black churches on fire

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afta dylan roof murdered 9 church going blakk peeps, seven blakk churches ave burn down.

mii guess dese dumb blakk churches aggo chatt bout more forgiveness

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Fires at black churches raise concern


Fires at several predominantly black churches in Southern states the past two weeks — at least three of them attributed to arson — raise concerns about potential fallout from the recent South Carolina church shooting.

The fires have all taken place in the weeks since the attack June 17. A 21-year-old man with apparent white supremacist beliefs is accused of going on a shooting rampage inside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., killing nine people.

The burned churches are in Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina. Federal investigators are looking into some of the cases to determine whether hate crimes were the cause, but so far the fires do not appear to be related.

And Tuesday night, a fire raged through a prominent African-American church, Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal, in Greeleyville, S.C. that was burned to the ground by the KKK in 1995. Authorities said it was too soon to tell what caused the fire, which took place during a night of frequent storms and lightning strikes.

The fire rekindled painful memories from the arson that destroyed the church 20 years ago, Williamsburg County Councilman Eddie Woods Jr. told the Associated Press.

"That was a tough thing to see," Woods said. "It is hurting those people again. But we're going to rebuild. If this was someone, they need to know that hate won't stop us again,"

"This is a systematic attack against the black church," said the Rev. Anthony Evans, president of the National Black Church Initiative, a coalition of 34,000 African-American churches. Evans said he's had several conference calls with black church leaders across the USA about the fires. "We are on alert status."

The fact that the recent fires occurred so close together in the wake of the Charleston shooting could be cause for concern, said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The fires may be retaliation for the backlash against the Confederate flag that followed the shootings, he said. After photos surfaced of suspect Dylann Roof wearing Confederate flag patches, retailers such as Walmart and Amazon suspended sales of the flag because of its popularity with white supremacists. Four of the rebel flags were recently removed from the state Capitol grounds in Alabama, and South Carolina lawmakers will decide whether or not to do the same next month.

Websites popular with white supremacists, such as Stormfront.org, lit up with angry denouncements of the treatment of the Confederate flag, Potok said.

"The single most suspicious thing about these fires is that they came so close together and so hard on the heels of attacks on the Confederate battle flag," Potok said. "That is a revered symbol for the radical right."

Some of the church fires were severe, such as the one last week at Briar Creek Road Baptist Church in Charlotte, which gutted an entire church wing. The FBI is investigating.

Others, such as the fire at College Hill Seventh-day Adventist Church in Knoxville, Tenn., were less damaging. Firefighters arrived at that church at around 10 p.m. June 21 to find a church van in flames in the parking lot and smoldering piles of hay and bags of soil near a side entrance, said Capt. D.J. Corcoran, a spokesman with the Knoxville Fire Department.

There were no obvious signs pointing to a hate crime, and the property was mostly unhurt, he said. The incident remains under investigation.

Potok said he is waiting on results of the investigations before drawing connections between the fires and the Charleston shooting. There has been a history of church fires after major events.

Hours after Barack Obama was elected as the nation's first black president in November 2008, arsonists torched the predominantly black Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Springfield, Mass.

Attacks on black churches have a long history in this country, said Mark Pitcavage, director of investigative research at the Anti-Defamation League.

Dating to post-Civil War Reconstruction, members of the Ku Klux Klan targeted black churches as a way of terrorizing the black community, he said. One of the most infamous attacks is the bombing in 1963 of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., which killed four girls, ages 11 to 14.

As recently as the mid-1990s, a rash of church fires prompted the formation of the National Church Arson Task Force. The group investigated 429 arsons and bombings of churches from 1995 to 1997 but found only a handful of cases involved hate groups.

That does little to quiet the fears of folks such as Evans, who has reached out to the Department of Justice about the attacks.

"This is a nationwide attack on the black church," he said. "We're taking it very seriously."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/06/30/black-churches-fires-charleston-shooting/29516267/

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South Carolina Black Church, Once Torched by KKK, Burns Again


Yet another predominately black church went up in flames Tuesday night — this time a South Carolina house of worship that was burned to the ground by Ku Klux Klan members 20 years ago.

But a federal law enforcement source told The Associated Press that the blaze that destroyed the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal, near the rural town of Greeleyville, does not appear to be intentionally set by an arsonist.

Local officials planned to hold a news conference Wednesday morning and could not immediately say what might have caused the fire — or if it was the result of a heavy lightning storm that passed over the area around the same time.

