Author Talk: Journalist Kevin Sack on Mother Emanuel AME Church

The Author Series Committee welcomes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kevin Sack, author of the acclaimed book Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church (Crown, 2025). Considered one of 2025's best books, Mother Emanuel is a sweeping history of one of the nation’s most important African American churches.

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.

Joining Kevin in conversation will be members of Detroit's oldest A.M.E. church, Bethel. Copies of Mother Emanuel will be available for sale from .

About Kevin: Kevin Sack is a veteran journalist who has written broadly about national affairs for more than four decades and has shared in three Pulitzer Prizes. Sack spent 30 years on the staff of The New York Times, where he was a senior writer, and worked previously for the Los Angeles Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His work also has been featured in The New York Times Magazine.

Sack is the author of Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church (Crown, June 3, 2025). It explores the 200-year history of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, site of the 2015 massacre of nine parishioners by a young white supremacist. The project was supported by a New America Emerson Collective Fellowship and grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

At The New York Times, Sack was known for producing long-form narrative and investigative projects on topics as varied as kidney transplantation, police militarization, refugee assimilation, and climate change. He also served as bureau chief in Atlanta and Albany, covered health care for the national desk, and reported extensively on race and domestic and presidential politics.

Sack was among those honored with the 2015 Pulitzer for international reporting for The Times’ coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, having co-authored a special report about the failures of global health groups to contain the epidemic. While at the Los Angeles Times, he and colleague Alan C. Miller won the 2003 Pulitzer for national reporting for an investigative series about the Marine Corps’ troubled Harrier attack jet, which they discovered had crashed 143 times in training, killing 45 pilots. Two years earlier, Sack shared the Pulitzer for national reporting and a George Polk award with a team of New York Times colleagues for the series “How Race is Lived in America,” which was later published in book form. He wrote the lead article, about the life of an integrated Pentecostal church in the Atlanta suburbs.

A native of Jacksonville, FL, and 1981 honors graduate of Duke University, Sack lives in Charleston, SC, with his wife, Dina Sack. They have three children.

This is NOT a ticketed event, meaning seats are available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Registration is highly encouraged in order to receive important updates about Kevin's visit. Questions? Email [email protected].

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Main | Detroit Public Library