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A Test of Faith Black Church Burnings and America'sEnduring Crucible of “Race”Timothy Patrick McCarthyPublished online: 11 Oct 2010.

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12 Souls Winter 2006

Souls 8 (1): 12–26, 2006 / Copyright © 2006 The Trustees of Columbia Universityin the City of New York / 1099-9949/02 / DOI:10.1080/10999940500517023

A Test of FaithBlack Church Burnings and America’s EnduringCrucible of “Race”

Timothy Patrick McCarthy

This essay examines the wave of black church burnings that occurred in theUnited States in the 1990s. During the last decade or so, nearly 500 Afri-can-American churches have been burned, the vast majority of them in theSouth. Drawing from his own personal experiences as a young collegeteacher taking his students down South on “alternative” spring break tripsto help rebuild these churches, McCarthy’s essay examines the complex so-cial, cultural, and political forces that have both framed the issue in thepublic consciousness and shaped the nation’s response to it. Bearing wit-ness to the enduring legacy of “race” and racism in the United States, “ATest of Faith” challenges readers to embrace a transformative vision of so-cial justice rooted in the author’s deep faith in the possibility of reconcilia-tion.

Keywords: black church burnings, hate crimes, Church Arson Prevention Act,religion

Souls

The Black South

Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a heavy fact.Such curious links of the human mind exist and must be reckoned with soberly. Theycannot be laughed away, nor always successfully stormed at, nor easily abolished byany act of legislature. And yet they must not be encouraged by being let alone. Theymust be recognized as facts, but unpleasant facts; things that stand in the way ofcivilization and religion and common decency.

—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other.We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking ofbread, and we are not alone any more.

—Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness

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In the deepest parts of the South, the soil looks like a mixture of fire and blood. Notquite red, not really orange, it’s a color all its own, unique to this part of the country, onethat is as difficult to describe as it is to forget. On the hottest days, the thick clay soilsticks to the bottom of your sneakers. And if you stay in one place long enough, it willchange their color entirely.

The South can change you, too, if you spend enough time there. Americans of everystripe have intense feelings about “the South,” its unique and peculiar history, its peopleand customs, its pride and prejudices. Whether we like to admit it or not, so much of whoand what we are as a country is rooted there: our best stories and our worst memories; ourmost noble struggles and our most humbling defeats; our loftiest ideals and our harshestrealities. The work of many of our best writers—Douglass and Twain, Faulkner andMorrison, O’Connor and Ellison, Welty and Walker—reminds us of these things. Indeed,as Albert Murray writes, going South takes us all “to a very old place.” It is perhaps theoldest place in America, a region that insists that the past is as important as the future. Inthe midst of a country so hastily preoccupied with “progress,” the South slows us downand calls on us to remember. One might even say the South teaches us that genuineprogress requires us to remember.

Such lessons often come without warning, and that is precisely what happened in thesmall town of Boligee, Alabama, during the winter of 1995–1996. Late in the evening ofDecember 22, three days before Christmas, the Mt. Zion Baptist Church burned to theground in a mysterious blaze. Just three weeks later, on the same night, two other nearbychurches—Little Mt. Zion Church and Mt. Zoar Baptist Church—were burned as well.All three were small African-American churches that had long served as the spiritual andsocial bedrock for this predominantly Black community of fewer than 300 residents.Before the church burnings, Boligee was hardly known for making headline news. Likeso many other places in the South, it was a forgotten place, too small and Black and poorto receive much notice. A four-square mile rural enclave, Boligee is located in the hillsjust east of the Alabama–Louisiana border. It is a young town—sixty percent of its resi-dents are under the age of 35—and a deeply impoverished one. Located in Greene County,one of the nation’s poorest counties, Boligee has a median household income of just$15,000, a figure that straddles the poverty line, and an unemployment rate over twenty-five percent. Surrounded by such unforgiving poverty, perhaps it makes sense that Boligeewould have more churches than schools. But when three Black churches were burned tothe ground in just one month, the faith of this tiny Alabama town was put to the test.

In the peculiar realm of national consciousness, timing is everything. Just three daysbefore the burnings of Little Mt. Zion and Mt. Zoar in Boligee, the 400-member, non-denominational Inner City Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, was the target of a similarlysuspicious attack. Although the church was almost entirely destroyed in the January 8fire, members of this multiracial congregation later discovered racist graffiti, scrawledwith the messages “Die, nigger, die” and “Nigger lovers,” on the back door of the church,which remained intact. Several days later, church leaders received a letter in the mailcontaining a 3-by-5 inch postcard with the corners burned. Filled with racial slurs, thecard read: “[the] church’s donations would be better spent on the families of Los Angelesmurder victims Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.” The combination of hate-ful epithets with an overt reference to the recent—and bitterly divisive—acquittal of O.J.Simpson in his highly publicized murder trial confirmed what many had already sus-pected: that this was a premeditated act of arson motivated by racism. Adding insult toinjury, the Knoxville fire was actually the fifth reported instance of suspicious fires in-volving churches with Black congregations in Tennessee in less than a year. Local inves-tigators had already attributed two of the fires to arson. Another—of “undetermined ori-gin”—was still under investigation.

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As fortune would have it, Inner City had a famous member: Reggie White, the all-prodefensive end for the Green Bay Packers, was also the associate pastor of the Knoxvillechurch. In the midst of preparing for the 1996 NFC Championship Game against theDallas Cowboys, White used his media celebrity to speak out against the destruction ofhis church and others like it. “Until this country starts dealing with organizations that dothings like this,” White told a sportswriter for The Boston Globe, “then we’re still goingto have problems. I think it’s time for the country to take this stuff seriously. It’s time westop sweeping this stuff under the rug because progress in race relations hasn’t beenmade.”1 White’s comments, especially the charge that these recent burnings were thework of white supremacists, were as chilling as they were candid. But in the wake of fiveBlack church burnings in Tennessee, and three more in Alabama, they resonated deeplywith those who feared that the recent spate of suspicious fires marked a return to theracist days of the Jim Crow era. Suddenly, and without explanation, the haunting specterof white resistance and racist violence was once again rearing its ugly head in the Ameri-can South.

