3 Black Churches burnt in North Carolina, Georgia and S.Carolina in the past 5 days.
Between 1882 and 1968, the year Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, three thousand four hundred and forty-six black men, women, and children were lynched in this country—a practice so vicious and frequent that Mark Twain was moved, in 1901, to write an essay called “The United States of Lyncherdom.” (Twain shelved the essay and plans for a full-length book on lynching because, he told his publisher, if he went forward, “I shouldn’t have even half a friend left down [South].”) These thousands of murders, as studied by the Tuskegee Institute and others, were a means of enforcing white supremacy in the political and economic marketplaces; they served to terrorize black men who might dare to sleep, or even talk, with white women, and to silence black children.
On the evening of June 17, 2015, a mass shooting took place at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. Nine people were killed, including the senior pastor, state senator Clementa C. Pinckney; a tenth person was shot and survived. The church is one of the United States’ oldest black churchesand has long been a site for community organization around civil rights.
Police arrested a suspect, later identified as 21-year-old Dylann Roof, in Shelby, North Carolina, the morning after the attack. The United States Department of Justice is investigating the possibility that the shooting was a hate crime or an act of domestic terrorism, among other motives.
In Charlotte, N.C., authorities say a June 24 fire at Briar Creek Baptist Church was the result of arson and is being investigated as a possible hate crime. NBC News reported that more than 75 firefighters were needed to extinguish the three-alarm fire.Two firefighters received medical treatment for heat-related injuries. The church sustained $250,000 in damage, including a collapsed ceiling and significant damage to a space used for a children’s summer camp.
A June 23 fire at God’s Power Church of Christ, a predominantly Black church in Macon, Ga., has been ruled as arson, although there is no indication it was a hate crime. As was reported in the Macon Telegraph, the front doors of the church were locked and wired shut when authorities arrived, but a side door was unlocked. According to this report at Raw Story ‘hate crime’ has yet to be suggested to determine.
And today,June 26, 2015 Early Morning Fire Destroys Tallahassee Church
Firefighters responded to the blaze around 5:20 a.m. at Greater Miracle Apostolic Holiness Church near the intersection of Wakulla Street and Campbell Street.No one is believed to have been in the church at the time of the fire. Power lines were also down in the area.
Former President Bill Clinton in a 1996 radio address after white supremacists went on a burning spree on black churches in the south .”In our country, during the fifties and sixties, black churches were burned to intimidate civil rights workers,” Clinton said. “I have vivid and painful memories of black churches being burned in my own state when I was a child.For 18 months from 1995 to 1996, more than 30 black churches were destroyed or damaged by arsonists.
Bill Clinton’s 1996 Speech On Church Attacks Shows Nothing Has Changed.
alexmanhatten 