With additional reporting by BRIAN JOSEPHS, NATASHA ASHBY, SAFIYA MANN, ZACHARY GOLDSTEIN and MALCOLM BANKS
The slaughter of nine Black worshippers in the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., was a tragic reminder of the four little girls killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963. A recent spate of Black churches going up in flames is reminiscent of 1996, when more than 100 churches were destroyed by fire.
It was such an epidemic of fires that the National Council of the Churches of Christ, under the leadership of Dr. Joan Brown Campbell, established a Burned Churches Fund that eventually rebuilt many of those churches.
Last week, when five predominantly Black churches were burned, at least two of the fires were confirmed as arson. The initial reports, as in 1996, gave no indication that the fires were connected with racism.
During an appearance on MSNBC Wednesday, Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the rash of Black church burnings could be a sign of “cultural genocide” in reaction to the demand that the Confederate battle flag be removed from the state capitol grounds in Columbia, S.C. The SPLC is also calling for a congressional investigation of domestic terrorism.
Racially motivated church burnings are by no means a new or recent phenomenon in America. Immediately after the Civil War, Black churches were bombed and burned at an alarming rate. “While the current period of burnings appears to have started in the 1980s,” the Burned Churches Project reported, “it intensified in 1995. Fifty black churches were known to have been victims of arson from 1990 to 1995. By 1996 and early 1997, that number had quadrupled.”
Fortunately, it was rare to have any deaths connected with the fires, unlike the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963. Two Klansmen were convicted of that crime in 2001 and 2002.
Mother Emanuel was burned in 1822, after the failed slave revolt led by Denmark Vesey, one of the founders of the church. A wooden church was rebuilt on the site in 1874 and the present structure was built in 1891. The church is now the oldest AME church south of Baltimore.
Investigations continue into the recent church burnings in Charlotte, N.C., and Knoxville, Tenn., although early reports suggest the fires were probably acts of vandalism. Of the four structures at Briar Creek Road Baptist Church in Charlotte, only a youth activities building in the back of the complex burned, while the sanctuary was untouched, according to one news account. However, it was also reported that the fire left $250,000 in damage and completely wiped out the church’s classroom education area and children’s summer camp.
Last Tuesday, God’s Power Church of Christ in Macon, Ga., was intentionally set on fire, local officials say. But the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms says the fire is still under investigation. The ATF is also looking into a fire that occurred last week at Glover Grove Missionary Church in Warrenville, S.C. Reports suggest that some of the fires may have been ignited by faulty electrical wiring. The same was said in 1996, along with suggestions that some of the pastors set the fires in recoup the insurance and rebuild.
Tuesday, Mt. Zion AME Church was the seventh church burned over the past week. In 1995, it was one of the churches burned down and later rebuilt by the Burned Churches Project. The Rev. Terrance Mackey was interviewed in 1995, and he expressed a belief that the churches were deliberately set on fire to start a race war. His sentiments presaged those spewed by Dylann Roof, the alleged killer of the nine at Mother Emanuel, in his manifesto.
So far, most of the churches burned are located in the South. In the 1990s, they were burned across the nation, and some had majority white congregations.
Bishop Bryant Robinson Jr. of Macedonia Church of God and Christ knows the pain of a church arson. His church was burned down just hours after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. The excitement of a historic event in Black history was squelched by scorched remains and the reminder that a post-racial America is a myth.
“We have not been able to purge that stain or remove that cancer,” Robinson said. “It has been stamped indefinitely into our conscious as a nation. However, we have refused to face it with integrity and honesty that we might try to become what they like to say we are—‘Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.’”
In 2011, Michael Jacques was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison for burning down the church out of anger stemming from Obama’s election. Benjamin Haskell, one of his accomplices, told police that he “was angry that the country was going to have an African-American president and that the Blacks and Puerto Ricans would now have more rights than whites,” according to the Huffington Post.
This case was one in which justice was served. However, Robinson is far from complacent.
“So we’ve come a ways down the road, but we’re not a post-racial society yet,” he said “We still have much work to do. Young people have to fortify, equip themselves with honing skills to finance, pick up the torch and keep pressing forward. They are not going to give it to us. Don’t be dismayed by this. We have to keep fighting.”
It may take some time for the National Council of Churches or some other ecumenical organization to once again come to the aid of the attacked and destroyed churches. In the past, Habitat for Humanity was part of the rebuilding effort, as was the NAACP.
A number of public officials were involved in the 1996 rebuilding effort, including Vice President Al Gore, Attorney General Janet Reno, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Andrew Cuomo, secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Of this group, only Cuomo remains active as a public official, and the rebuilding may be a task he can renew.
