Church Leaders Investigate Firebombings of Black Churches Across the South
Episcopal News Service. May 23, 1996 [96-1478]
Nan Cobbey, Features Editor of Episcopal Life
(ENS) As the van pulled off the dirt road, the sun cast long shadows over what remained of Central Baptist Church: charred timbers, blackened blocks, twisted metal. Only the brick chimney stood.
Around the lot's perimeter, tucked among primroses and crimson clover, lay silent witnesses to the destruction: five generations of the congregation's ancestors, their graves marked by modest headstones.
Central Baptist in Massillon is one of dozens of black churches mysteriously burned in the last few years, and an ecumenical team had come to investigate and offer support.
In the midst of the rubble lay a bell. "It had been here as long as I was," the Rev. David Alexander said as he and the others looked over the wreckage. "And I've been here 72 years."
"We lost a whole lot in the fire... everything we had." The insurance, he said, was "old," and the $10,000 or $15,000 the church might receive will not go far.
That story of senseless destruction, repeated again and again by other pastors in other towns, has convinced a National Council of Churches of Christ (NCC) task force that they are witnessing not only a vicious form of domestic terrorism, but evidence of a conspiracy.
Forty-nine churches across the South have been burned since 1990 and the incidents are occurring with rapidly increasing frequency. In 1994, 10 churches burned. In 1995, 13. This year so far, 14 more.
Diane Porter, the Episcopal Church's senior executive for program, serves with the Rev. Mac Charles Jones, the NCC's associate to the general secretary for racial justice, as co-chair of a coalition task force investigating the fires. She led a team traveling to Southern states to meet with pastors and members of the affected churches.
The investigating team is beginning to see similarities between the fires, "something that looks like an initiation rite for white young men going into a supremacist organization," said Porter, a black woman. "The work we are doing now is going to focus on whether or not that is the emerging pattern."
The team is a coalition of people from the NCC's racial justice working group, the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal (CDR), which tracks the Ku Klux Klan and other supremacist organizations, and the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. It has interviewed dozens of pastors and church members across the South and visited five states where burnings have occurred -- Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Georgia.
An hour and a half south in Greene County, where three churches were burned in January, the team heard how black community leaders were excluded from meetings with the U.S. assistant attorney general for civil rights, Deval Patrick, when he came to investigate the burnings. A newly formed, predominantly white citizens committee that is controlling donations for the burned churches met with Patrick.
The pastors of Mount Zion, Little Zion and Mount Zoar Baptist churches shared discouragement about their treatment. They resent being asked to beg for money sent to help them. "I've been in that church 82 years... behind that rostrum 79 years. If they got no more confidence in me than that, they can keep the money," said the Rev. W.D. Lewis, 92, pastor of Little Zion Baptist.
Though they offer support, solidarity and help with fund-raising to rebuild the churches, the coalition's goals are far broader. Porter and the others want to focus national attention on escalating hate crimes and what they see as an entirely inadequate response. They want answers and they want action.
One way they hope to encourage that is by bringing the pastors of the burned churches to Washington, D.C., June 8-10, for a National Day of Justice for Black Churches. They want the pastors to tell their stories to each other and the press, to worship together at an ecumenical service and, finally, to meet with officials of the Justice Department including, they hope, Attorney General Janet Reno.
"I want the Justice Department to take this seriously," said Porter. "I want them to stop and say, 'Well maybe this is domestic terrorism. Maybe racism is behind this. Maybe there is something more to all this than meets the eye.'"
Her frustration emerges from what team members heard again and again during their visits:
- Local investigators refuse to believe race is involved in the burnings even when three or more churches, all of them black, are destroyed in the same area.
- Investigations do not lead to arrests but focus instead on the pastors and congregations of the victimized churches and disrupt their lives.
- Predominantly white citizens' groups take control of donations sent to rebuild the churches and then make black pastors submit requests and receipts to get the money, implying they can't be trusted.
The coalition's criticism of federal handling of the investigations may be behind its exlusion from giving oral testimony at recent Congressional hearings. While the Christian Coalition and Southern Baptist Convention were invited to participate, the three groups were told the witness list was full and were limited to sending in written testimony.
"It seems to me to be an obvious snub," said Jones. "I think it was a political decision because it would have been pretty hard to miss us."
"We submit to this committee that these manifestations of domestic terrorism demand the highest degree of bi-partisan attention at the federal, state and local levels," stated the written testimony offered by the Rev. Dr. Joan Brown Campbell, NCC general secretary, and Bishop Melvin Talbert, NCC president. "This is not a Democratic or Republican issue, but rather an American problem that should arouse moral outrage and condemnation from all people irrespective of their race, ethnic origin, religious affiliation or political orientation."
Before the 1990s, according to a study conducted by USA Today, no more than one such fire a year was reported. Since 1990, 49 black or multiracial churches, most of them Baptist, have been burned.
Burnings are not the only hate crime churches are reporting. Pastors have received death threats. Congregations complain of racist graffiti, cross burnings, hate literature and vandalism, some of it severe.
In most cases, local FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents are handling the investigations. Yet in the last six years only 12 suspects have been arrested. All of them are white males between the ages of 17 and 42, and a number belong to white-supremacist organizations including Aryan Nation, Skinheads for White Justice and the Klan, according to CDR research.
Until last month, all the fire-bombings reported had taken place in nine southern states. On April 19, Riverview Missionary Baptist Church in Kingston, New York, was set on fire. A resident in the church's black neighborhood saw two white men watching the church just before the flames were visible. Investigators say a flammable liquid was used.
"These church burnings are not just church burnings," declared team member Ron Daniels at a rally April 7. Daniels, executive director of the Center for Democratic Renewal, was addressing a crowd of several hundred at First Baptist Church in East Elmhurst, New York.
"[The burnings are] really an attack on affirmative action... on immigrants... on social programs. This is happening in the context of a nation where the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and where millions of poor white people are anxious, feeling great anxiety and pain."
Yet, he said, instead of getting angry at powerful whites who control the wealth, who "perpetuate a crime against all poor people," the anxious turn their anger "toward black people, people of color, the dispossessed and the disadvantaged."
In that kind of "venomous climate, people do crazy things," said Daniels. "Instead of standing side by side with black people to transform and change society... [they] are turning their anger against black churches."
Jones has a warning for the churches and the nation. "Ultimately what we are talking about is the soul of America. I'm convinced that unless America deals with the issue of racism, America can never be a country that reaches its destiny."
Jones brought that message of challenge to the rally in East Elmhurst. He named the violence as a form of domestic terrorism, called it "an attack on the soul of the African-American community," and urged his listeners to cease being silent in the face of such racism.
"Call the sin by its name," he said. "Somebody has to name it. We as the church are called to the job of naming sin."
Then he reminded his fellow team members and the ecumenical, multiracial audience that they had the antidote to "this evil conspiracy." It had been given to them by the one who broke the bread and poured the wine to put himself inside them and change them so they could not be still "when wrong was being done, black churches being burned."
"This antidote does not stop conspiracies," said Jones, "but it is so powerful and so strong that we will survive the conspiracy and the conspiracies will not have the last word. The conspiracies do not have the last word."
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