The widespread perception that the recent church burnings were connected to pastracial injustices was especially strong among African Americans. To appreciate this per-spective, one needs to understand and acknowledge the history of slavery and its legacyof white supremacy in the United States. From the moment the first slave ship arrived onNorth American shores in 1619, the unequal relationship between the descendants ofAfricans and the descendants of Europeans has dominated American history. Indeed, itwas through the institution of chattel slavery that dual “American” identities—“white”and “Black”—were initially forged on the basis of so-called “racial” difference. By thetime slavery was finally abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitutionin 1865, “race” was firmly entrenched as the predominant ideology of inequality andsocial hierarchy in American life. Ever since, “whites” and “Blacks” have interpreted theworld before them largely on the basis of dual historical memories, negotiating theirrelationships with one another through the artificial prism of “race.”2 For Blacks, churchburnings unleash brutal memories of slavery, lynching, segregation, fire bombings, po-lice brutality, and other forms of white oppression. Generally speaking, whites do nothave the same reaction. This is not to suggest that African Americans think in conspirato-rial terms, or that some white people aren’t genuinely sympathetic to the struggles ofBlack people, but it is to say that Black and white Americans have distinct ways of seeingthe world that have been deeply conditioned by their very different historical experiencesin the United States. Put more simply, when confronted with the same reality—a churchburning, a budget cut, a police shooting—Blacks and whites are more likely than not tointerpret it differently. Thus, it was not surprising that African Americans were the first todecry the fires this time.

In addition to Reggie White, several civil rights organizations helped to bring theissue of Black church burnings to the attention of law enforcement officials, politicians,and the national news media during the winter and spring of 1996. Foremost among themwas the Center for Democratic Renewal (CDR), a non-denominational, multiracial non-profit organization based in Atlanta, Georgia. Founded in 1979 to monitor “the resur-gence of violent bigotry against individuals because of their race, sexual orientation,religion, ethnicity, or national origin,” the CDR is a clearinghouse for investigative re-search on hate crimes that “advances the vision of a democratic, diverse and just society,free of racism and bigotry.”3 In the spring of 1996, just as news of the fires in Tennesseeand Alabama began to garner national attention, the CDR released a shocking report,“Black Church Burnings in the South,” documenting eighty incidents of Black churcharson or vandalism since 1990—twenty-eight of which had occurred between Januaryand June of 1996—and providing extensive anecdotal evidence of hate crimes and white

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The Black South 15

supremacist organization in the eight Southern states where Black church burnings weremost prevalent. “A particularly virulent resurgence of these hate crimes [the burning ofBlack churches in the South] has emerged over the past six years, increasing in numbersand intensity with each passing month,” the report stated. “The attacks on Black churchesare acts of domestic terrorism and must be placed within the context of white supremacy.”The CDR Report was the first of its kind to draw explicit connections between the recentchurch burnings, organized white supremacy, and 1990s legislation calling for bettertracking and harsher prosecution of hate crimes.4

Almost immediately, several other organizations—including the NAACP, the NationalUrban League, the National Council of Black Churches (NCBC), the Center for Consti-tutional Rights (CCR), and the National Council of Churches (NCC)—joined togetherwith the CDR to promote its work in response to the church burnings. By June, the CCR,a progressive legal advocacy group based in Washington, DC, began filing civil rightssuits against those already convicted of racially motivated hate crimes. Likewise, theNCC, a New York City–based ecumenical organization comprised mostly of white lib-eral Christian churches, launched its own investigation of the church burnings, and, to-gether with the NCBC, established the Burned Churches Fund designed to raise andallocate millions of dollars for the rebuilding effort. Following the lead of the NCC andthe NCBC, a virtual army of assistance—from religious groups like the Quakers andUnitarians to secular organizations like Habitat for Humanity and the Anti-DefamationLeague to businesses like International Paper, Inc. and Nations Bank—was mobilizedfrom every corner of the country. Even the ultra-conservative Christian Coalition andSouthern Baptist Convention pledged considerable financial support, marking a sharpdeparture from their long history of moral ambivalence and racial antipathy toward theirBlack Christian neighbors in the South. Announcing a new era of “racial reconciliation,”

Harvard University students spend their spring break in March 2002, in Rocky Point, NChelping to rebuild Antioch United Holy Church after it was burned in an arson blaze onMartin Luther King Day 1998. Photograph by Justin Ide/Harvard University News Office. © 2002.

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Ralph Reed, then director of the Christian Coalition, admitted: “I would not deny thatthere was a time in our nation’s history when the white evangelical church was not onlyon the sidelines, but on the wrong side of the most central struggle of social justice in thiscentury. I think that was wrong; I think we paid a price for that.” But not this time.Together with civil rights activists, religious progressives, and socially responsible busi-nessmen, even white “born-again” Christian conservatives were on board to help combatthe church burnings.5

All of this commotion, this unprecedented coalition building, soon attracted the atten-tion of America’s journalists and politicians. Between January and June 1996, hundredsof articles were published about the church burnings, many of them citing White’s publicstatements, the CDR report, and the Tennessee and Alabama burnings as catalysts fortheir attention. In addition to early reports in local newspapers and television broadcaststhroughout the South, national media outlets like CNN, ABC’s Nightline, New York Times,Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Christian Science Monitor, Wall StreetJournal, New Yorker, USA Today, and others began running cover stories featuring whatTime magazine editors called “the national epidemic of violence against Black churches.”The Atlanta Journal and Constitution listed the church burnings as “the top religion storyof the year,” according to a year-end poll of 64 journalists who covered religious storiesfor secular newspapers in 1996.6 Such extensive coverage resulted in an unusually height-ened public awareness of the issue. Thus, what had begun as a series of seemingly ran-dom acts of destruction in the South had become, almost overnight, a national crisis.Mention Black church burnings to anyone in America, and he or she will likely respondwith some reference to what was going on in “the mid-nineties.”7

