Burning Faith: Church Arson in the American South

2. Fear

The fires recalled darker days in American history, harkening back to the days of Jim Crow segregation, when white southerners perfected the finer points of racial terror in keeping black folks “in their place” and hooded Klansmen destroyed property and lives at will. Like similar attacks in the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, the fires of the 1990s created terror, as intended. A Perfect Case of Race Hatred Forrest Harris—director of the Kelly Miller Smith Institute, Vanderbilt University’s African-American church studies program—saw in the arsons a residual imprint of the 1960s, a time when a number of white southerners refused to accept the world as it was and should have been. According to Harris , each burned church sends the message, “We don’t like the way the world is now.” Indeed, the fires of the 1990s paralleled the relentless attacks on houses of worship during the civil rights era.1 Even a partial list of attacks on houses of worship conveys the scope of such crimes in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, a bombing at the Temple , a synagogue in Atlanta, caused $200,000 worth of damage, tearing an eighteen-square-foot hole in the side of the building and shattering windows of two nearby buildings on October 12, 1958; this bombing paralleled similar attacks on synagogues in Miami, Jacksonville, and Birmingham. Teenagers 2 fear 26 / Burning Faith vandalized synagogues in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and more than a dozen other cities in a two-day period in early January 1960. On June 25, 1964, a firebomb damaged a black church in Longdale, Mississippi; the following day, arsonists burned a black church in Clinton, Mississippi. On July 6, 1964, two black churches were burned to the ground in Raleigh, Mississippi. Someone bombed a black church in Oxford, Alabama, on May 13, 1965. On July 18, arsonists burned a black church in Elmwood, Alabama, and two more black churches in Greensboro, Alabama; the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Sam Bowers, boasted that the Klan was responsible for more than sixteen arsons in Laurel, Mississippi. Arsonists burned a black church in Jones County, Mississippi, on September 26, 1965. On January 2, 1966, someone not only burned a black church in Newton, Georgia, but also threatened to kill the local sheriff if he investigated the incident. Bombs destroyed a black church in Ernul, North Carolina, on April 9, 1966. Arsonists destroyed a Catholic church in Carthage, Mississippi, on June 24, 1966, and someone bombed a black church in Richmond, Virginia, on October 5, 1966. When FBI agents pursued suspects in the September 18, 1967, bombing of Temple Beth Israel in Jackson, Mississippi, a carload of armed Klansmen rammed their vehicle from behind. Reverend A. D. King’s church was bombed in Louisville, Kentucky, on August 14, 1968, and on November 27, four teenagers—all under the age of sixteen—were charged with torching the Yeshiva of Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, New York. On January 19, 1970, fire damaged a synagogue in the Bronx that had been vandalized four times in the past year.2 In the twelve-week period surrounding the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by President Lyndon Baines Johnson, thirty-four black churches were burned in Mississippi, according to Michael and Judy Newton, authors of The Ku Klux Klan: An Encyclopedia (1990). Records kept by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) indicate that no fewer than two hundred black churches were burned and destroyed in the South during the civil rights era. The fires “signaled a strategy by anti-integrationist forces to destroy what they believed was the core ingredient in the lives of black Americans,” according to Reginold Bundy of the Tri-State Defender. By doing so, the segregationists reasoned, they would weaken the collective activism of the civil rights movement. “The black church has always represented the bonding fiber of the African-American community,” Bundy reported in 1996, “and its present role is no less important in rural communities around the South.” CORE concluded in 1968 that the burning of African-American churches in the fear / 27 South did more to raise the level of determination of African Americans than almost any other thing, including the stirring speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.3 Bundy aptly reported on the more recent arsons. The fires in 1996, while terrifying, did not surprise the...