MOTHER EMANUEL

Searching history of the Charleston church brought into the headlines by mass murder.

In 2015, 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof took advantage of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church’s open-door policy—“meant to affirm the place of the church as a refuge…not just from the universal stresses of life but from the particular ones born of four hundred years of enslavement, repression, and state-­sanctioned discrimination”—and shot down nine parishioners and clergy. Former New York Times reporter Sack uses that horrific event as an entry point into the larger history of the Black church in America, from that open-door policy to involvement in the Civil Rights Movement over many decades and in local and national politics. In the last regard, one founding member of Emanuel, the oldest AME congregation in the South, “helped organize the 1865 statewide convention of Black South Carolinians that was called to set a postwar political agenda,” an agenda thwarted by the failure of Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow. Indeed, by Sack’s illuminating account, politics defined much of the Black church in relation to white society, though it was not always progressive; as he notes, the AME church in particular, though boasting a membership of 1 million in 1950, “rarely seemed in the vanguard, its voice often fainter than it might have been for a body its size and potential strength.” In South Carolina, an epicenter of white supremacy, Emanuel tended toward gradualism in the interest of survival—as Sack notes, Emanuel has always struggled financially, with a declining membership and diminished post-pandemic attendance. Roof was not the only or final challenge or threat: Many other supremacists, Sack writes, are on the horizon, so Emanuel now has a squad of congregants who carry concealed weapons—and, tellingly, “the doors of the church are no longer always open.”

A sobering, expertly told history of the struggle for equality as waged from pulpit and pew.