THE BACKSTORY

I was at home in Atlanta on the night of June 17, 2015, when CNN first reported that there had been a shooting at a church in Charleston. I looked up from my reading. Despite decades of reporting about race and politics in the South, and any number of visits to Charleston, I had never heard of Emanuel A.M.E. Church. But the simple fact that it was an African Methodist Episcopal church triggered my every jaded instinct. Intellectually, I understood that any number of circumstances could prompt a shooting at a house of worship, of whatever tradition -- a domestic dispute, an argument among rivals, even a robbery. But the initial news reports described Emanuel as a historic congregation, nearly 200 years old, and a quick internet search revealed that it had been the first outpost of African Methodism in the South. As I saw that this was not just any church, but a preeminent Black congregation with antebellum roots, I braced for what seemed like the inevitability that this would unfold as a hate crime. An hour later, after interviewing survivors Polly Sheppard and Felicia Sanders, the police announced that they were looking for a young white suspect who had spouted racist beliefs as he fired.

Years before, I had reported for The New York Times on the torching of Southern Black churches in the 1990s and on the prosecutions of Klansmen – nearly four decades after the fact -- for the fatal 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. I had some appreciation, therefore, for the legacy of terroristic violence against Black churches and the depth of the desecration committed at Emanuel. Like so many around the world, I was profoundly affected by the shootings, and what they might mean for American race relations during the second term of America’s first Black president. But as I came to learn the skeletal outlines of Mother Emanuel’s story, starting with a Google search that very evening, I also became intrigued by all that had happened in and around the church before that night.

Its predecessor congregation had been founded in 1818 after a dramatic walkout by free and enslaved Black worshippers from Charleston’s Methodist churches. An insurrection plot that incubated within the congregation in 1822 had been brutally suppressed with the hangings of dozens of suspects, the destruction of the church, and the exile of its leaders. Emanuel’s Reconstruction-era pastor had been one of the first Black men ever elected to Congress, serving two terms. Its civil rights-era pastor had simultaneously led Charleston’s NAACP, organizing marches and demonstrations from the church. One of his daughters had been among the pioneers who desegregated Charleston’s schools. Booker T. Washington had spoken from Emanuel’s pulpit, and so had W.E.B. Du Bois and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Through this one institution, I realized, an enormous swath of African American history could be explored all under one metaphorical roof, and in the city perhaps most central to it, the port where nearly half of all enslaved Africans had disembarked in North America and where the Civil War began. Furthermore, I became convinced, delving into the history of this congregation and denomination would be essential to understanding how family members of the victims, only days after the shootings, had almost reflexively expressed forgiveness for the unrepentant racist who had murdered their loved ones.

Although I am neither an African American nor a Christian, or perhaps because of it, the Black church had always held a deep fascination for me. The first time I found myself the only white person in an African American church was on a Sunday morning in the summer of 1980, when a fellow intern at The Atlanta Constitution invited me to join her for worship at West Hunter Street Baptist. Her Uncle Ralph would be preaching, she said. Her Uncle Ralph, who I didn’t know much about at the time, wound up being Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s friend, lieutenant, and successor as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. When Rev. Abernathy asked visitors to rise and be recognized that Sunday, and then allowed them to be seated, he pointedly insisted that I stand back up. And then as a packed house of amused congregants looked on, he interrogated me until I squirmed: Who was I? Where was I from? Where did I go to college? What year? What was I studying? History of what? Why was I in Atlanta? How did I know his niece? The point of letting me linger, I could only assume, was to make me feel my otherness, that discomfort unfamiliar to most white people of being a minority within the dominant culture. It was an effective enough lesson that I distinctly remember the sensation more than four decades later.

Something of a straight line stretches from that morning through the rest of my journalism career. As a cub reporter for the Constitution, at a time when Atlanta’s governance was transitioning to Black leadership, I spent my days covering civil rights preachers who had moved into politics, like Andrew Young, Hosea Williams, and Joseph Lowery, as well as groundbreaking leaders like Maynard Jackson, John Lewis, and Julian Bond whose power emanated from the Black church. During election years, many a Sunday morning was spent at Ebenezer or Big Bethel or Hillside, watching candidates pay tribute. I was enchanted by the theatricality, the spirituality, the music, and the profound sense of history. In 2000, when my editors at The New York Times recruited me for the team that produced the Pulitzer-winning series “How Race is Lived in America,” I chose as my laboratory an integrated Pentecostal church in the Atlanta suburbs. I could not imagine a better place to study the country’s race relations at the turn of the millennium, and my longform narrative – “Shared Prayers, Mixed Blessings” -- led the 15-part series. In the weeks before Barack Obama’s historic election in 2008, the Times dispatched me to Albany, GA, to report on how the ground had moved for aging lions of the civil rights movement, and again I went to church to find out.

And so, what drove me to spend the next decade exploring Mother Emanuel’s history was not simply my horror at the events of June 17, 2015, but my intrigue about everything that had come before it. I was on the Times’ investigative team when the shootings occurred, and it was not part of my portfolio to parachute into big breaking news stories. But the pull of this story was strong, and I raised my hand to join our team of reporters in Charleston. I spent several days producing a profile of Reverend Clementa Pinckney, the pastor and state senator who had been the first person shot. It ran on the front page on the day of Pinckney’s remarkable funeral, where President Barack Obama sang “Amazing Grace” to cap off a powerful eulogy. I covered that service as well, one of those moments when a journalist realizes he is witnessing history in real time, and found that Obama had crystallized much of my thinking about the meaning of forgiveness and grace within the context of the Black church and of Black suffering. I returned to Charleston in late 2016 and early 2017 to cover the bizarre trial of Dylann Roof, an emotional experience for even the most hardened cops and journalists in the courtroom.

Over the ensuing decade, I immersed myself in the life of the church, attending worship services and other functions whenever possible and interviewing nearly two hundred people, including current and former members and pastors, survivors of the shootings, family members of the victims, civic leaders, A.M.E. bishops and elders, historians, and theologians. My wife and I relocated temporarily to Charleston for seven months of research in 2019 and moved back for good in 2022. I read voluminously about the histories of Charleston and South Carolina and Methodism and African Methodism, reviewed thousands of pages of trial documents, and spent weeks buried in archives and libraries in Charleston, Columbia, and Philadelphia. I mined databases of old newspapers, reconstructed the genealogies of key figures, and searched for handwritten deeds in bulky bound volumes. I swapped letters with Dylann Roof on death row, and listened to hours of recorded jailhouse telephone calls between the deeply detached killer and his heartbroken and bewildered family members, which I obtained through an open records request.

This is the way I always work, but I felt a particular responsibility as a white man who was writing about the Black church and the broad expanse of African American history. I approached the mission with great humility about the sensitivity of the endeavor, about all that I would not know and all that I might get wrong, and with a fundamental understanding that I could not experience or appreciate the history I would be exploring in the way that African Americans do. We journalists face this dilemma all the time, of course, but it is our role and purpose to be travelers in time and space, to search for truth by broadening our own exposure to people and cultures and events that may seem alien. We then bear a heavy obligation to read widely, question openly, think critically, and write empathetically to compensate for the limitations of our own backgrounds and to counteract our preconceived notions. I can only hope that I have done so in a way that reciprocates the deep respect and courtesy shown to me by the people of Mother Emanuel under the most trying conditions.