It is not a coincidence, of course, that “the mid-nineties” also coincided with an elec-tion season. William Jefferson Clinton, the brilliant and charming Southern boy who rosefrom poverty to the presidency, was running for re-election in what then seemed to be atight race against longtime Republican Senator Bob Dole (Clinton ultimately won com-fortably). For Clinton, whom Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison famously referred to as“America’s first Black President,” the issue of Black church burnings hit close to home.8

A devoted Christian and champion of civil rights, Clinton grew up in Arkansas at theheight of its (and the nation’s) difficult battles over racial integration. On June 8, 1996,Clinton drew from his own experience as he used his weekly presidential radio address tocondemn the recent rash of Black church burnings. Flanked in the Oval Office by severalBlack ministers whose churches had recently been burned, Clinton pressed the nation’sconscience: “It’s hard to think of a more depraved act of violence than the destruction ofa place of worship. In our country during the ‘50s and ‘60s, Black churches burned tointimidate civil rights workers. I have vivid and painful memories of Black churchesbeing burned in my own state when I was a child. . . . We must never allow that to happenagain.”9 Clinton went on to announce the formation of a new federal task force—jointlycomprised of the Departments of Justice and Treasury, the Federal Bureau of Investiga-tion (FBI), and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (AFT)—that would imple-ment new mechanisms to investigate and prosecute the crimes that had already beencommitted, and to work with churches and local officials to help prevent future churchburnings from occurring. Clinton’s bold initiative, although criticized by some civil rightsleaders as long overdue, enjoyed rare bipartisan support in Congress. At the urging ofMichigan Democrat John Conyers, then head of the Congressional Black Caucus, Illi-nois Republican Henry Hyde called a roster of witnesses to testify on the church burningsbefore the House Judiciary Committee. The March 22 hearings, augmented by Clinton’spublic stance on the issue, helped to secure the unanimous passage of the Church ArsonPrevention Act, co-sponsored in the House by Hyde and Conyers, and in the Senate byliberal Democrat Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and conservative Republican Lauch

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The Black South 17

Faircloth of North Carolina. Signed into law on July 3, the bill provided stronger federalsupport to local and state law enforcement agencies, imposed harsher penalties on vio-lent crimes committed against houses of worship, and authorized the Department of Hous-ing and Urban Development (HUD) to give millions of dollars in federal assistance to thechurch rebuilding effort.10 During Clinton’s second term, the National Church Arson TaskForce prepared four annual reports documenting the progress that had been made inaddressing the issue of church burnings. Although its preliminary investigations pro-duced no evidence to “support the theory that these fires were the product of a broad ornationwide conspiracy,” the task force’s fourth and final annual report did acknowledgethat while “statistics indicate great progress in the fight against arsons at our nation’shouses of worship . . . our task is not yet done.”11 Thus, notwithstanding unprecedentednew federal initiatives, Black churches continued to burn at alarming rates during thesecond half of the decade. And few observers failed to notice that most of these burningswere still happening in the South.

People of genuine faith understand that the distinction between politics and moralityoften rests in the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk. As MartinLuther King, Jr., wrote in his prophetic 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail”: “I am surethat none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysisthat deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. . . . Shallowunderstanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstand-ing from people of ill will.”12 The 1990s church burning controversy uniquely illustratesKing’s point. Ever since the rash of burnings in Tennessee and Alabama first gainednational attention, there was widespread concern that it represented an organized racist“conspiracy.” President Clinton was hardly alone in expressing his concern “that racialhostility is the driving force behind a number of these incidents.”13 Concern and outrightsuspicion were especially deep in the Black community, whose experience with racialsegregation and violence had not ended with the Civil Rights Movement. Echoing ReggieWhite and the findings of the CDR report, Rev. Mac Charles Jones, a CDR board mem-ber, blamed the church burnings on “a well-organized white-supremacist movement.”14

Likewise, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert argued that “[t]he attacks are not oc-curring in a vacuum. They are the work of twisted individuals who flourish in an atmo-sphere that is inflamed, in Mr. Conyer’s words, by ‘the rhetoric of hate and blame.’”15 Inhis weekly syndicated column, “Along the Color Line,” Dr. Manning Marable, then di-rector of Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies, waseven more specific: “The ‘conspiracy’ . . . is the convergence of high unemployment,budget cuts, the assault on affirmative action, minority economic set-asides and majorityBlack legislative districts, and the demonization of both welfare mothers and young Blackmen. If a political, social and economic environment of hatred is constructed by deliber-ate policy decisions, we should not be surprised that this hatred manifests itself in theburning of our houses of worship.”16 During the very same week that President Clintondelivered his radio address on the subject, veteran civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Jacksoncalled the church burnings a “cultural conspiracy—a seeping intolerance fed by whitepoliticians’ attacks on affirmative action and immigration.”17 In effect, the church burningsprovided Black leaders with a unique opportunity to consider how the arsons related tothe broader context of America’s long history of racist violence, as well as policies likewelfare reform and “tough on crime” legislation that they considered highly detrimentalto the Black community.

