Arson Attacks on Black Churches
by Black church arsons are slowly becoming a reemerging problem across the American South. Civil rights activists are confronted with terrorist acts by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and other white supremacist organizations that seek to regain the absolute power that whites held prior to the civil rights movement.
White supremacists have targeted black churches because they consider any type of African American community practice a detrimental threat to white culture.
The Ku Klux Klan
In 1866, the Ku Klux Klan originated in Pulaski, Tennessee, as a social group for Civil War veterans. On August 16, 1996, a federal indictment charged the Ku Klux Klan with a string of black church arsons in South Carolina, and more than seventy since 1995. Klan members Gary Cox and Timothy Welsh both confessed their violation of civil rights laws when admitting their role in the torching of the Mount Zion AME Church in Greelyville, South Carolina. Cox and Welsh were also implicated in the burning of Macedonia Baptist Church in Bloomville, South Carolina. Arthur Allen Haley and Hubert Lavon Rowell were arrested on conspiracy and arson charges of a black church, labor camp, a Claredon County Service Center, and a black man’s automobile. Haley and Rowell were also suspected of providing Cox and Welsh with deadly explosives. South Carolina’s attorney general’s office claimed that the Ku Klux Klan instructed their members to regard black churches as a threat to white power because black community actions advocate racial equality. Recent statistics show that the Ku Klux Klan has burned approximately fifty-seven churches with black congregations over the past decade. Although cases of black church arsons are on the rise, they typically receive scant media attention. News groups usually cover a story of vandalism against sacred African American grounds with few follow-up reports.
Relief Organizations
In contrast, the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal (CDR) is the main group that conducts research on patterns of black church arsons. CDR is an organization whose primary goal is to work with ”progressive activists and organizations to build a movement to counter right-wing rhetoric and public policy initiatives” (Fumento, 1). Mainstream conservatives are portrayed as racist criminals by the CDR. CDR researchers discovered that the great majority of individuals that are detained or arrested in connection with black church arsons are black. Racially skewed studies conducted by the CDR have labeled accidental fires as intentional. Furthermore, the CDR failed to report blazes set by African Americans themselves.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) plays a significant role in highlighting cases of arson against African Americans. On Thursday, February 8, 1996, the Department of Justice launched a civil rights investigation into a string of arsons across Alabama and Tennessee. The investigation was launched one day after the NAACP released a statement that they delivered to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno asking the federal government to probe into how black church arsons violate civil rights laws. According to Wade Henderson, director of the NAACP’s Washington, D.C., division, black church arsons are resurrections that bring back historically troubling memories for African Americans (Fletcher, A04). The work of the NAACP demonstrates a sharp rise in black political power in the United States.
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