Arsonists Can’t Destroy Will Of Iron

It hardly seems coincidental that more than two dozen black churches, mostly in the South, have been destroyed by fire since January 1995. It is more likely that somebody is out there, under the cover of darkness, torching the churches while harboring the hope that black communities will be paralyzed.

Six churches were burned in Tennessee, five each in Louisiana and South Carolina, four in Alabama, three in Mississippi, and one each in Virginia, Georgia and North Carolina. The latest was Thursday night in Charlotte, N.C., where a 93-year-old church was destroyed.

According to government investigators and local fire officials, arson has not yet been determined as the basis for the infernos that have destroyed more black churches than supermarkets, lumberyards and factories in the same areas.

Churches contain mostly prayer books, stained-glass windows, organs and pews, not things that will likely lead to spontaneous combustion in the middle of the night.

The cowards who think that burning down black churches will immobilize the black community have it exactly backward. What they don’t understand is that when gasoline, matches and other incendiary devices are used to deliberately ignite black churches, the damage often galvanizes congregations. Ladies wearing their Sunday best, lace gloves and outrageously colorful hats take on a powerful protective instinct that almost nothing can defeat.

Burning black churches, especially in the South, inspires the parishioners to come together as a potent moral force. While investigators fiddle, church members are becoming increasingly committed to rebuilding and to protecting their religious institutions.

This latest form of racial evil is igniting a soul force that will move blacks to behave in miraculous ways, just as they did at the height of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.

The whole thing goes back deep in black history in America. Right from the beginning, the church was the community’s bedrock and salvation, the balm that kept hope alive when everything seemed so lost. It was the church that enabled blacks to endure lynchings and protected a grieving mother’s sanity when the news came that her child had been raped and murdered and thrown in the Mississippi by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

No matter how high most blacks rise in the workplace or in politics, rarely do they place their accomplishments above the cross.

That is precisely what made the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so forceful and effective. He was intelligent enough to understand that the one institution that would help deliver blacks from the ravages of racism was the church. And it was upon that rock that he based his entire moral revolution that ultimately changed, not only the South, but the world. In 13 years of praying and marching and leading blacks and their supporters, he built a movement that was so powerful that it still reverberates today, nearly 30 years after his death.

Last week, a rural black church was burned in Greensboro, Ala. Fire officials were greeted by the burned-out frame of the Rising Star Baptist Church when they were summoned at 2:30 a.m.

Of more than 50 church fires in the United States since January 1995, more than half of them were churches where blacks worship. For those who are convinced that the civil rights movement solved the nation’s racial problems, this attempt at religious intimidation stands as a harsh reminder that the battle against hatred has not yet been won.

If Dr. King’s life stood for anything, it was the belief that you can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea. If he gave his followers anything, it was a timeless faith in God. His life was a priceless contribution to his community and his country. I will never forget his influence when he finished speaking. People sitting in the church pews instinctively reached out toward one another. Their hands touched and soon they began to sway back and forth and the words of the unofficial black national anthem could be heard.

“We Shall Overcome,” they sang, and if the church burnings continue, the black church ladies and the church deacons and the others, all stiff with dignity, will sing the song again.

And when they do, those who think they can kill communities by setting their churches ablaze will learn something about the power of prayer, iron will and inexhaustible determination among people who have struggled for generations against tyranny, fanaticism and racial hatred.