Black Church Is Target Again for Deadly Strike at the Heart


By RACHEL L. SWARNS and CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
JUNE 19, 2015




In Atlanta, the former slaves sang their hallelujahs in an abandoned railroad boxcar. In Lincoln County, N.C., they called out to Jesus in a building made of old pine poles. Near Cartersville, Ga., they raised their voices to the heavens from a roofless barrel shop.

After the Civil War, African-Americans abandoned the white congregations where they had been forced to pray as slaves and created their own centers of worship, remaking the religious map of the South.

What emerged in those years after Emancipation is what the African-American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois and others have described as the “first social institution fully controlled by black men in America.” Black churches ran schools, offered burial assistance and served as clearinghouses for information about jobs, social happenings and politics. More than just spiritual homes, they embodied their communities’ growing political aspirations.

And before long, they became targets.

In the fall of 1870, as the Ku Klux Klan battled to return African-Americans to subservience, nearly every black church in Tuskegee, Ala., was engulfed in flames. Ninety-three years later, as the civil rights movement gained momentum, a bomb blast killed four young girls in a black church in Birmingham, Ala., that was a well-known meeting place for movement leaders.

Violent History: Attacks on Black Churches
The killing of nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., is among a long list of attacks targeting predominantly black churches in the United States.


So this week, when the Rev. Henry A. Belin III heard about the mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S. C., he felt heartbroken. But he was not surprised that a racist gunman had set his sights on a historic black church.

“You attack the center, whatever you think is going to hit at the heart,” said Mr. Belin, the pastor of the Bethel First A. M .E. Church in Harlem, who rallied several hundred mourners this week for an evening prayer vigil in solidarity with the parishioners. “The black church has been the heart.”

All across the country, black congregations of all sizes mourned this week, communing in impromptu prayer services, in phone calls and on Facebook and on Twitter where people regardless of religious affiliation declared, #IamAME.

“It’s like a jog of the memory of how our sacred places have become places of violence toward us,” said Juone Darko, an adjunct professor at George Mason University, who grew up in Birmingham and attended a memorial service at Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington on Friday.

“They are sacred to us, but they aren’t seen as sacred to people who want to do us harm,” she said.

Even at a time of waning attendance, the church remains an important institution for African-Americans. In 2014, 79 percent of African-Americans identified themselves as Christian, a religious-affiliation rate that has dipped in recent years but remains higher than that of any other ethnic group, according to the Pew Research Center.

In Pew’s most recent study of church attendance, which was conducted in 2009, 53 percent of African-Americans reported attending religious services at least once a week, compared with 39 percent of Americans overall.

And churches continue to extend their mission beyond Sunday services, as they have since their founding.

In the 19th century, these centers of worship, small and large, rural and urban, stone and ramshackle, became vital community engines. More than 100 of the first black men to be elected to legislative office in the United States were ministers, according to Eric Foner, a Columbia University history professor known for his expertise in the Reconstruction era.

During segregation, churches became places where black men and women found leadership opportunities denied to them by white society. Some, though not all, became springboards for politicians and headquarters for protest movements, most recently in connection with the issue of police brutality.

That churches may not be vociferously political today does not mean that they are not doing the daily work of sustaining black people within their communities, said Barbara D. Savage, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion.”

She pointed to large suburban megachurches, with middle-class memberships that form investment clubs and engage in small-scale economic development projects, and older urban churches that raise money for school uniforms and scholarships for young people.

The deacons of small clapboard churches that dot the Southern countryside have become soldiers in the fight to improve public health, organizing walking clubs and healthy potlucks in places ravaged by heart disease and diabetes. And churches still serve as efficient communications hubs, as evident from the political figures who shuffle in an out of pews at election time. In New Orleans, black churches became channels to share information when residents were scattered and their homes destroyed by the floodwaters after Hurricane Katrina.

“It’s not just African, it’s not just American, it’s not your run-of-the-mill religious experience,” said the Rev. Dwight Webster, of the Christian Unity Baptist Church in New Orleans, who lamented what he described as the falling away of young people. “It’s what was needed to help a people survive.”

Heidi Beirich, director of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said hate groups remained keenly aware of the church’s significance.

“It’s a symbol of the black community,” she said. “If you want to harm black folks, it’s an obvious easy target.”

Even as the church has evolved, racial violence has been a perennial companion. The killing of the four girls in Birmingham still lingers in memories. But it was only one of more than 300 such church bombings in the 1960s, according to “Black Church Arson in the United States 1989-1996,” which appeared in The Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies in 1999.

The violence continued. From 1989 to 1996, more than 200 black and multiracial churches in the country were burned, according to a congressional hearing held in 1997, the article said.

“What is beyond question is that we are facing an epidemic of terror,” Deval Patrick, who was then an assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in 1996.

The shooting in Charleston this week has resurrected some of those fears. On Friday, church leaders reported a bomb threat at Metropolitan A. M. E. Church in Washington. Other pastors said they were contemplating hiring security guards.

That Dylann Roof, the accused gunman, was welcomed at one of the church’s small informal gatherings — a midweek Bible study — and that some relative of the victims offered him forgiveness afterward is part of what makes the tragedy so searing.

“In churches all over the country people are asking, ‘Do we need someone at the door, someone who is a little bit more questioning?’ ” Professor Savage said. “This is an example of how terrorism works.”

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