SHL Book Club: Mother Emanuel by Kevin Sack

We are reading Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church by Kevin Sack for our March book club meeting.

The meeting will be held in Meeting Room B of the Main Public Library downtown. Metered street parking is free on Sundays, and there is parking available in the garage under the library (garage closes at 5).

After the meeting we'll go out for food and further conversation.
Thanks to the generosity of our donors, SHL has funds available to ensure everyone feels welcome and able to participate. If you would like to participate in dining with us after book club but the cost presents a challenge, please email us at shl@lowcountryhumanists.org, and we can discreetly arrange to cover your costs.

About the book:
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.