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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Feb.1, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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In the poorest rural counties of Alabama and Tennessee, a recent series of arson fires and vandalism has hit predominantly Black churches. On the night of Jan. 11, two Black churches in Boligee, Ala., were firebombed.
That day, three racists had been sentenced in court for earlier vandalizing three churches in Coatopa in nearby Sumter county.
The Jan. 8 firebombing of the Inner City Church in Knoxville, Tenn., brought media attention to the surge in racist attacks on Black churches--because Inner City's assistant pastor is Reggie White, a football player with the Green Bay Packers. Racist graffiti were sprayed on the walls and the doors of the church before it was completely destroyed.
Several days later a racist hate letter circulated in the area. The letter warned of a campaign against integration and interracial marriages.
John Zippert, publisher of The Greene County Democrat, says: "I don't think any if this was accidental. I think these particular churches were targeted. You have white churches in between all of them that were not touched."
Although these latest attacks have received the most attention, Black churches in the South have actually been under siege since 1994. Black community leaders say this may signal renewed organizing by racist terrorists encouraged by the right wing's increasing political ascendancy.
Attacks on Black churches are attacks on the Black community as a whole. The churches act as an important social nucleus, a cultural glue, and many in the community view them as a central factor in their lives.
During the 1950s and the early part of the 1960s, the civil-rights movement largely expressed itself through the Black churches. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. emerged from the pulpit to lead a great mass movement; he is a prime example of Black churches' role in the political struggle by the oppressed and disenfranchised Black people, especially in the South.
This movement defeated legalized racism and segregation in the form of the Jim Crow laws. During that period, racists frequently targeted Black churches for firebombings and attacks.
Most of the time, people were in the churches at the time of the attacks. The killing of four little girls in a 1963 church bombing in Mississippi horrified millions.
The current attacks are happening at a time when there is no political movement in the South equal to the early civil- rights movement. The economy is lurching toward crisis; rural counties in Alabama and Tennessee suffer high unemployment and deep poverty.
This is the backdrop to the rise in racist attacks in the rural South. A political movement to counter the assault on the living standards of the workers and oppressed people is needed. Such a movement could put the racists in their place.
With a Democrat in the White House, some might look to Washington for help. They may be asking why President Bill Clinton hasn't called for a full investigation of the fires.
But there is only silence on the subject emanating from Pennsylvania Avenue.
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