TAKING NO CHANCES
The Briar Creek Road Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C., is one of six churches in the U.S. South that have reported fires since last month’s shooting in Charleston, S.C. Though police haven’t branded any of the fires as hate crimes, they have found eviden
As a predominantly black church in rural South Carolina — rebuilt after members of the Ku Klux Klan torched it 20 years ago — blazed again Tuesday night, its crackling timbers and smoke-shrouded bricks were set to become a symbol of racial hatred in America, a poignant entry in a list of black churches beset by fire since nine people were shot dead June 17 inside another historic black church in the state.
News, however, that the cause of the fire initially looks to be lightning — an “act of God” in insurance parlance — rather than racists, muted some of the anguish over the loss of the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church in Greeleyville, about 80 kilometres north of Charleston, the scene of the mass shooting, but the ire and the fear of black church leaders in the United States remains intense.
A state of emergency has been declared by the National Black Church Initiative, a coalition of 34,000 African-American churches, fearing white supremacists are targeting black churches as a symbol of black activism and leadership pushing for social change.
Since the Charleston shooting, for which police charged 21-yearold Dylann Roof, an apparent white supremacist, six churches associated with the black community in the Southern states have reported fires. Law-enforcement agencies are probing the cause of each; some are being deemed as likely accidental, others as arson.
So far, authorities have not branded any as hate crimes.
For leaders within the black churches, however, history has shown they cannot take chances, said Rev. Anthony Evans, president of the Black Church Initiative.
His organization has sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice calling for an investigation into white supremacist groups that have targeted the black church in the past and assistance in protecting their buildings, congregants and leadership.
“The black church has always been the object — as we saw in Charleston — of the frustration of extreme white supremacist groups. We are considering the fires and the shooting as a linkage. We don’t see these as isolated incidents,” Evans said in an interview.
“We are really shaken by these events in light of Charleston,” he said. The shootings show how hatred can lead to destruction.
“We don’t know who is behind this but we have history.
“We have history that the same element is trying to strike a blow at the black church, trying to silence us, to silence our leadership and we will not be deterred by these incidents.”
The coalition urges black church congregations to adopt “emergency security protocols” including “security rings around our churches.” The nighttime fires show the buildings must be watched around the clock, he said.
“Let me be very clear: We are going to not sit back and take it. And I’m not advocating violence, we’re not going to have guns, but we’ll organize ourselves in a way that we create a preventive mechanism.
“Just like the country is on high alert going into the Fourth of July, the black church all across this country is on high alert given the apparent attacks, again, on the black church.”
Evans said an action plan cannot be deterred by studying statistics on church fires or the possible randomness of clustered events, even though statistically, if the six church fires in the southeast were all that occurred recently it would be a relatively safe period.
An average of approximately 31 U.S. congregations burned every week from 2007 through 2011, according to a 2013 estimate by the National Fire Protection Association. Just 16 per cent of the fires at houses of worship and funeral homes were intentionally set during the five-year period, so arsonists set fire to approximately five religious structures each week. The figures, however, do not break out predominantly white congregations from black congregations.
Evans said history shows white supremacist groups have seen the church as a primary target since the 1800s.
A spate of arsons against black churches made headlines in the 1990s, including the church in Greeleyville, for which two members of the KKK were convicted. A task force probed hundreds of fires and arson at the time, only a few of which were proven to be racially motivated.
Black church attacks sometimes follow events seen as victories for blacks, such as the Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Massachusetts being torched in 2008 shortly after Barack Obama was elected as the first black U.S. president. One of the most notorious attacks was the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four young girls in 1963, during the civil rights movement. The church was a hub for organizing and hosted civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
The history of church-targeting by white hate groups goes back to the post-Civil War reconstruction.
The black churches’ role in galvanizing and organizing the black community terrifies those opposed to racial integration and harmony, Evans said. “This motivates the extreme white supremacy element that has existed in America since the beginning of America,” said Evans. And if the black church is seen as a symbol of strength within the black community, argument and anger over another symbol — the Confederate flag — has also emerged since the Charleston shooting. Photos of Roof holding a gun and a Confederate flag and posing with Confederate flag memorabilia brought fierce debate over the appropriateness of the official use of the flag.
Let me be very clear: We are going to not sit back and take it. And I’m not advocating violence.