Although many whites were rightly disturbed by the church burnings, the analysis thatwas being articulated by Black leaders—drawing connections between the impact ofhistorical racism, recent public policies, and the increase in Black church burnings—washarder for them to see, much less accept. As a result, when the burnings first garnered

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national attention, a great deal of energy was devoted to proving whether or not thecharge of a “racist conspiracy” was legitimate. This took a variety of forms. The firstevidence of this came during the House Judiciary hearings, which consisted of just onefull day of testimony. Although several Black ministers and representatives from civilrights groups like the NAACP were called to testify, many Black critics were troubled bythe fact that the CDR, NCC, and CCR—the three organizations most responsible forbringing the church burnings to the nation’s attention—were excluded from the hearings.“I am concerned at the politeness of this hearing,” Texas Democrat Shirley Jackson Leesaid to reporters, “You’ve got burned churches and burned history. You have intimidatedcommunities.” When pressed, chairman Hyde stated that his decision to exclude theseleft-leaning groups from the witness list was due to the fact that he did not want to “politi-cize” the hearings in any way. Hyde’s logic would have been more persuasive had severalmembers of the ultra-conservative Christian Coalition and Southern Baptist Conventionnot been asked to appear before the committee. Moreover, when word got out that testi-mony from two Black ministers from South Carolina and Tennessee revealed the fact thatfederal agents had subpoenaed their church financial records and subjected members oftheir congregations to intrusive polygraph tests, many civil rights activists were under-standably miffed. “Instead of going after these redneck terrorists,” Rev. Joseph Lowery,president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), asked, “why arethey investigating the people who had their churches burned down?” Thus, rather thanserving as a strong symbol of the federal government’s renewed commitment to racialjustice and reconciliation, the House Judiciary hearings became a lightning rod for con-tinued suspicion and division.18

Wisdom, July 2005. Marvel, Arkansas. Photograph by Victor Hubbard. Courtesy of Red Clay Arts(www.redclayarts.com). © 2005.

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President Clinton’s response offers further evidence of the political wrangling thatultimately undermined an effective federal response to Black church burnings. With hisown unique blend of moral outrage and political pragmatism, Clinton denounced theburnings that were “clearly” the work of white racists, but stopped short of attributing theentire rash of arsons to a nationwide racist conspiracy. “All arsons are not hate crimes,”the President stated, “but all are hateful crimes.”19 Instead, Clinton announced severalnew federal initiatives to help with investigations, law enforcement, and the rebuildingprocess. Those close to Clinton, Black and white alike, remain convinced that his con-cern over the church burnings was genuine, and that he was firmly committed to prevent-ing the crisis from escalating any further. But when he personalized the issue by referringto his own “vivid and painful memories” of church burnings in Arkansas during the 1950sand 1960s, he was derided by certain journalists for being both manipulative and disin-genuous. “Never to miss an opportunity to capitalize on tragedy,” conservative criticJohn LeBoutillier wrote shortly after Clinton’s June 8 radio address, “[Clinton] look[ed]at the audience in the eye, bit his lower lip, feigned a tear and said, ‘I have vivid andpainful memories as a child growing up in Arkansas of Black churches being burned. . . .’The problem is . . . a total lie. . . . He made the whole thing up.”20 LeBoutillier’s point,echoed by many of Clinton’s detractors, was initially corroborated by a story in the Ar-kansas Democrat-Gazette, quoting two of the President’s Arkansas contemporaries whocould not recall any Black church burnings during his childhood. Just two days later,however, the newspaper published another article, based on more extensive research,citing evidence of four Black church burnings in Arkansas during this time, one of whichhappened in Clinton’s hometown of Hot Springs. Julian E. Barnes, author of the article,concluded: “Clinton told the truth when he spoke of Black churches burning in Arkansaswhen he was young.”21

Although Clinton was eventually vindicated in this journalistic tussle, the attempt tocast aspersions on his credibility had a more sinister effect of calling into question thewhole truth of the church burning “conspiracy.” From the very beginning, the debate overwhether or not this represented a “conspiracy” dominated all investigations of the churchburnings. Many people were reluctant to embrace the serious charges leveled by civilrights leaders and Black church members. Even Southern Poverty Law Center founderMorris Dees, whose work to bankrupt the Ku Klux Klan would lead one to believe thathe’d have sympathy for Southern Blacks whose churches had been burned, was surpris-ingly flippant. When asked about the church burnings, he quipped: “This is deer-huntingseason, and you have . . . a lot of drunk white boys who might be angry at not getting deer.It’s still bigoted, insensitive, and intimidating, but it’s not organized.”22 This kind of skep-ticism escalated as journalists and other critics began to discount the initial claims of civilrights groups and liberal sympathizers, adding complexity to the issue of Black churchburnings. Citing evidence that perpetrators of these crimes were motivated by diverseimpulses, ranging from racial and religious hostility to intoxication, economic alienation,and pyromania, critics and skeptics alike drew attention to the fact that white churcheswere also burning, that Blacks were committing some of these crimes, too, and that thespike in church arson in the mid-1990s had more to do with “copycat” crimes committedin the wake of increased media and political attention than with a resurgence of whiteracism. Some commentators even pointed to the startling number of churches burned byjuveniles as evidence that claims of racism had been overblown, as if to suggest thatteenagers—or, for that matter, “copycat” criminals—are immune to racial prejudice. In aparticularly seething diatribe, Michael Fumento, a former attorney with the U.S. Com-mission on Civil Rights during the Reagan presidency, published an op-ed in the July 8Wall Street Journal, exposing what he called “the great Black church-burning hoax,” a“lie” deliberately perpetrated by the CDR to foment “tremendous racial division . . . and

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great fear among southern Black churchgoers.”23 Writing just one week later in The NewYorker, the far more temperate Michael Kelly lent support, perhaps unwittingly, to one ofFumento’s central arguments—that members of the liberal media and guilt-ridden politi-cians had conspired with the left-wing CDR to invent a “crisis” or “conspiracy.” “Then,”Kelly wrote, “in a case of overreaction that seems to have been inspired in roughly equalmeasure by genuine concern, guilt, and self-interest, [the media and politicians of bothparties] leaped on the bandwagon with a near-hysteria as misplaced as their previousindifference.”24

