Ashes of Church Fires Yield Few Clues

The Rev. W. D. Lewis is 92 years old. It is his church that burned. Let him tell it:

“The last Sunday we were in there I had a real good sermon. And there wasn’t any quarrel in the church. My sermon was about turning over a new life, to start a new thing, to start living better, to start working together, to live in the spirit of God, to get along.

“Four days later, they called me. My daughter drove me back out there. And it was all burned down. It was gone. The church was all down in ashes, just one wall and one corner still standing. The other walls had fallen in, and there was nothing left but ashes.

“So I said a prayer, and I asked the Lord to take charge. I asked the Lord to take control of it. I asked him two things. I asked him to help me build another church. And I asked him to tell us who did it. Because he’s the Lord. He knows.”

Six months later, the Lord still isn’t talking.

Sifting for Answers

Three small, rural, black Missionary Baptist churches outside town were destroyed this past winter. The first--Mount Zion--went up in flames on Dec. 22. The other two--Rev. Lewis’ Little Zion and the nearby Mount Zoar--lit up the sky on the night of Jan. 11.

As with other cases in the growing number of fires at predominantly black churches, arson investigators here are sifting for answers to mysteries that, after all this time, may forever go unsolved.

What is happening here in little Boligee--one cafe, one mercantile store, population fewer than 300--is also being played out in communities not only across the Southeast but also farther north, in New Jersey, and, this past week, in Portland, Ore.

Arson can be the toughest, most complex crime to solve. And with added pressure from the White House and a public increasingly frustrated by the devastation, federal and state fire officials are working against time and patience to make arrests.

Investigators in Boligee have found enough clues to declare the three fires either suspicious or deliberately set. But they have not shaken enough evidence from the cinders to put any arsonists behind bars.

Was it racism?

Some black community leaders believe the fires came in retaliation for the jailing of two white men for vandalizing other black churches. And at least one white leader thinks the ministers might have been behind the blazes--in order to sucker wealthy white benefactors into helping them build new churches.

Others theorize that the fires were the work of outsiders.

Some guess devil worshipers from down the highway in Tuscaloosa or Birmingham who could have come here to destroy Christian dwellings.

Some point to out-of-town sportsmen who camp in the woods around Greene County and hunt for deer and rabbit, and who rarely return home without at least one night of heavy drinking.

Or was the arson merely a lark? Perhaps teenagers out on a tear. Maybe copycats who read about the other fires at black churches. Maybe none of the three church fires, though located within six miles of one another, are related at all.

“We’re going to pursue these cases until the end of time if that’s what it takes and find out who did it,” pledged Craig Valentik, a special agent of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in Birmingham, Ala.

But then, to check himself, he added: “I hope.”

John Robison, the state fire marshal in Montgomery, Ala., said his office has cleared 20 out of the 38 church fires--black or white--in the last six years in Alabama. Authorities arrested 32 people. Their motives ran the gamut, but none was racially driven, he said.

In Boligee, “we have not uncovered a single bit of evidence or information that would point to a racial motive,” Robison said. “Does that mean that none of them are racial? No. We just can’t support that. And we don’t guess at things.”

Lorenzo French, a Greene County sheriff’s detective assigned to the joint federal-state investigation team working the Boligee fires, said every day that ends without an arrest means tomorrow will bring more demand for a solution.

“We’re under pressure from the smallest person in our community to the most powerful person in the nation--the president of the United States,” French said. “I go home at night and my 13-year-old daughter says, ‘Daddy, you going to solve the church fires?’ ”

French is also a member of Little Zion church, so he has a personal stake in finding the cause of that fire. “Not to mention,” he said, “the pressure I’m getting from my fellow churchgoers.”

‘Splashing Waters’

Boligee is a Choctaw name for “splashing waters.” The town lies cradled between the arms of the Tombigbee and Black Warrior rivers. Corn, cattle, catfish and cotton are raised here. The residents are 70% African American, the descendants of plantation-era dwellers. Many, like Lewis, are elderly. They look back at long lives in western Alabama, and no fire is going to burn them out.

All three were night fires, at churches along isolated gravel roads far back in the country.

The first blaze struck three days before Christmas. Half a week passed before the fire at the remote scene was reported, and little but ash and dirt remained. The other two fires broke out after 9 p.m. on the same night Jan. 11. The fires were so intense that they were left to burn themselves out.

