Kevin Sack is the author of the new book Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church. He spent 30 years as a New York Times journalist, and has also written for the Los Angeles Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Q: What inspired you to write this book about Mother Emanuel church in Charleston, South Carolina?
A: As I covered the aftermath of the 2015 massacre at Emanuel for The New York Times, I became fascinated by the congregation's remarkably rich history, which obviously had just become even more so.
I felt that people should understand why it mattered so much that this horrific crime happened where it did, and also thought the church should not forever be known only for what happened that night.
It occurred to me that the church could be used as a narrative vehicle to tell a broader story of African American life over a two-century span in the city that may be most critical to our understanding of race in America.
I also hoped that through the history of the church and its denomination I might come to understand how family members of the victims brought themselves to forgive a remorseless, racist mass murderer only days after the crime, and what that really meant in the contexts of Black suffering and the Black church.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: It was a 10-year process that came to include interviews with roughly 200 people, some multiple times; voluminous reading about the histories of Methodism, African Methodism, the Black church, Charleston, South Carolina, enslavement, Reconstruction, Civil Rights, forgiveness; long stretches spent in libraries and archives in Charleston and elsewhere, including the church's own; and substantial use of online genealogical databases and digitized newspapers. Thank God for those. How this work was ever done previously is beyond me.
There were some wonderful discoveries and debunkings along the way -- for example, that the land Emanuel sits on was sold to the congregation in 1865 by the imprisoned Secretary of the Treasury of the Confederate States of America; that the church was dismantled board by board -- rather than burned to the ground, as previously thought -- after the discovery of a slave insurrection plot in 1822; that the earthquake of 1886 damaged but did not destroy the church, also as previously claimed.
The biggest and happiest surprise, though, was simply that my thesis that the church could be used to illustrate and animate the broader story of Black life in Charleston proved out time and again.
Q: In a New York Times review of the book, Randall Kennedy writes of your work, “His pages teem with information often eloquently conveyed, leaving his readers as enthralled as he is with his expansive, inspiring and hugely important subject.” What do you think of that description?
A: Professor Kennedy is certainly right that I was enthralled by the subject matter, pretty much every day of the decade I spent at it. I hope he's right that readers will find my curiosity infectious.
Needless to say, it was pretty fun to happen upon that review while randomly scrolling through the Times app on my phone that Sunday morning. I did not know anything about the timing, author, or conclusions until I found it.
It was tremendously affirming to receive that kind of praise from one of our most distinguished voices on race. As a native South Carolinian, he obviously found this history personal and resonant.
I had never spoken to Professor Kennedy before, but I had the opportunity to thank him when he showed up for a book launch event at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, wearing, appropriately I felt, running shorts and a Harriet Tubman T-shirt.
Q: Especially given the current political climate, what do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: That the telling of complete and actual American history really matters, and that there is nothing to fear and everything to gain from a deeper and more nuanced understanding of our national psychosis surrounding race.
Like it or not, claim it or not, our history is shared, even its more inglorious chapters, and we deny it and erase it at our deep peril.
I always felt one of the real benefits of this book would be the opportunity it presented to study our racial history in one place over an extended span, to show the connectedness of eras and events and movements and leaders.
I don't think you can follow that arc in a place like Charleston without conceding the ongoing impact of centuries of systemic racism.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'll be traveling a good bit this fall to promote and discuss the book, and I'm preparing to teach a journalism class at Princeton in the spring semester of 2026, about approaches to writing about race in America.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Only that I have gratitude for the chance to talk about Mother Emanuel and for anyone who chooses to pick up the book. Let me know if you think I've got it right that forgiveness, in this case, was less for the benefit of the forgiven than for the forgivers.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment