Kevin Sack > Quotes

“There was an additional factor at work in the Lowcountry, where the lingering culture of enslavement could feel so intractable. From long experience, Black church leaders there understood that the battle against white supremacy must first be a battle for Black minds, and that the church was singularly positioned to be the point of that spear.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“I have endeavored to tell the congregation’s story in a way that reciprocates that respect, recognizing that my own race, background, and privilege make it impossible for me to experience or understand it in the way that African Americans do. To that end, I have compensated in the only way I know how, in the way I have been trained, by putting in the work: by reading and interviewing voluminously, by relentlessly pursuing and adhering to the facts, and by thinking and writing with as much humility, empathy, and care as I can summon.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“Mother Emanuel had become sacred space, now more than ever, and its walls told a sacred story. It revealed Charleston to have been an epicenter of both enslavement and resistance, and the Black church to have been steadfast in holding both American Christianity and American democracy to account for their betrayals. It stood proudly as a landmark of African Methodism, and thus a singular monument to the theological autonomy and political audacity of African Americans.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“Many white Carolinians had long been wary of introducing their enslaved people to their faith. Despite its civilizing intent, they feared that Christianity could prove exceedingly dangerous in the wrong hands.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“I member when a preacher say, ‘Honor your missus an’ mossa dat your days may be long for dey is your only God,’ ” recalled Dave White, who had been enslaved in Congaree, South Carolina, his dialect as transcribed by his interviewer. John Andrew Jackson, who wrote an autobiography after escaping a plantation north of Charleston, remembered that Methodist preachers reinforced Black inferiority and compliance even in administering communion. “It was the custom among them when conducting the Lord’s Supper,” Jackson wrote, “to have the white people partake first, and then say to the negroes—‘Now all you n----rs that are humble and obedient servants to your masters, can come and partake.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“Out of black religious life emerged a conception of black national identity,” the scholar Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., has written. “It also enabled them to view themselves as bound together, as in communion with one another.” Designed to serve uniquely Black needs, Black Christianity became culturally distinct from white Christianity even when theologically parallel. It was, and is, in the construct of Eugene D. Genovese, the eminent historian of American slavery, “a religion within a religion in a nation within a nation.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“South Carolina found new ways to repress people of color and invigorated the enforcement of old ones, giving rise to a tradition of extralegal policing. In Charleston, militias redoubled their patrols to address public complaints about loitering, gambling, and drinking by Black residents. Even the physical landscape was transformed for defensive purposes, as the state appropriated money for a central garrison to protect the peninsula against domestic attack: The Citadel.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“With the chamber packed with onlookers, Cain argued that the bill redundantly replicated the federal civil rights law of 1866. But he also testified to the discrimination he had witnessed in the free North, which he said demonstrated that only time and education, not laws, could wring the hatred from men’s hearts. Until then, Cain forecast, white Americans would find ways to circumvent statutes that forced them to share space with those they perceived as inferior.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“There was, in fact, a choice to be made in Charleston after the shootings at Mother Emanuel, a choice between conflagration and peace, between hatred and forgiveness. Once again, the Black community took the high road, the Way of Sorrows, and the streets did not erupt. This left more than a few conflicted, particularly those who already viewed Christianity as a tool of the oppressor class. No one wanted the elegant old city to burn. But neither did they want white Charleston (or white America, for that matter) to be exculpated. In their view, the expressions of forgiveness, the hand-holding across the bridge, the financial support for Mother Emanuel, all served the subversive purpose of making white people feel undeservedly better about themselves. They understood that their white neighbors bore no individual responsibility, and that many had responded with their hearts. But the narrative in Charleston nonetheless risked allowing them to presume absolution for the legacy of white supremacy that produced Dylann Roof and that still prevented Black Carolinians from achieving equity in most every sphere of life.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“Isabel Wilkerson wrote in Caste. “Black forgiveness of dominant-caste sin has become a spiritual form of having to be twice as good, in trauma, as in other aspects of life, to be seen as half as worthy.” In an op-ed for The New York Times, Roxane Gay explained why she could not forgive Dylann Roof: “White people embrace narratives about forgiveness so they can pretend the world is a fairer place than it actually is and that racism is merely a vestige of a painful past instead of this indelible part of our present…We forgive and forgive and forgive and those who trespass against us continue to trespass against us.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“He firmly associated that church with the cause of American Black nationalism. After a lengthy flirtation with the African colonization movement—which advocated the migration of free Black people across the Atlantic—Allen declared in an 1827 letter that America now belonged as much to the descendants of Africa as to those of Europe. His unflinching rhetoric still echoes in Sunday sermons and stump speeches. “This land which we have watered with our tears and our blood, is now our mother country and we are well satisfied to stay where wisdom abounds, and the gospel is free,” Allen declared.