No injuries were reported, but the fire took around two and a half hours to bring under control, the Clarendon County Fire Department said around midnight ET.

Its roof collapsed and Williamsburg County Fire Chief Randy Swinton told NBC News the 8,000-square-foot church had been gutted.

On Wednesday morning, only the brick walls of the church remained. The roof had collapsed, and the long slender windows no longer had glass in them.

The side of the church facing the rural highway had a white cross that appeared charred.

In Greeleyville, S.C., where Mt. Zion African Methodist Episcopal burned on Tuesday night. pic.twitter.com/O5vhKyAUtN
— Alan Blinder (@alanblinder) July 1, 2015

Greeleyville Mayor Jessie Parker said the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division and the U.S. Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms investigators were on site overnight. "We're hoping by morning that we'll know something," he said.

Hours before the fire broke out, the NAACP sent a series of tweets saying it was "alerting black churches to take necessary precautions" and urging the Department of Justice to "investigate a series of black church fires in the Southeast."

NAACP State Conferences and units are now alerting black churches to take necessary precautions. #WhoIsBurningBlackChurches
— NAACP (@NAACP) June 30, 2015

The blaze was the latest in a series of fires at predominately black, Southern churches since June 17, when a white gunman killed nine black black worshipers at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, about 50 miles south of Greeleyville.

The fires have fueled concerns about the potential for a new wave of racist violence since the Charleston shooting. The FBI has launched an investigation.

Asked whether Tuesday's fire could be related to the other recent blazes, Mark Keel, chief of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, told the Post and Courier newspaper of Charleston: "Certainly, I think we all are concerned about those things."

Mount Zion, founded more than 110 years ago, was burned to the ground June 20, 1995, by two members of the Ku Klux Klan. They pleased guilty the following year. That arson also came amid a rash of suspicious church fires.

President Bill Clinton attended the rededication of the rebuilt church a year later and said in a speech that "it was the church that saved the people until the civil rights revolution came along."

He said it was "doubly troubling to people ... who spent their entire lives working for equal opportunity among our people...to see our native South engulfed in a rash of church burnings."

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/another-historically-black-church-south-carolina-burning-n384876

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Another Black Church Burns in the South, the 8th in 10 Days


#WhoIsBurningBlackChurches trended on Twitter throughout the week



Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church, a prominent African-American church in Greeleyville, S.C., caught fire late Tuesday. It is the eighth black church in the Southern U.S. to burn in 10 days.

Greeleyville, about 60 miles northwest of Charleston, S.C., has seen similar fires before, the Charleston Post and Courier reports. Mount Zion was burned to the ground by the KKK in 1995, part of a string of 30 fires in black churches that spanned two years.

An investigation into the fire’s cause will begin after it is safely extinguished, chief of the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division Mark Keel told the Post and Courier. He noted that the thunderstorm that pounded the town of 375 on Tuesday evening could have ignited the church. Meteorologist Pete Mohlin of the National Weather Service told the paper that there was a lot of lightning in the area around 7 p.m., but he could not say if it had caused the fire.

Parishioners across the South are surveying the damage that a string of similar fires has caused this week, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports, starting in Knoxville, Tenn., on June 21 and moving to Macon, Ga., and Gibson County, in Tennessee, on June 23; Charlotte, N.C., on June 24; Elyria, Ohio, on June 25; and Tallahassee, Fla., and Warrenville, S.C., on June 26.

Three of those fires have been ruled arson, one was determined to be caused by a falling branch and faulty wiring, and the others remain under investigation. Several have been blamed preliminarily on lightning; weather in the South this week has been turbulent.

State senator Cezar McKnight was on the scene as the fire continued to burn at 10 p.m. “South Carolina has been through a lot the last two weeks, and we’ve made the best of a terrible situation,” he said. “I would hate for this to be something somebody did on purpose to try to poison the love and fellowship.”

The Post and Courier recalled that then President Bill Clinton visited Mount Zion after it was rebuilt following the 1995 attack. His remarks at its dedication have resonance still:

“The men and women of Mount Zion have shown us the meaning of these words by refusing to be defeated and by building up this new church. Others have come together with you,” Clinton said on June 12, 1996. “The pastor told me he got contributions from all over the world to help to rebuild this church. In just a few days we’ll have a joyful noise coming out of this church … I want to ask every citizen, as we stand on this hallowed ground together, to help to rebuild our churches, to restore hope, to show the forces of hatred they cannot win.”

http://time.com/3942688/black-church-burning-mount-zion-ame-south-carolina/