Torching of Black Churches Stirs Civil Rights-Era Pain

This rural town is sifting through the ashes that have come like a bad memory to haunt its dreams.

Church fires are lighting up the night in this isolated corner of the state. The echoes of civil rights-era violence the fires evoke have been just as shocking as they are painful to the targeted African American congregations.

“That’s part of the disturbing nature of this,” said Jim Cavanaugh, special agent in charge of the U.S. Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Birmingham office, which is investigating the fires. “None of us wants to go back in history. Let’s hope it’s not that.”

But what else could it be?

Two black churches went up in flames in one night last week, another just before Christmas. All are within a six-mile radius. Federal authorities are investigating possible links between these fires and five churches that have been burned in Tennessee. Racist graffiti was scrawled on the wall of the latest Tennessee church to be set ablaze.

“One thing I’m glad about--they didn’t catch us during service,” said the Rev. W.D. Lewis, the 92-year-old pastor of the Little Zion Baptist Church near Boligee. “Then [the fire] might’ve killed some people up in there.”

Lewis did not want to speculate about who might have set the blaze, but he acknowledged the possibility that it and the others were racially motivated.

The firebombing of an occupied black church in Birmingham in the 1960s remains one of the most horrifying and galvanizing incidents of the civil rights movement.

“The devil is still around,” Lewis said.

Levy Pickens, pastor at the nearby Mt. Zion Baptist Church, which burned to the ground Dec. 22, also was reluctant to point fingers. “I don’t have no idea about how the fire started or who started it or if it started on its own,” said Pickens, sounding wary of strangers. “I was [at home] about 12 miles from the church” when the fire started.

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Mayor Buddy Lavender, who also serves as the one-man police and fire departments in this town of 300 people, was blunter: “They were started,” he said of the fires. “It’s arson. It appeared that they are trying to destroy black churches.” The only question, he said, is who did it, and why.

“I’m calling in all the resources I know,” he said. The state fire marshal, the ATF and the FBI all are involved in the investigation.

The state offered a $4,000 reward Friday for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the arsonists, and the ATF offered a $5,000 reward.

So far there are few leads.

The churches in Alabama were so isolated that they burned down before firefighters arrived. The two latest fires occurred on Jan. 11, the day a newspaper in neighboring Sumpter County carried a story about the sentencing of two white men who admitted to vandalizing three other black churches last year. Authorities have speculated that the fires may have been set in retaliation by friends of the white men.

It is not known if the vandals were members of any organized racial hate groups. A third white man involved in the desecration died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound before sentencing. Another possibility is that the fires were set by racists from out of state, the same culprits responsible for the Tennessee fires. Federal officials are investigating similarities between the Alabama fires and the torching of four black churches in western Tennessee last year.

The firebombing of a multiracial church in Knoxville Jan. 8 appears unrelated, said Cavanaugh, the ATF official. “The modus operandi in that fire is completely different,” he said.

A National Football League star, Green Bay Packers defensive lineman Reggie White, is an associate pastor at the Knoxville church. Authorities found racist graffiti, gunpowder, cans of kerosene and at least 18 Molotov cocktails amid the rubble of the inner-city church.

Lavender said other possible culprits in the Alabama fires are drug dealers--the pastors at the churches had been outspoken against drugs--or even black community activists who, he theorized, could have set the fires in order to raise their own stock in a community that seems to have grown apathetic about social and political issues.

He acknowledged, however, that this is all speculation at this point. “We haven’t got any hard evidence,” he said. “We’re like a man standing beside the road watching the cars go by.”

Both Lavender and Lewis said Greene County, which is 70% African American, has not witnessed much overt racial tension in recent years.

Lavender, who is white, characterized the violence of the 1950s and 1960s as “a lot of water under the bridge.” But he acknowledged that there are still people, both white and black, in the community who, he believes, would like to see racial strife return.

Lewis, for his part, said he might have angered some in the community with his hard-hitting preaching style, but he said he has never received any threats. Noting that he has spoken out forcefully against drugs, adultery and state-approved gambling, he said: “I don’t compromise . . . I ain’t going to change my way of preaching. They’ll have to burn me up to stop me from preaching.”