On Wednesday, July 1, a fire was reported at
the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal
Church in Greeleyville, South Carolina. The
AP reports that an anonymous federal official
said the fire did not appear to be
intentionally set, but Winfred Pressley, a
division operations officer at the regional
Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco division, said
that the investigation is still ongoing, as did
other local investigators. Shanna Daniels, a
spokesperson for the FBI, declined to
comment on the case, but said that church
arson “has been a hot topic over the past few
days.”

“What's the church doing on fire?”
Jeanette Dudley, the associate pastor of God's
Power Church of Christ in Macon, Georgia,
got a call a little after 5 a.m. on Wednesday,
June 24, she told a local TV news station. Her
tiny church of about a dozen members had
been burned, probably beyond repair. The
Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco got
called in, which has been the standard
procedure for church fires since the late
1960s. Investigators say they’ve ruled out
possible causes like an electrical malfunction;
most likely, this was arson.


The very same night, many miles away in
North Carolina, another church burned: Briar
Creek Road Baptist Church, which was set on
fire some time around 1 a.m. Investigators
have ruled it an act of arson, the AP reports;
according to The Charlotte Observer , they
haven’t yet determined whether it might be a
hate crime.


Two other predominantly black churches have
been the target of possible arson in the past
fornight: Glover Grove Missionary Baptist
Church in Warrenville, South Carolina, which
caught fire on Friday, and College Hill
Seventh Day Adventist, which burned on
Monday in Knoxville, Tennessee. Investigators
in Knoxville told a local news station they
believed it was an act of vandalism, although
they aren’t investigating the incident as a
hate crime. (There have also been at least
four other cases of fires at churches in the
past fortnight. At Fruitland Presbyterian
Church in Gibson County, Tennessee, and the
Greater Miracle Temple Apostolic Holiness
Church in Tallahassee, Florida, officials
suspect the blazes were caused by lightning
and electrical wires, respectively, but
investigations are still ongoing. A church that
is not predominantly black—College Heights
Baptist Church in Elyria, Ohio—was burned
on Saturday morning. The fire appears to
have been started in the sanctuary, and
WKYC reports that the cause is still under
investigation. The town’s fire and police
departments did not immediately return calls
for confirmation on Sunday. * And a Monday,
June 29, fire at Disciples of Christ Ministries
in Jackson, Mississippi, was ruled accidental .)
These fires join the murder of nine people at
Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist
Episcopal Church as major acts of violence
perpetrated against predominantly black
churches in the last fortnight. Churches are
burning again in the United States, and the
symbolism of that is powerful. Even though
many instances of arson have happened at
white churches, the crime is often association
with racial violence: a highly visible attack on
a core institution of the black community,
often done at night, and often motivated by
hate.


As my colleague David Graham noted last
week, the history of American church
burnings dates to before the Civil War, but
there was a major uptick in incidents of
arson at black churches in the middle and
late 20th century. One of the most famous
was the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street
Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama,
which killed four girls. Three decades later,
cases of church arson rose sharply. In
response, in 1995, President Bill Clinton also
set up a church-arson investigative task force,
and in 1996, Congress passed a law
increasing the sentences for arsonists who
target religious organizations, particularly for
reasons of race or ethnicity. Between 1995
and 1999, Clinton’s task force reported that it
opened 827 investigations into burnings and
bombings at houses of worship; it was later
disbanded.



In recent years, it’s been harder to get a clear
sense of the number of church fires across
the country. The National Fire Protection
Association reports that between 2007 and
2011, there were an average of 280
intentionally set fires at houses of worship in
America each year, although a small
percentage of those took place at other
religious organizations, like funeral homes.
One of the organization’s staffers, Marty
Ahrens, said that tracking church arson has
become much more complicated since
reporting standards changed in the late ‘90s.
Sometimes, fires that are reported to the
National Fire Incident Reporting System are
considered “suspicious,” but they can’t be
reported as arson until they’re definitively
ruled “intentional.” Even then, it’s difficult to
determine what motivated an act of arson.
“To know that something is motivated by
hate, you either have to know who did it or
they have to leave you a message in some
way that makes it very obvious,” she said.
“There are an awful lot of [intentionally set
fires] that are not hate crimes—they’re run-
of-the-mill kids doing stupid things.”
The investigations in North Carolina, Georgia,
South Carolina, Florida, Ohio, and Tennessee
are still ongoing, and they may end up in that
broad category of fires of suspicious, but
ultimately unknowable, origin that Ahrens
described. But no matter why they happened,
these fires are a troubling reminder of the
vulnerability of our sacred institutions in the
days following one of the most violent attacks
on a church in recent memory. It’s true that a
stupid kid might stumble backward into one
of the most symbolically terrifying crimes
possible in the United States, but that doesn’t
make the terror of churches burning any less
powerful.

How come all end time things seem to be happening to black people?


http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/07/arson-churches-north-carolina-georgia/396881/