The ultimate irony here is that the media did assist in turning the tide against thegenuine concern over burned churches that emerged during the spring of 1996. It is hardto say whether this had anything to do with the fact that much of the money initiallypromised for the rebuilding effort—including the Christian Coalition’s ultimately hollowpledge of more than $1 million—never found its way to the churches in need. No doubtsome of this money was redirected following a few highly visible incidents of allegedcorruption among Black ministers charged with insurance fraud and other financial ir-regularities related to the church burnings.25 Still, even the $6.2 million in HUD loansresulted in the rebuilding of no more than a dozen burned churches by the end of Clinton’ssecond term.26 Although the AFT and FBI investigated incidents of church arson muchmore vigorously in the late 1990s, President Clinton’s initial commitment to this issuewas derailed by the Monica Lewinsky scandal and subsequent impeachment battle. Thefourth and final report on church arson was issued to President Clinton in September2000. Shortly after George W. Bush assumed the presidency the following January, hedissolved the multi-agency National Church Arson Task Force and eliminated the budgetfor federal loan assistance to burned churches. Some critics wonder—quite justifiably—why the church rebuilding effort does not fall within the parameters of Bush’s so-called“faith-based initiatives.” Today, several hundred Black churches are still waiting to berebuilt.27

Recalling Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the national controversy overBlack church burnings reaffirmed that “shallow understanding from people of good will”and “absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will” still conspire against and frus-trate the struggle for justice in America.

* * * *The media and political frenzy over Black church burnings that flared up in 1996 was

only half of the story.After all the wrangling by politicians and journalists, the nation’s attention to the issue

faded almost as quickly as it emerged. In reality, all the heated debate over whether or notthis was the mark of a racist “conspiracy” missed the point. Are burned churches morehorrifying if they are the work of Klansman? Are acts of arson less damaging when theyare committed by people whose motives are complex or ambiguous? Should we not con-tinue to work to prevent the burning of churches even in areas where there is little or noevidence of organized white supremacist terror? Should we not help to rebuild the manychurches that have already been destroyed, regardless of what motivated those respon-sible for the burnings?

The fact remains that during the 1990s, more than one thousand churches were de-stroyed or damaged by arson in the United States. According to the Charleston-basedNational Coalition for Burned Churches and Community Empowerment, a total numberof 1263 arsons were reported by the decade’s end. Despite the fact that white churchessubstantially outnumber Black churches nationwide, the number of arsons committed on

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each—483 to 432, respectively—was roughly the same. Considering the central role ofBlack churches in African-American communities since the days of slavery, these burningshave had a disproportionately devastating impact on the lives of Black people, especiallyin the South.28 For more than a decade, Southern Black churches have been at least twiceas likely as white churches in the region to be targeted for arson, and yet only half aslikely to see the perpetrators arrested or convicted, regardless of whether racism could bedetected as a principal motive. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of Black churchburnings, 78.5 percent, have occurred in the South, where the vestiges of slavery andsegregation are still palpable, and often visible. All but one Southern state—Virginia—was included on the list of twenty states with the highest number of reported arsons; eightwere in the top ten. Even more striking is the fact that the eight states reporting the largestpercentage of Black church burnings (relative to all church arsons statewide) were alllocated in the South: Arkansas (74.3%), Mississippi (73.3%), South Carolina (60%),Alabama (55.4%), Tennessee (50%), Louisiana (47.2%), Georgia (46.7%), and NorthCarolina (41.2%). Although we do not yet have comprehensive statistics for the last fiveyears—partly because the federal government seems to have stopped keeping them whenBush came to office—the evidence we do have strongly suggests that the landscape haschanged very little since the 1990s. In other words, there continues to be an unmistakablecorrelation between race, region, and church arson (see Table 1).29

So what happened to the Black churches that burned during the 1990s? What aboutthe Black churches that have continued to burn—at a rate of several dozen per year—during the first half decade of the twenty-first century? And what about the members ofthese churches who have waited patiently for assistance while journalists, politicians,investigators, and the larger American public have debated the legitimacy of their viola-tion and despair? Who, in other words, is rebuilding the churches? The answers to thesequestions constitute the other half of this story.

Ever since the controversy over Black church burnings erupted in the mid-1990s, awide range of Americans have come forward to support the rebuilding effort. Habitat forHumanity, the Washington Quaker Workcamps, and the Unitarian Universalist ServiceCommittee were the first to take the lead with volunteer coordination, running workcamps throughout the country where volunteers can stay while they help with the recon-struction. Many secular organizations and religious groups of every faith and denomina-tion have offered physical and financial assistance. The National Coalition of Churcheshas literally raised millions of dollars to help rebuild the churches that have been burned.Socially responsible businesses—like International Paper, Inc. and NationsBank—havemade unprecedented pledges to donate building materials and help track down leads andinformation for investigators. Altogether, thousands of volunteers have donated millionsof hours of free labor—and millions of dollars—in what amounts to one of the mostextraordinary outpourings of human compassion in American history.

Fortunately, I have had the opportunity to both witness and participate in this first-hand. I still remember the real discomfort I felt when Reggie White interrupted his prepa-ration for the NFC Championship Game in January 1996 to talk candidly about the burn-ing of his church in Knoxville, Tennessee. And I certainly remember President Clinton’sweekly radio address on the morning of June 8, 1996; it was my twenty-fifth birthday.The following year, while still a graduate student in American history at Columbia Uni-versity, I signed up to participate in a spring break public service project in rural Ala-bama. Galvanized by the recent news of Black church burnings in the South, three Co-lumbia chaplains had decided to take a group of students to Greensboro, AL, to helprebuild the Rising Star Baptist Church, a small African-American church that was burnedin an arson attack on June 3, 1996. As it turned out, Greensboro was the town just next toBoligee, where Little Mt. Zion, Mt. Zoar Baptist, and Mt. Zion Baptist had been burned.

