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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Aug. 29, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Klan members confess

Conspiracy behind arson at Black churches

By Leslie Feinberg

After months when federal investigators denied there was any conspiracy behind the torching of Black churches, a federal indictment issued Aug. 16 charged the Ku Klux Klan with kindling this wave of white-supremacist arson.

It charges four Klan members with torching Black churches in South Carolina. And it names the Ku Klux Klan as an instigator of a wave of violence and intimidation that has claimed 70 predominantly Black churches just since last year.

On Aug. 14, Gary Cox and Timothy Welch-both of Manning, S.C.-plead ed guilty to civil-rights violations and other charges.

The two admitted burning the Mount Zion AME Church in Greeleyville, S.C., on June 20, 1995. The Mount Zion Church arson was in the national spotlight after President Bill Clinton toured the church's wreckage.

On June 21, 1995, Cox and Welch set fire to the century-old Macedonia Baptist Church in Bloomville, they admitted. The men also pleaded guilty to beating and stabbing a 50-year-old retarded Black man.

Both admitted they were members of the Klan when they set the fires.

Klan kindled arson violence

On Aug. 16, Arthur Allen Haley and Hubert Lavon Rowell were charged with conspiracy and arson in the burning of a predominantly Black church, a migrant labor camp, a Clarendon County Service Center and an African American man's car.

Haley and Rowell are charged with providing Cox and Welch with firebombs.

The indictment also says the Klan "taught its members that churches attended primarily by Black persons promote the interests of Black persons to the detriment of white persons."

It adds that the KKK urged its members to arm themselves in preparation for a war by white supremacists.

No pattern?

Since January 1995, in the southeastern United States, 57 arson fires have been set in churches with predominantly Black congregations, and 32 set in churches with multinational congregations.

Nationwide, 90 church fires were reported in June and July as being investigated as arson.

Yet this wave of arson did not make headlines at all until angered African American communities conducted their own inquiries.

Up until mid-August, spokespeople for the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and other federal government officials had repeatedly stated that their investigations revealed no pattern, connections or similarities.

This conclusion has enjoyed prominent media attention.

The National Council of Churches disputed federal and law-enforcement officials' earlier claim that there was no apparent connection between any of the church burnings. With far fewer resources at its disposal, Bishop Melvin Talbert of the NCC told reporters May 21 that his group's investigations "have uncovered striking similarities in these incidents."

Compared to the government claim that the church burnings were isolated incidents, the arrests of these Klansmen have received very little media coverage.

Home-grown terrorists

The KKK was named in this federal indictment as an instigator of a white-supremacist terror. Why is this news getting such scant notice in the media? Such restraint has been uncommon regarding other incidents.

Without any evidence of why TWA Flight 800 crashed or who was behind a pipe-bomb explosion in Atlanta, television programs were quickly preempted for hours of live news commentary.

President Clinton and sundry other politicians and top cops took to the airwaves to rail against "terrorism." Democrats and Republicans alike used the TWA crash and Olympic explosion to strengthen the police apparatus.

They have expressed no such outrage at the KKK's racist terrorism. None of these capitalist politicians has vowed to disarm and outlaw the Klan.

In any case, beefing up police power has never helped the African American and other oppressed communities against Klan terror. On the contrary, the Klan and other fascist groups have long maintained deep ties to the government's police and military forces.

Federal agents assigned to investigate church arsons have treated the victims of the attacks as though they are criminals. Agents have reportedly subjected pastors to lie-detector tests, fingerprinted congregation members, shown up unannounced at jobs and homes, and even implied that church members set the fires.

Ron Nixon, editor of Southern Exposure of Durham, N.C., told Peoples Video Network correspondent Johnnie Stevens earlier in August that federal agents combined their investigation of church fires with an investigation of voter-registration fraud. In other words, they investigated political activity in the Black churches as they supposedly investigated the fires.

And it's not just the cops and Klan the oppressed are up against. Jesse Jackson said, "It seems that the blue suits are engaging in anti-civil-rights propaganda and legislation in Congress, and the black robes are handing out restrictive rulings in the courts, and the white sheets are doing the burning."

An independent anti-racist movement of working and oppressed people who despise the aims of white supremacy can truly beat back the Klan. That movement can demand the Klan and other fascist groups be disarmed and outlawed.

A community-run inquiry, with full subpoena power, can expose their financial backers and police and military connections. And above all, the right of oppressed communities under the gun to defend themselves must be supported.