As it was, said A.L. “Buddy” Lavender, the town’s mayor, police chief and fire marshal, someone had stolen the heater out of the town firehouse, causing the water pump on the fire truck to freeze. There was no saving these churches after the first spark.

The Rev. Melvin Hodges, who pastors at another black church, St. Paul’s Missionary Baptist, was returning home with his family when he came upon the Little Zion fire.

“We saw this red light in the sky,” he recalled. “I thought it was some kind of industrial thing at first. I put on the brakes and turned left and went on down there.

“But the fire was already up. Then a deacon come up and his was wife crying. I went home.”

Search for Clues

From a purely evidentiary standpoint, not one of the fires has yet to offer a single clue telling what happened.

Authorities said they have found no burn patterns, no forced locks, no broken windowpanes, no discarded lanterns. There were no late-night phone calls, no threatening letters, no racial epithets left behind. There were no missing church funds, no special insurance deals.

Nor were there any tire tracks that could be examined. But officials did send some ash and soot to a federal laboratory in Atlanta. The test results, according to French, were negative for any flammable liquids.

They also sent a German shepherd dog in to sniff through the debris, “but the dog didn’t hit on anything in those three churches,” French said.

Even about $90,000 in reward money has gone unclaimed. No one stepped forward in a first round of 300 interviews with law enforcement officers. A second round of 50 interviews is underway.

Religious organizations--the Quakers and the Mennonites--have set up campsites to help rebuild the structures. Local officials have said more than $1 million has been pledged not only to rebuild the churches but to pay for new pianos, pews and prayer books.

Robert Woodbridge, a contractor from the county seat at Eutaw, is overseeing the reconstruction at the Mount Zion site.

“Every time you look up, there’s another fire in a church somewhere,” he said. “And sometimes when you open a lid on something, it gives people all kinds of ideas about things.”

The unsolved fires have strained race relations in the community. On the morning of the two January fires, two young white men were sentenced to six months in jail for vandalizing three other black churches in the area. Next, someone fired two rounds of buckshot into the home of the sentencing judge, Eddie Hardaway Jr., who is black.

“There’s no doubt that those fires were deliberate, and I’m convinced they were racially motivated,” said Barrown Lankster, the black district attorney who prosecuted the men. “That was no accident those churches burned down.”

But Lavender, who is white and has been a town leader for two decades, said he knows of no racial hatred deep enough in Boligee to lead a white person to put a match to a black house of God.

“The racists are not white people in Greene County,” Lavender said. “It’s black people. They have taken over county government. They want to keep it that way. And they will do everything they can to keep it.”

As mayor, Lavender received up to $12,000 in contributions after news of the fires broke nationally. He set up an account at the Merchants & Farmers Bank in Eutaw. He then was accused of trying to hoard the money, and he was taken to court and forced to turn all the cash directly over to the church pastors.

“It’s all left me thinking they could have done these fires for their own benefit,” Lavender said.

But Spiver Gordon, a black community leader who heads the local Southern Christian Leadership Conference, scoffed at Lavender and other whites who portray him and the black pastors as “paid agitators.”

Bringing Pressure

Gordon has participated in the Southern ministers’ entourages that have met in Washington with Clinton administration leaders about the fires and has sought to bring more pressure to bear on federal investigators.

“The focus of the investigations should be on the criminals, not the victims,” he said. “The mayor is a first cousin to stupidity. If he wants to call me an agitator, that’s fine. An agitator gets the dirt out.”

As the accusations have flown and tensions have mounted, authorities have continued to plod on. Last week, another team of federal investigators was in town, knocking on doors, asking more questions.

“We’re talking to a lot of people, and they’re telling us a lot of stories,” said Valentik, the ATF special agent.

“We have to hope now that somebody will come forward, hope somebody will talk,” French said. “If it was kids, you’d think at least one of them was going to squeal. And there’s the reward money out there.”

Outside town, a new steeple is going up at the new Little Zion church. Said Lewis, with almost a century of preaching in him: “I don’t know what’s the matter with people. Except it’s the devil. The devil gets in them, and the devil put them in my church. Maybe it’s better not knowing who did it.”

For now, the Lord remains silent.