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I remember learning about the trip from a student in one of my undergraduate teachingsections. She was planning to go, but had to pull out at the last minute due to a familyemergency. Knowing that I had been doing graduate research on race, civil rights, and thehistory of the South, she asked me if I wanted to take her place on the trip. In retrospect,this particular moment of serendipity probably changed my life, as it forced me to beginto see the world around me in a very different way. Trading history books for a hammerand hardhat, I joined ranks with the thousands of volunteer laborers who have traveled tothe South to help rebuild the hundreds of Black churches that have been burned in the1990s. It was there, deep in the heart of Alabama, that I began to discover America allover again—and in some respects, for the very first time.

Ever since my first church rebuilding trip in Greensboro, Alabama, in March of 1997,I have continued to take groups of college students each year to various parts of thecountry—Summerton and Gadsden, South Carolina; Hinesville, Georgia; Rocky Point,North Carolina; Tallahassee, Florida; Opelika, Alabama; and Wheeling, West Virginia—to rebuild eight Black churches burned in arson attacks. Starting when I was a graduatestudent at Columbia, then as a young instructor at Harvard and visiting scholar at UNC-

Table 1National Church Arson Incidents by State, 1990–1999

Top 10 States Reporting More Than 45 Arsons*

State Number of Arsons** % Black*** Population (White/Black)****

Texas 145 36.6 20,851,820 (71.0/11.5)Florida 90 16.7 15,982,378 (78.0/14.6)North Carolina 85 41.2 8,049,313 (72.1/21.6)Alabama 74 55.4 4,447,100 (71.1/26.0)Tennessee 66 50.0 5,689,283 (80.2/16.4)South Carolina 65 60.0 4,012,012 (67.2/29.5)Georgia 60 46.7 8,186,453 (65.1/28.7)Pennsylvania 52 17.3 12,281,054 (85.4/10.0)Missouri 49 12.2 5,595,211 (84.9/11.2)California 46 15.2 33,871,648 (59.5/6.7)

Other Southern States in the Top 20*****

Mississippi (11) 45 73.3 2,844,658 (61.4/36.3)Kentucky (14) 37 16.2 4,041,769 (90.1/7.3)Louisiana (15) 36 47.2 4,468,976 (63.9/32.5)Arkansas (16) 35 74.3 2,673,400 (80.0/15.7)

* Source: National Coalition for Burned Churches and Community Empowerment, Church Burning Re-search Center, Charleston, South Carolina, 2000.

** Includes all arson incidents reported for African-American, “Caucasian,” Hispanic, Jewish, “Mixed,”and “Unknown” congregations. Of the 1263 total arsons reported during the 1990s, 432 were directed atAfrican-American churches; 483 at “Caucasian” churches; 31 at Hispanic churches; 11 at Jewish synagogues;12 at “Mixed” churches; and 294 at “Unknown” congregations.

*** Percentage of reported arsons directed at African-American churches between 1990–1999.**** Total population by state (with percentages of white and Black populations), based on 2000 Census

findings. Source: John W. Wright, ed. 2003 New York Times Almanac (New York: Penguin, 2002).***** All but one southern state—Virginia—is included in the 20 states with the highest number of

reported arsons. The top 8 states reporting the largest percentage of Black church burnings are all located inthe South: AK, MS, SC, AL, TN, LA, GA, and NC. Interestingly, these are also the states with the largestBlack populations (i.e., relative to whites).

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Chapel Hill, I have organized “alternative spring break” trips for students interested indoing this work. During the last decade, nearly 200 undergraduates have participated inthese rebuilding projects. The students themselves—young men and women of everyracial and ethnic background, religious faith, socioe-conomic class, sexual orientation,and political persuasion—represent the stunning diversity that is America’s greatest re-source. Needless to say, this has been a unique opportunity for me as a young teacherstruggling to make the lessons of American history tangible to my students. These tripshave allowed us to transform the traditional academic relationship by working side byside with one another in a more egalitarian manner. I have seen my students changethrough these experiences, and many of them have since gone on to live deeply morallives in service to the public good. The most extraordinary thing about this work—asidefrom the newly reconstructed churches—are the relationships we’ve established with themembers of the congregations with whom we have worked. Year after year, my studentsand I arrive in Southern Black communities that are still dealing with the deep pain andsuffering that has been caused by the destruction of their church. There is always someshared discomfort at first—anxiety on our part, skepticism on theirs—which we carefullymask with polite generosity. Each year, I must remind myself that these are communitiesthat have either been disrupted by intrusive legal investigations and media coverage, orneglected or ignored altogether. Regardless, the church burning has been the biggest testof their faith, and it continues to weigh heavily on their minds and hearts and souls. Insome cases, church members still harbor an understandable mistrust of “outsiders,” espe-cially white people who have come offering assistance. Why would we be any differentfrom the white people who live in their communities, or the white people who haveinvestigated the arson? And what does it mean if we are different? Strangers or not, wehave been called to help one another in the midst of great tragedy and loss. What we’vegained in the process is difficult to measure, but I think all of us would agree that it hasreaffirmed our faith that ordinary people have a tremendous capacity to be good to oneanother when faced with the most difficult circumstances.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I feel a more focused and urgent sense of purpose now thanI did when I first arrived in Alabama in 1997. No doubt some of this has to do with gettingolder, but it also has to do with the growing political outrage I have felt over the lastdecade, especially when an increasingly harsh and elitist right-wing political establish-ment—one that pontificates about Jesus without practicing His teachings—has preventedhundreds of Black congregations from acquiring the resources necessary to rebuild theirchurches. Notwithstanding the great moral and spiritual failures of our contemporarypolitical culture, these annual trips have given me the opportunity to witness humanity atits best: complete strangers crossing lines of color, class, and faith to embrace one an-other in acts of uncommon courage and genuine compassion. In other words, I have seenpeople defy both history and the present—prejudice and politics—by going against thegrain of America’s most stubborn and destructive impulses to create a remarkable newcontext for hope and reconciliation.

