Black church burned in Knoxville, TN
The South’s Sordid History of Attacks on Black Churches
By Chris Kromm
Facing South
June 20, 2015 – In the wake of the heinous murders of nine members of Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church this week, many have pointed to historic congregation’s central role in the city’s African-American community.
As Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor and state legislator who was killed in the shooting, told a group of visitors in 2013 [1], "It’s a very special place because this site, this area, has been tied to the history and life of African Americans since about the early 1800s."
The massacre called to mind the long history of racially-motivated attacks on black churches in the South, which have been targeted precisely because of their role as not just houses of worship but also sanctuaries from racism and a gathering space for community action.
Sarah Kaplan in The Washington Post [2] looked at Emanuel A.M.E.’s history as a target for racist violence:
It was founded by worshipers fleeing racism and burned to the ground for its connection with a thwarted slave revolt. For years its meetings were conducted in secret to evade laws that banned all-black services. It was jolted by an earthquake in 1886. Civil rights luminaries spoke from its pulpit and led marches from its steps. For nearly two hundred years it had been the site of struggle, resistance and change.
Attacks on black churches continued through the Jim Crow era, and intensified again in the wake of the 1950s civil rights movement. The Sept. 15, 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama by members of the Ku Klux Klan [3], which killed four girls and injured 20 others, marked a turning point in the escalation of the Southern civil rights struggle.
In the 1990s, black churches again emerged as targets in a wave of arsons and firebombings [4]. As the Institute for Southern Studies reported in its magazine Southern Exposure in 1996 [pdf] [5], fires damaged 230 churches in a 21-month span starting in August 1994, when young white men linked to the neo-Nazi group Aryan Faction threw a Molotov cocktail and shot bullets into a predominantly black church in Clarksville, Tennessee. The assailants left a note, saying, "AF wants you to leave our white community. You Coons! Coon hunting season is open."
As the Southern Exposure investigation found, more than half of the arsons that swept through the South in the mid-1990s involved black churches, even though African-American congregations comprised only a fifth of churches in the region. Eighty percent of those arrested for the fires were white. (Continued)
