.”
What’s next
Sack will have book events throughout June across the South, including a June 2 pre-publication sneak peak for members of the church and AME community. It will be at 7 p.m. at the church, 110 Calhoun St. At a 6 p.m. June 3 ticketed event, Sack will talk with broadcaster Carolyn Murray at the Charleston Library Society.
Next spring, he’ll head to Princeton University to be a visiting journalism professor where he’ll teach a course on America’s racial narrative.
After that? He may — after some rest — begin work on a book that explores race in the 1960s in his hometown of Jacksonville, including a look into a childhood hero.
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