Burning Faith: Church Arson in the American South

1. Fire

In the mid-1990s, a number of churches, many of them predominantly AfricanAmerican , burned in a series of arsons across the nation. Initially treated as a chain of unrelated incidents, the fires signaled a resurgence in churches as targets of hate crime. Mississippi Burning On April 4, 1993, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., three youths broke into and set fire to the Springhill Baptist Church in rural Amite County, Mississippi. A few hours later, they broke into and burned the Rocky Point Missionary Baptist Church in Pike County. Both churches, predominantly African-American, were completely destroyed. As the youths drove away from the burning churches, they shouted “burn, nigger, burn” and other racial slurs, as they later admitted in court. On October 1, the three young men—Charles W. McGeehee Jr., age eighteen; Jerome A. Bellelo, seventeen; and Roy J. McGovern, eighteen—pled guilty in U.S. District Court to conspiring to burn and burning the two churches in rural southern Mississippi; specifically, they pled guilty to violating Section 241 of Title 18, United States Code, by conspiring to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate the black church members in their constitutional right to hold and use religious property in the same manner as other citizens in the 1 fire 2 / Burning Faith United States. “There is no place in our society for racially motivated crimes like this one,” said Attorney General Janet Reno. “The Justice Department and the United States Attorneys will prosecute these cases as a top priority .” The boys were not the first white youths to attack black churches, nor were they the last, but they became the first individuals ever convicted in federal court of a church burning in Mississippi: at a time when state-level convictions for this kind of arson were still uncommon, each of the trio was sentenced to three to four years in federal prison. The incident received press coverage in local papers and in two black newspapers.1 The 1993 Springhill Baptist fire, with all of its racist symbolism, marked the beginning of a long series of fires at churches across the American South. In January 1994, a church burned in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In February, three churches burned in Sumter County, Alabama: Bucks Chapel Church, Pine Top Baptist, and Oak Grove Missionary Church. That same month, two burned in Aiken County, South Carolina: Rock Hill Baptist Church and Old Rosemary Baptist Church. Five churches had burned in South Carolina in the previous two years; then, in June 1994, another church burned in Aiken County: Jerusalem Baptist Church. The following month, two churches burned in Georgia: Springfield Baptist Church in Madison and Elam Baptist Church in Jones County. In August, two houses of worship burned in Tennessee : Greater Missionary Baptist Church and Benevolent Lodge #210. The fires continued into the fall of 1994, when more churches burned in Tennessee , including New Wright’s Chapel in Shelby County. Three more churches burned in South Carolina in September and October: Rice’s Chapel in Buffalo , Shrub Branch Baptist Church in Blackville, and St. Paul AME Church in Cades. Winter snow flurries did not extinguish the fires as Salem Missionary Baptist Church burned in Fruitland, Tennessee, on December 30. Bluff Road United Methodist Church burned in Columbia, South Carolina, on New Year’s Day. These fires were sometimes noted in local newspapers. They received little outside attention.2 The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) documented a number of fires in the Deep South in the coming months. Two churches burned in Tennessee on January 13, 1995: Johnson Grove Baptist in Bells and Macedonia Baptist in Denmark. On January 31, Mt. Calvary Baptist burned in Hardeman County, Tennessee. On February 20, authorities charged two white men and a white teen with attacking three black churches with sledgehammers ; prosecutors noted that nearby white churches were unharmed, suggesting the attacks were racially motivated.3 fire / 3 On May 15, someone broke into the Greater Mt. Zion Tabernacle Church of God in Christ in Portsmouth, Virginia, and set the burgundy velvet curtains near the pulpit on fire. Greater Mt. Zion had been founded in 1915 by a localwoman,herdaughter,andhergranddaughter.Foryearsafterthechurch’s founding, church members met in homes or on street corners. No one knows how old the building was when it burned, and no one seems to remember exactly when church members purchased the...