This is tough work, to be sure: it’s never done, there’s still so much more to do, and toofew people—especially the powerful and privileged—are willing to lend a hand. Still,these sojourns with my students, guided as they are by the deep friendships we havecultivated while breaking bread with Black people all over the South, have taught me thathope is not only possible but also imperative in these troubled times. Thus, a decade ago,I began to develop what I now understand to be faith—the deepest kind of faith that canonly come from witnessing unconditional love and acceptance between fellow humanbeings thrown together in the wake of tragedy. It is because of this witness—these hu-mane and loving souls with whom I have traveled, lived, worshiped, and worked—that Istill have some real measure of faith in my country.

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Despite the fact that there is still ample reason to “go South” every spring.Despite the fact that Black churches continue to burn.Regardless of whether or not we are paying attention.

Notes1. White quoted in Michael Madden, “White says church attack was racially motivated,” Boston Globe,

January 12, 1996.2. Numerous scholars have traced the evolution of “race”—and its relationship to slavery, emancipation,

and the rise of Jim Crow segregation—in American history. The most sophisticated treatments include W. E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Antheneum, 1992); Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Sla-very, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 81 (May–June 1990), pp. 95–118; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1975); Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1968); C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (3rd rev. ed;New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Nathan Huggins, “The Deforming Mirror of Truth” in Revela-tions: American History, American Myths (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Theodore Allen, TheInvention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America, 2 vols. (London and NewYork: Verso Press, 1997); and George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in Americanand South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Lest one think that “race” is merely ahistorical phenomenon with little or no contemporary relevance, the Mississippi state legislature recentlyoffered a powerful example of how “racial” attitudes continue to be inextricably linked to the legacy ofslavery. In 1995, Mississippi finally became the last state in the nation to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment—adopted in 1865—which abolished slavery at the end of the Civil War. One has to wonder (1) what took themso long; and (2) whether there was any debate before the vote.

3. The Center for Democratic Renewal lists its mission and history on its website, www.thecdr.org.4. See Black Church Burnings: Research Report on Hate Groups and Hate Crimes in Nine Southern

States (Atlanta, GA: Center for Democratic Renewal, June 1996).5. For a detailed listing of the widespread response to the church burnings, as well as a bold moral appeal

to confront the legacy of “race” and the reality of racism in American culture, see Bill Bradley, “Our Unre-solved Dilemma: Church Burnings and America’s Quest for Racial Healing,” Sojourners (September–Octo-ber 1996), pp. 30–32. See also Michael A. Fletcher, “Christian Coalition Plans to Cooperate with BlackChurches to Squelch Fires,” Washington Post, June 19, 1996; Michelle Singletary, “NationsBank Offers Upto $500,000 for Information on Church Blazes,” Washington Post, June 12, 1996; and Timothy Harper,“Rebuilding Every Burned Black Church,” Sky Magazine (February 1997). Harper’s article highlighted theextraordinary commitment of John T. Dillon, CEO of International Paper, Inc., who promised to donate lum-ber and building materials to rebuild every Black church that had been burned. Representatives at Interna-tional Paper estimated that the cost of this unprecedented in-kind corporate donation would exceed $2 mil-lion.

6. See Gayle White, “Looking Back at ‘96,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, December 28, 1996.7. For the most detailed account of the evolution of media coverage of the church burning controversy, see

Joe Holley, “Anatomy of a Story: Who Was Burning the Black Churches?” Columbia Journalism Review(September/October 1996).

8. In her now famous essay, Morrison wrote: “White skin notwithstanding, this is our first Black presi-dent. Blacker than any actual person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. . . . Clinton displaysalmost every trope of Blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing,McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.” See Toni Morrison, “Clinton as the First Black Presi-dent,” The New Yorker, October 15, 1998.

9. William Jefferson Clinton, Weekly Presidential Radio Address, June 8, 1996.10. The Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996 (Public Law 104–155) was signed into law by President

Clinton on July 3, 1996. The Act stated that “Changes in Federal law are necessary to deal properly with thisproblem [of church arson].” Toward this end, it prohibited “violent interference with religious worship” (Sec.3); imposed longer sentencing requirements for those convicted of church arson (Sec. 3); authorized theDepartment of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to initiate a “Loan Guarantee Recovery Fund” toassist churches in the rebuilding effort (Sec. 4); authorized “additional personnel to assist state and local lawenforcement” in church arson investigations (Sec. 6); re-authorized the Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990,which required the Department of Justice, under the auspices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to collectdata on hate crimes (Sec. 7); and commended and encouraged “those individuals and entities that have re-

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sponded with funds to assist in the rebuilding of places of worship that have been victimized by arson” (Sec.8). The history of legislation to prevent “hate crimes” dates back to the first federal hate crimes law in 1969(18 U.S.C. Section 245), which protected individuals against crimes due to “race, color, or national origin.”Since then, laws have been passed to add gender, religion, physical disability, and sexual orientation to the listof protected categories, although this varies from state to state. According to the Hate Crime Statistics Act of1990, “hate crimes” (or “bias crimes”) are those “crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race,religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, including where appropriate the crimes of murder, non-negligentmanslaugher, forcible rape, aggravated assault, simple assault, intimidation, arson, and destruction, damage,or vandalism of property” (Public Law 101-275). See “U.S. Hate Crimes: Definitions and Facts,”www.religioustolerance.org; and also Bureau of Justice Assistance, A Policymaker’s Guide to Hate Crimes(Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Assistance Monograph, 1997).

11. National Church Arson Task Force, Fourth Year Report for the President (Washington, September2000).

12. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” reprinted in Timothy Patrick McCarthy andJohn McMillian, eds., The Radical Reader: A Documentary Anthology of the American Radical Tradition(New York: New Press, 2003), pp. 362–377.

