Who Will Carry Torch Of Outrage?

The churches are burning. You’d better tell somebody. Pass it on like the score in the ball game, move it down the line like juicy gossip. Better yet, just yell it from the mountaintop.

The churches - black churches - are burning like they did in the Reconstruction South, like they did when preachers got uppity and congregations out of line. The churches are burning like they did when white men in white hoods wanted to teach lessons and instill fear.

The churches are burning. More than 30 in the last 18 months, according to the government; 80 since 1990, according to the Center For Democratic Renewal, a watchdog group. Fire is chewing the wood, heat deforming the cross, soot blackening the face of Jesus. The churches are burning in an attack that seems designed to strike at the soul of black America.

Hel-lo? Why isn’t black America outraged? Why isn’t America outraged? Remember the Million Man March? We talked that one to death. Remember the O.J. Simpson trial? Couldn’t go to the grocery store without hearing folks chewing that one over.

But the churches are on fire and there is silence. The silence of the unconcerned, the unengaged, the unenraged. Silence.

No story in Ebony magazine. No special edition of “Oprah.” No spate of angry essays from black columnists, this one included.

Where is the outcry? Where is the urgency?

The Rev. Jesse Jackson would have you know he and other aging warriors of the Civil Rights era have been trying to do just that for the last five years. “The media have been expressing disinterest in it,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s been difficult to raise this issue.” Difficult, evidently, with blacks as well as whites. And ain’t that a kick in the head.

“In the face of these attacks, many blacks have been retreating into a kind of creeping conservatism,” Jackson says. “Retreating from demonstrating, from picketing, from boycotting … We have to go on the offensive again.”

Jackson sounds energized by this - “When the going gets tough with three seconds to go, give me the ball,” he says - but others in the black religious community offer more lamentations than calls to arms.

The Rev. Christopher Hamlin of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., says the attacks are “an indication that we have not come as far as we presumed and that there is still a lot of work to be done, if in fact the fires are being done in a racial overtone.”

“I don’t think it’s racial,” says William Gary, presiding deacon of the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. “I think it’s hate crimes. More hate than racial.”

It is a distinction that is difficult to see. Imagine that 30 synagogues had come under arson attack. Or 30 mosques of the Nation of Islam. Can anyone imagine that there would be this mass silence? Can anyone think leaders would draw distinctions between race crimes and hate crimes or lard their conversation with cautious, lawyerly disclaimers?

How many churches need to burn before we call the thing what it is? Namely, as Jackson puts it, the logical outgrowth of a virulent atmosphere where racism finds a comfort zone in the coded language of high public officials, the lords of conservatism have declared open season on black gains, and the Supreme Court has turned its back.

“The burning of churches is the last stage of that,” he said. “This kind of anti-black mania has been building for a long time.”

For Jackson it’s 1896 all over again. In that year, a season of black gain - already under assault by mobs in the streets and racists in office - came to a grinding halt under the heel of the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of Jim Crow. Watching the churches burn now as they did then, one finds it difficult to argue.

One wonders how we ever forgot.

How do you forget the sisters in the Amen corner, seconding the preacher at every turn in the sermon? How do you forget the choir on the stand, shaking the rafters of Heaven with good news and joyful noise? How can memory lose the old times when slave forebears sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and the hymn to God was made an exhortation to escape?

You forget that at your own peril. Betray history when you misplace the line that connects clapboard huts in cotton-field clearings to mighty mansions of God that take up whole city blocks. Break faith with elders when you overlook what the church meant in the years of struggle. Shame the sacrifice of martyrs when you disremember how it became the crucible of deliverance.

It is no accident that most of the major players in the Civil Rights struggle of the ‘50s and ‘60s had earned the title “Reverend”: Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, Hosea Williams, Wyatt Tee Walker, Bernard Lee, Ralph Abernathy, C.T. Vivian and, of course, Martin Luther King. The crusade came from the church. The leadership did, too.

It’s different now. A different struggle, a different time.

And maybe that’s the source of the silence. The Revs. Jackson and Hamlin deny it, but the church does not mean what it once did. Our world is secularized and decentralized and it’s almost quaint to think of a church house as the heart of a community.

But it is incumbent upon black America, especially in these heartless and regressive times, to remember, honor and embrace what was. For all the diffusion of black life, we would do well to remember one of those bits of wisdom gained at grandma’s knee.

You don’t forget the bridge that brought you across.

The black church was for black America a refuge from the storm, a source of defiance in fearful days. When it is under attack, we, above all other Americans, owe it more than silence.

The churches are burning. You better tell somebody.

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