Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’ TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • A sweeping history of one of the nation’s most important African American churches and a profound story of courage and grace amid the fight for racial justice—from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kevin Sack “A masterpiece . . . a dense, rich, captivating narrative, featuring vivid prose . . . expansive, inspiring and hugely important.”—The New York Times (Editors’ Choice) “Race, religion, and terror combine for an extraordinary story of America.”—Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., bestselling author of Begin Again A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Kirkus Reviews 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.