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“Jones and Allen nonetheless granted broad absolution for white mistreatment, modeling the grace that came to define the Black church and that still found expression two centuries later at Dylann Roof’s bond hearing. “Let no rancour or ill-will lodge in your breasts for any bad treatment you may have received,” they counseled their formerly enslaved readers. “If you do, you transgress against God, who will not hold you guiltless.” They cited both Testaments in urging African Americans to turn the other cheek. Christ, they wrote, “hath commanded to love our enemies, to do good to them that hate and despitefully use us.” Forgiveness should be offered as one wishes to receive it, they said, less for the benefit of the forgiven than for the serenity of the forgiver.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“There was no bar to eternal salvation beyond belief, not on the basis of color or class or even past sin. That God was the master of both enslaver and enslaved suggested a fundamental equality, at least in the next life if not on Earth. If little else, the church acknowledged the essential humanity of those in bondage, and recognized that their degraded condition did not render them soulless. That made it perplexing that an omnipresent and benevolent deity would countenance the oppression of one race by another in God’s kingdom on Earth.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“frustration, long fed by cynicism, could be found in the Lowcountry as well, where the suppression of “Black rage” for the reassurance of white folks was as old as plantation culture. “Aren’t they wonderful?” Rev. Darby asked mockingly over lunch one day. “We have such good colored people. Don’t we have good colored people? We have to do something for them, make them some chicken, go hold hands on the bridge and sing ‘Kumbaya.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“They thought he was putting the church in danger, but he stood up for the rights of people and what he believed in and what the Bible said about how we are to live and treat other people.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“One of them, a mixed-race shoemaker named Morris Brown, led thousands of free and enslaved Black Carolinians in a walkout from white-controlled churches to protest indignities in governance and worship. They formed their own “African Church” and became the first congregation in the Deep South to affiliate with the nascent African Methodist Episcopal denomination, which had just formed in Philadelphia after a three-decade gestation.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“In the African American church, the open-doors metaphor conveys something extra, an assertion of defiance, and resilience. It is meant to affirm the place of the church as a refuge, both physically and spiritually, 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. In these sanctuaries, it is a vow that the people of God will not be cleaved from their faith or their hope, not by centuries of subjugation or the basest attempts at dehumanization, not by dynamite secreted beneath church stairwells or Molotov cocktails hurled through stained glass.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“frustration, long fed by cynicism, could be found in the Lowcountry as well, where the suppression of “Black rage” for the reassurance of white folks was as old as plantation culture. “Aren’t they wonderful?” Rev. Darby asked mockingly over lunch one day. “We have such good colored people. Don’t we have good colored people? We have to do something for them, make them some chicken, go hold hands on the bridge and sing ‘Kumbaya.’ ” Charleston educator and activist”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“It did not take much churchgoing for the enslaved to comprehend the hypocrisy of white Christians who committed wicked crimes while donning the cloak of piety.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“Having accumulated some wealth as a shoe merchant and chimney sweep (his company cleaned President Washington’s flues in what was then the nation’s capital), he bought the frame of a former blacksmith shop and had it hauled to the lot he had purchased on Sixth Street, near Lombard. Allen had carpenters retrofit the building into a modest sanctuary, and he built a crude wooden pulpit and several benches with his own hands. In tribute, today’s AME emblem intertwines a crucifix with a blacksmith’s anvil.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“Once Black and white Christians began worshipping the same God in separate spaces, there was little to bring them back together. Four of five U.S. churchgoers still attend services with congregations that are predominantly one race.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“The growth continued unabated in the nineteenth century, with membership reaching 580,000 in 1840, shortly before the denomination split over slavery into Northern and Southern branches.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“It remains one of the great curiosities of American religious development that enslaved Africans and their descendants so readily embraced the faith of their oppressors, and then so adeptly reshaped it into a liberation theology.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“The families’ words may have sounded like a grant of absolution, or an earnest prayer for the soul of an unrepentant sinner. But they were more precisely heard as an iteration of a timeworn survival mechanism, a tactic that had helped African Americans withstand enslavement, forced migration, captivity, indentured servitude, segregation, discrimination, denial of citizenship, and the constant threat of racial and sexual violence with their souls still, somehow, intact. This, after all, had been the story of African people and their descendants in the South Carolina Lowcountry for nearly five hundred years.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church

“Similarly, in Charleston, his approach implicitly accepted segregation while focusing on the “equal” component of the separate-but-equal doctrine. Tailoring his message to white listeners, Washington assured his audience that Black Americans did not desire to share restaurant tables or railway cars (or bedrooms or marriages) with white people; they simply wanted equal accommodations in their separate spaces. “Let me say as emphatically as I am able, that judging by my observation and experience, nowhere in this country is the negro race seeking to obtrude itself upon the white race,” Washington said. “I think you will find that the more the negro is educated, the more he gets to understand himself and the world, the more he finds satisfaction in the company of his own people, the less he desires to force himself in any place that he is not wanted.”
― Kevin Sack, Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church