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Top News Today –
Black Churches: Who’s Burning Them?
Black churches across the South are burning. Is it an extreme coincidence, or is someone deliberately setting them ablaze? Law enforcement officials and civil rights leaders want an answer ASAP!
Top News Today
At least 6 black churches throughout the South have burned within the past 2 weeks, with 4 of them positively attributed to arson. Interestingly, each of the fires mysteriously took place immediately following the June 17th shooting of 9 church members at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC, and the aftermath of the Confederate flag removal in southern states. Accident, or no?
JUNE 22nd: College Hill Seventh-day Adventist Church in Knoxville, TN. Firefighters arrived on the scene to discover a church van in flames amid smoldering piles of hay and bags of soil near a side entrance.
Cause: ARSONJUNE 23rd: God’s Power Church of Christ in Macon, GA. Officials say the building is a total loss.
Cause: ARSONJUNE 24th: Briar Creek Road Baptist Church in Charlotte, NC. The fire gutted an entire church wing and the FBI is investigating.
Cause: ARSONJUNE 24th: Fruitland Presbyterian Church in Humboldt, TN. Officials presume the fire was an isolated incident, possibly caused by a lightning strike, however an investigation is underway.
Cause: UNKNOWNJUNE 26th: Glover Grove Baptist Church in Warrenville, SC. The entire building burned to the ground and insurance won’t cover a rebuild.
Cause: ARSONJUNE 30th: The Mount Zion AME church in Greeleyville, SC was destroyed by fire for the 2nd time. The church first burned in 1995 when it was set ablaze by the KKK.
Cause: UNKNOWN
Last week, the College Heights Baptist Church in Elyria, OH also burned under suspicious circumstances, making it the 7th black church fire in less than 2 weeks. Additionally, 20 black female AME pastors in South Carolina alerted police that they each received threatening letters in June.
Although the fires are being thoroughly investigated by federal authorities, leaders of black churches nationwide are naturally concerned. Having already beefed up security at Bible study sessions and church services following the shooting in Charleston, skittish church leaders are openly verbalizing their thoughts and fears.
“This is a systematic attack against black churches,” said the Rev. Anthony Evans, president of the National Black Church Initiative, a coalition of 34,000 African-American churches. Evans recently conducted several conference calls with black church leaders across the USA about the fires and overall church security. “We are on alert status.”
According to Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the fact the church fires occurred so close together in the wake of the Charleston shooting is cause for concern. “The fires may be retaliation for the backlash against the Confederate flag that followed the shootings,” Potok said.
Potok was mindful that white supremacist websites, including Stormfront.org, angrily denounced treatment of the Confederate flag and promised retribution.
“The single most suspicious thing about these fires is that they came so close together and so hard on the heels of attacks on the Confederate battle flag,” Potok said. “That is a revered symbol for the radical right.”
“The scary thing is when these things happen late at night, we only lose buildings, but if it begins to happen during the day, this could be a real serious issue,” said Dot Scott, president of South Carolina’s NAACP Charleston chapter, referring to the potential loss of human life.
“This is the message the Klan wants to continue to send,” Scott added. “The imminent removal of the [Confederate] flag has really stirred ire in the group, and they want to fight back. That’s what we’re dealing with now.”
Lisa Sharon Harper, chief church engagement officer at the Christian social justice organization Sojourners, said she believes it “can’t be a coincidence” the fires within the black churches happened to coincide with the backlash against the Confederate flag. She pointed to similar church bombings and burnings that happened during the Reconstruction Era in the South and the Civil Rights Era, and during racial reconciliation efforts that followed the Rodney King incident. Arsonists even torched a black church in Massachusetts hours after Barack Obama became the nation’s first black president.
“Whenever you have African-Americans in history pushing back against white supremacy, you inevitably have church burnings,” Harper said. “In light of Confederate flags being taken down off of government buildings, this is a true threat to the dominance of whiteness in America.”
Why are black churches suddenly and mysteriously burning? Is this a coincidence, or a deliberate act of racism and terrorism? #WhoIsBurningBlackChurches
I've decided to hold my peace, for now, and give inverstigators more time to try and identify the guilty person(s) responsible in each of the 4 cases for burning those churches.
I'm hoping that law enforcement will be able to solve each case so that justice can be served.
Would I be suprised if they find that the churches were burned by White racists? No.
But to be honest, I don't rule out the very real possibility that…in at least one church burning..the actual culprit(s) turns out to be Black with nefarious/wicked motivations as well..
We shall.see….