Hate in America: Is there a resurgence of Black church burnings?
6th July 2015 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
In late November 1965, the Bethany Baptist Church near tiny Jonesboro, La., in Jackson Parish was burned virtually to the ground for the second time in a year. According to published reports at the time, the church had recently hosted voter-registration drives for African-American citizens.
But outrage over the Jonesboro burnings began months before, right after the structure was torched the first time in January 1965. According to the Jan. 23, 1965, issue of The Louisiana Weekly, leaders of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) wired (via telegraph) a blistering statement to U.S. Sen. Russell Long and U.S. Rep. Hale Boggs, both of Louisiana:
“Imperative you as Louisiana Senator/Representative ensure most thorough FBI investigations of racist church burnings and murder. Such crimes unsolved and without prosecution encourage additional terrorism. Louisiana is on verge of becoming another Mississippi.”
But violence such as church burnings and bombings were unfortunately and tragically nothing new to civil rights activists. Long a target for white supremacists who clung desperately to the dying vestiges of the Jim Crow South, such horrific tragedies peaked in the 1960s with the chilling 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four little girls and injured 22 other church-goers.
“The most important thing to know is that this is something that’s been happening for a very long time,” says Tulane University professor of history Dr. Emily Clark. “After the American revolution, churches really became the center of African-American activity, both in terms of a place to gather socially and a focus of political organization. Churches are where African Americans really came together, so they were such obvious targets for violence.”
Flash forward to the modern day, when, in the wake of a series of racially-charged incidents of violence and protest based in South Carolina, six Black churches were recently burned within the span of a week, with federal and local authorities investigating all of them as possible arsons.
Then, last Tuesday night, a seventh church — the Mount Zion AME Church of Greeleyville, S.C. — was almost completely destroyed by fire. As of press time, the cause of this latest blaze was undetermined, but the NAACP and other African-American leaders urged other Black churches to be on high alert.
“Churches are burning again in the United States,” Emma Green wrote for The Atlantic June 25, “and the symbolism of that is powerful. Even though many instances of arson have happened at white churches, the crime is often association with racial violence: a highly visible attack on a core institution of the Black community, often done at night, and often motivated by hate.”
The Rev. Dr. W. Franklyn Richardson, chairman of the Conference of National Black Churches, says such arsons and other violence against African-American religious institutions are merely manifestations of a deeper culture of mistrust and hate that continues to be woven into American society.
“My speculations is that these fires are symptomatic of a sickness in the American psyche that is grounded in racism,” Dr. Richardson says. “Until we stop reacting to the symptoms and not the cause, this resistance [to justice and equality] and hatred in our country will continue.
“Our challenge is to open a debate on race, but it can’t happen in the dark but out in the light,” he adds. “All parties involved must be able to comment and discuss the issues so we heal these divisions. If we don’t, this disease will continue to block our coming together as a society.”
Even though none of the recent burnings occurred in Louisiana, the violence has reverberated in the Pelican State and in New Orleans, where scholars and activists are reacting to recent events.
Dr. Dorothy V. Smith, professor of history and dean of the College of General Studies at Dillard University, echoes many of thoughts of Dr. Richardson.
“The burning of churches today conveys the same message as it did in past years,” Smith says. “It is done to remind Blacks that they are still inferior and powerless even with a Black president. The nation has to have a serious discussion about race relations in this country and stop feeding into the media frenzy of divide and conquer.
While other in Southern states African-American churches have consistently played a key role in the ongoing fight for civil rights, the relationship between places of worship and the battle for equality and justice has been more complicated in Louisiana, wrote historian and author Adam Fairclough in Race & Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972.
Fairclough argued that during the mid-20th century, Black church leaders in Louisiana were hesitant to align with the Louisiana chapters of more strident civil-rights organizations like CORE and the NAACP, fearing that such an action would make Louisiana churches the subject of the type of terrorism experienced by faith-based institutions in other states.
Despite hesitation by some religious representatives, others did, in fact, risk retribution by becoming NAACP leaders, Fairclough wrote.
“Although historians of the civil rights movement have often exaggerated the importance of the black church,” he wrote, “some Baptist and Methodist ministers did support the NAACP. Ministers headed perhaps a third of the association’s branches, including, at one time or another, Shreveport, Alexandria, Monroe and New Orleans. But the significance on ministerial support did not lie merely in their individual participation, or even in their general prestige within the Black community; in many instances, ministers brought about bloc enrollment of their congregations. In New Orleans, for example, the Rev. I.L. Haynes persuaded 820 members of his 900-strong congregation to join the NAACP.”
The endangered nature of African-American churches in the South, including Louisiana, didn’t end with the conclusion of the 1960s phase of the Civil Rights Movement and the passage of numerous federal acts spurring the nation toward equality.
During the mid-to-late-1990s, after a surge in church burnings, especially in the South, both the federal government and national African-American religious organizations pledged millions of dollars to protect and rebuild devastated church buildings, and law enforcement on all levels renewed its drive to investigate such violence and bring perpetrators to justice. (Tragically enough, one of the churches that was destroyed two decades ago was the Mount Zion AME in Greeleyville, S.C., the same one that burned last week.)
And now it seems it might be happening again, thanks to a domino effect of events. Events triggered by the murder of churchgoers in Charleston by young white supremacist Dylann Roof spurred political and social leaders to push for the removal of Confederate flags and other outdated, racist imagery from public view.
That, in turn, drove supporters of symbols to protests of their own, and Tulane professor Clark believes the recent destruction of a half-dozen Black churches within a week is intricately connected to that chain of events.
“I absolutely believe [the burnings] are connected to what happened in Charleston,” DR. Clark says. “It’s related to the movement over the Confederate flag and memorials, and it obviously stems from a mindset [among Southern whites] that was taught during the Civil Rights Movement.
“What’s going on seems like a symptom to me,” she adds. “It’s just enormously demoralizing and embarrassing that this is happening in this country again.”
Dr. Richardson of the CNBC agrees, saying such violence and bigotry diminishes the United States’ moral standing globally.
“It definitely cripples our capacity to be the world leader on human rights,” he says. “It’s a plague for us. It makes it especially frustrating for us because it distorts much of the democratic language and imagery we try to project.”
But Richardson says this can be a crucial turning point, a key point where the races can come together to evaluate how to solve the problem, with both Black and white churches joining hands to lead the way.
Dillard’s Smith concurs.
“A great opportunity exists to start this dialogue even though it was caused by bloodshed,” she says. “White Americans have to openly and honestly be willing to engage in the racist ideology they started and continue to perpetuate. They have to be willing to confront bigotry and subscribe to equality for all. This involves looking at economic parity and social justice, especially voting rights, and be willing to make the necessary changes.”
This article originally published in the July 6, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