13. Clinton, Weekly Presidential Radio Address, June 8, 1996.14. Jones, qtd. in Holley, “Who Was Burning the Churches?” See also Herb Boyd, “Black Churches,

Victims of Terrorism, Worried by FBI, ATF Investigations,” Amsterdam News, May 25, 1996.15. Bob Herbert, “A Church Destroyed by Hate,” New York Times, May 24, 1996.16. Manning Marable, “Why the Churches Burn,” “Along the Color Line” (syndicated column), July

1996.17. Jackson, qtd. in Newsweek, June 3, 1996. See also “Jesse Jackson Tours Burned-Out Church,” Los

Angeles Sentinel, May 16, 1996.18. Lowery, qtd. in Ron Nixon and Dennis Bernstein, “The Fires This Time,” The Nation, June 17, 1996.

See also Minutes of the Judiciary Committee, U.S. House of Representatives, March 22, 1996.19. Clinton, Weekly Presidential Radio Address, June 8, 1996.20. LeBoutillier, qtd. in “Black Church Burnings,” www.politus.blogspot.com, September 23, 2003.21. See “Others Don’t Recall,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, June 9, 1996; and Julian E. Barnes, “‘Pain-

ful Memories’,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, June 11, 1996.22. Dees, qtd. in Ronald Smothers, “Black Church Fires are under U.S. Review,” New York Times, Janu-

ary 20, 1996. For nearly two decades, Dees has been one of the nation’s leading crusaders against organizedwhite supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. However, by focusing all of his energy on undermining theseorganizations, Dees has developed a troubling blind spot when it comes to isolated, unorganized, or randomacts of racial violence. Ironically, Dees’s public reluctance to treat the recent Black church arsons with thesame seriousness he displayed in his work against the Klan gave unwitting support to those who later turnedtheir backs on the issue after claiming there was no evidence of a “conspiracy.”

23. Michael Fumento, “A Church Arson Epidemic? It’s Smoke and Mirrors,” Wall Street Journal, July 8,1996.

24. Michael Kelly, “Playing with Fire,” The New Yorker, July 15, 1996.25. After the initial media sensation over the church burnings subsided, prominent media outlets began

running stories about corrupt Black ministers who were allegedly manipulating national concern over thearsons to their personal advantage—through insurance fraud, misappropriation of rebuilding funds, or (inrare instances) by burning the churches themselves. These stories further fueled suspicion that the arson“conspiracy” had been concocted by civil rights activists and their liberal sympathizers. For one example ofthis, see Monica Davey and David Barstow, “League Asks Lyons What Became of its Donation,” St. Peters-burg Times, September 12, 1997.

26. National Church Arson Task Force, Fourth Year Report for the President (September 2000), pp. 6–8.27. Source: National Coalition for Burned Churches and Community Empowerment (Charleston, SC:

Church Burning Research Center, 1999).28. This is especially the case in rural and segregated areas of the South, where the church is even more

indispensable as a haven from surrounding poverty and racial tension, and where the overwhelming majorityof Black church burnings have taken place during the last decade or so. This is not to say that attacks on Blackchurches are worse than attacks on white churches—arson is a hideous violation and criminal act no matterwhat the target—but I do want to underscore the disproportionate devastation these crimes have had on theAfrican-American community.

29. Source: National Coalition for Burned Churches and Community Empowerment (Charleston, SC:Church Burning Research Center, 1999). These figures include all arson incidents reported for African-Ameri-can, “Caucasian,” Hispanic, “Mixed,” and “Unknown” congregations. Of the 1263 total arsons reportedbetween 1990 and 1999, 432 were directed at African-American churches; 483 at “Caucasian” churches; 31at Hispanic churches; 11 at Jewish synagogues; 12 at “Mixed” churches; and 294 at “Unknown” congrega-

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tions. One factor that complicates these statistics is that “Unknown” churches often have interracial or “mixed”congregations, despite the fact that they are not listed as such. Thus, the arson figure for churches withsignificant or entirely Black congregations could be as high as 738, suggesting that “race” could have playedat least some factor in close to 60% of the total arsons recorded during the 1990s. The statistics from theNational Coalition for Burned Churches (NCFBC) are the most comprehensive figures available because theycombine the findings of the National Church Arson Task Force’s Fourth Annual Report (2000) and extensivelocal research, including interviews with church leaders and investigators across the nation. Still, the task ofcompiling accurate statistics is at once challenging and frustrating, making it very difficult to conclusivelydetermine the motivation of these crimes. There are at least three reasons for this. First, federal investigatorsfrom the FBI and AFT are usually only deployed when local authorities request their involvement. This wasalmost always the case before the passage of the 1996 Church Arson Prevention Act; less so from 1996–2000,when federal authorities became much more active in investigations regardless of whether they were called inby local law enforcement officials. Thus, especially before 1996, federal figures on church arson are incom-plete because they do not include incidents where federal officials were not involved in the investigation.Second, many (we do not know how many) cases are dropped when investigators decide that it is impossibleto determine the cause of the fire. Generally speaking, arson is the most difficult crime to investigate—conviction rates are roughly fifteen percent, far below other serious crimes—because most or all criminalevidence is destroyed. This may seem an obvious point, but it’s an important one, especially with respect todetermining the motivation(s) of the perpetrator(s). Finally, there is often a great discrepancy between thefindings of investigators and the accounts of local church leaders—and this is especially the case with Afri-can-American congregations, which, for historical reasons, often remain skeptical of the methodology andintentions of investigators. One powerful example of this was the investigation into the burning of the SouthRichland Bible Way Church in Gadsden, South Carolina. Despite the investigators’ claim that they had com-pleted a “thorough” investigation, they still failed to uncover the body of a congregation member who waskilled after entering the burning church to try to put out the fire. The corpse was found by another member ofthe congregation just days after the investigators left the scene. My students and I helped to rebuild the SouthRichland Bible Way Church in 1999; it reopened the following year.

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