On Journalism and Scholarship: Kevin Sack in Conversation with Avram Alpert about “Mother Emanuel”

Sack will present his book Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church, 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. Sack and Alpert will then talk about the importance of scholarship for Sack’s public writing, and what scholars and journalists can learn from each other in terms of presenting research to general readers.

Part of the Writing Program’s Public Scholarship Initiative, in collaboration with Labyrinth Books. Co-sponsored by the Program in Journalism.

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From Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel is 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.

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.

Kevin Sack is a veteran journalist who has written about national affairs for more than four decades and has been part of three Pulitzer Prize–winning teams. A native of Jacksonville, Florida, and a graduate of Duke University, he spent thirty years on the staff of The New York Times, where he specialized in writing long-form narrative and investigative reports, often related to race. He has also written for the Los Angeles Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine. He was previously an Emerson Collective Fellow at New America and teaches journalism at Princeton University.

Avram Alpert is a generalist in the humanities. He works to understand what values we should live by in our connected, chaotic, and potentially catastrophic times. His writing has appeared in Aeon, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. His most recent book is The Good-Enough Life.