Black churches in flames
Over the June 10 weekend, two more black churches in the south were torched, in Greenville, Texas, bringing the total of such racist arson attacks to more than 60 since 1990. The number of instances is accelerating — 25 this year alone.
In a rarity, local cops made arrests in two of these cases the next day — for one Greenville fire and for one a week earlier in Charlotte, North Carolina.
This wave of black church burnings had been down-played in the capitalist press until the past few weeks, when a coalition of black pastors and civil rights activists began demanding action by the federal government. A delegation from the coalition descended on Washington in the first week in June, not only to demand more federal action, but also to denounce what the federal government has done so far in "investigating" the wave of terror.
In a classic case of what Malcolm X termed turning the victim into the criminal, Clinton's Justice Department has been targeting, not white supremacist groups, but the churches themselves!
The Reverend MacCharles Jones, associate general secretary for racial justice for the National Council of Churches, said that the feds had required lie detector tests of church members, issued subpoenas for church records and told congregations that they are among the suspects.
Rose Johnson, the executive director of a group that researches racism, explained that after a fire at a church in Knoxville, Tennessee, federal agents "polygraphed pastors, fingerprinted church members, showed up unannounced at job sites and homes and implied that church members burned their church".
The Clinton Administration has been reluctantly dragged into appearing to do something by the publicity generated by the National Council of Churches-based coalition. Clinton did not make his first statement about the bombings until the coalition delegates were in Washington besieging his Justice Department.
The government is still downplaying the terror wave. It claimed "only" 32 churches have been torched, while the Center for Democratic Renewal in Atlanta, Georgia, documented 57 cases as of early May, and there have been more since. The New York Times continues to parrot the administration's line that there is "no evidence" of a conspiracy behind the attacks.
It may turn out that no one group is coordinating the burnings, but right-wing extremists have publicly proposed that local groups "do their own thing" so as to avoid conspiracy charges.
More to the point, for two decades both the Democrats and Republicans have refused to carry forward the gains won by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, and have now begun to try to reverse some of those gains. The anti-black political atmosphere thus generated sets the stage for the extremists.
As Reverend Jesse Jackson points out, "It seems the blue suits are engaging in anti-civil rights propaganda and legislation in Congress, the black robes are handing out restrictive rulings in the courts, and the white sheets are doing the burning. There is a kinship among these things."
Concerning the two most recent burnings in Greenville, Texas, the fire chief opined that they were "acts of local vandalism". Other city officials refused to say whether racism was involved(!), but did admit that the letters KKK, for Ku Klux Klan, were spray-painted on a wall at a local car wash and were cut into several greens at the local golf course.
Black churches were targets of racists in the south during the civil rights movement because they were often the organising centres of the movement. Today, they are still often centres for the black community, especially in rural areas.
The story of a church torched last year in Dixiana, South Carolina, appeared in a recent column by Bob Herbert in the New York Times. It gives a feeling for the twisted minds behind such attacks.
The church, with a small and poor African-American congregation, had been the target of vandalism for years. In 1985, racists raided the church at night, carving "KKK" on the front door. Trees surrounding the church were riddled with bullets, and the pews were full of bullet holes. The pot-bellied stove was smashed, water pump destroyed, piano trashed, hymnals ripped apart.
A new sacrament cloth was spread out and defecated on. In the graveyard coffins were dug up.
When a white woman, Ammie Murray, helped found an interracial group to fight the vandalism following this attack, she was called a "nigger lover", told that her grandson would be killed, had a bullet shot through her front door and was chased down a desolate road and rammed by a car full of white men. Both of her dogs were beaten to death.
Ten years after the 1985 vandalism, the racist creeps decided to join in the new wave of arson attacks, and burned the church down.
Also last year, when two members of the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were arrested for setting fire to two churches in South Carolina, a former member of the organisation said he had attended rallies with the accused at which black churches were denounced as places where people learned about how to get on public assistance.
With both Democrats and Republicans attacking "single mothers on welfare" and Clinton promising to "end welfare as we know it" — thinly veiled attempts to blame society's ills on those at the bottom, especially blacks — is it surprising that Klansmen can work themselves into a terrorist frenzy over the issue?
Clinton's reluctance even to acknowledge that these attacks were taking place allowed the Republicans to beat him to the punch. The House Judiciary Committee under Republican Henry Hyde held a one-day hearing on the burnings before Clinton's first speech on the subject.
The Hyde hearings were a farce. He refused to allow testimony from the National Council of Churches, the Center for Democratic Renewal and the Center for Constitutional Rights — the three groups responsible for building the coalition that publicised the attacks. He did call on the rightist Christian Coalition to testify, however.
Ron Daniels of the CCR said that the fact that Clinton failed to make a strong statement or appear at the site of a burned-out church "and put himself squarely on the record against racial violence, has left a great void for Hyde and the Christian Coalition to exploit".