Chapter 3
Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church
This text tells the story of the horrific mass shooting that Dylan Roof carried out in 2015 at Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston, SC.
Kevin Sack traverses hundreds of years of history as a way to put Roof’s terrible act of hatred in the context of a very, very long history of anti-Black violence in South Carolina, and in America at large.
The narrative tracks hundreds of years of Black Christian resilience as it unfolds hundreds of years of oppressive violence.
Alongside the foundation of the country’s first broad-based Black denomination—African Methodism—are the continued attempts by White Christians, politicians, and neighbors to disempower the Black church. The long arc of history brings Sack back to where he began: on June 17, 2015, with the horrifying and intentional violence executed by Roof. The church faced a long road to recovery, and the text is decisive in its descriptions of long-term trauma for the community. Will Mother Emanuel ever be the same?
Sack concludes an epilogue on forgiveness.
He writes that forgiveness is a psychological mechanism “long utilized by African American Christians to purge themselves of self-destructive toxins… Because the choice to forgive is one dignity that cannot be taken away… it is also a path to empowerment… forgiveness resurrects personal agency for victims who have been robbed of it, breaking psychological enslavement. It imbues the oppressed with leverage over those who have treated them unjustly, trumping assertions of racial superiority with demonstrations of moral superiority” (338).
Is this the best forgiveness can do in a world of racial violence? Heal the internal wounds of the disempowered while leaving their material lives in shambles, still? What of that old pipe dream—reconciliation?
