The massacre of nine parishioners two weeks ago at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C., is a stark reminder of the sad vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow still present within the United States. The deadly rampage of a 21-year-old avowed racist has brought to fore painful memories of when African Americans at great peril dared to study and adhere to the Gospels.
Black churches, particularly in the South, have been historically targeted precisely because of their role as not just houses of worship but also sanctuaries from racism and as organizing points of community action. Mother Emanuel A.M.E., founded in 1816, was once burned to the ground for its connection with a thwarted slave revolt. Members then had to conduct services in secret to evade laws that sanctioned Black Christian persecution.
For about 200 years, the church has been the site of struggle, resistance and change as many abolitionists and civil rights luminaries have spoken from its pulpit and led marches from its steps.
Each attack against Black Christians signals a virulent animus not only toward any particular congregation, but toward the entire African American community. Some family members of the slain parishioners said at the killer’s arraignment last week that they would forgive him. They also said his evil act would not deter them from weekly worship. In Los Angeles, members of First A.M.E. Church echoed the sentiments of their sister-church in Charleston—the same city where the first volley of the Civil War took place.
Hard to forgive …‘but we must’
“We must forgive,” said Hatttie Hicks, a member of the First A.M.E. congregation. “It’s hard. It’s very hard to forgive, but we are taught to forgive.”
American baby-boomers are familiar with the September 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., when members of the local Ku Klux Klan murdered four young girls preparing for Sunday-morning worship. At their funeral, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “They died between the sacred walls of the church of God. And they were discussing the eternal meaning of love.”
In the 1990s, Black churches again emerged as targets in a 21-month wave of arsons and firebombings. Some 230 churches were attacked—27 of which were destroyed by fire—beginning in August 1994, when young White men associated with the neo-Nazi group Aryan Faction threw a Molotov cocktail and sprayed bullets into a Black church in Clarksville, Tenn. They left a note, saying, “AF wants you to leave our White community. You Coons! Coon hunting season is open.”
More than half of the arsons that swept through the South in the mid-1990s involved Black churches, even though African American churches comprised only one-fifth of the churches in the region. Eighty percent of those arrested in Connecticut the fires were White. The arson attacks finally gained national attention, when the late football great Reggie White announced in January 1996 that his Inner City Church in Knoxville, Tenn., had been destroyed by a Molotov cocktail. Like most of the arson attacks, racial epithets were etched on the walls.
During the 1990s, Los Angeles was not immune to attacks on African American churches. In 1993, there was a White supremacist plot to bomb First A.M.E. Church and kill Rodney King. Although the plan was uncovered and stopped beforehand, the local branch of the NAACP—and the district attorney’s office—revealed that the intent of the assassination plot was to incite a race war. In July 1997, arsonists struck First A.M.E. Zion Church in the North University Park community, causing more than $1 million in damage. The attack drew condemnation from city officials, from the Los Angeles Archdiocese, and from religious leaders of all faiths throughout the county. Michael Eisner of the Walt Disney Co. pledged $100,000 to help them rebuild.
Los Angeles not immune
In the arson investigations 20 years ago, law enforcement officials tended to blame racism as a factor only if the suspects had ties to hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis. Church leaders say this approach more often than not minimized the broader role of racism that fueled the attacks, because most hate crimes are not committed by members of such organized groups and are, instead, perpetrated mostly by disaffected, younger Whites who have grown up in a pervasive culture that scapegoats African Americans for their own socio-economic hardships. Back in the 1990s, Jack Levin, Ph.D. and director of the Program for the Study of Violence and Social Conflict at Northeastern University, prepared profiles of the church burning suspects and found that the “… overwhelming majority of the arsons can be blamed on young, mostly White men.” Burning Black churches, his report found, had become “protest by proxy.”
On Nov. 4, 2008, headlines reported the destruction of a Black church in Springfield, Mass.; the building had been destroyed reportedly to protest President Barack Obama’s impending inauguration. The arsonist was later found guilty of a hate crime.
In 2013, the most recent year for which federal data is available, the FBI identified 3,563 victims of racially motivated hate crimes. Black victims constituted 66 percent of the total; 21 percent were victims of anti-White bias; 4.6 percent were victims of anti-Asian bias, and 4.5 percent were victims of anti-Native Indian bias. If the Charleston murders are confirmed to be a hate crime—as some authorities claimed in the first reports—or a form of domestic terrorism, it would share horrific similarities with the 2012 attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin where a White supremacist killed six people, as well as other attacks domestically and abroad on churches, synagogues and mosques by religious bigots. The local clergy has been looking at these attacks as an indicator of how they must maintain their faith in times of religious intolerance.
‘It could have been our church’
First A.M.E. Church released a statement condemning the Charleston murders: “We encourage peace-loving people within and without institutions of faith to reach out to God and to each other in the wake of this senseless attack against life and liberty.”
Destruction of Black churches may find its origins in the early days of the Civil War. Recently freed slaves would often seek solace in places of worship and consequently build their lives around this community. In turn, these churches became targets for White supremacists; burning a church down was a common tactic usedtoforce the congregation out of the community, and across the South 150 years ago churches burned at an alarming rate.
During the Civil Rights era, many Black churches became rallying points for activism and protest. Religion and church communities were a pillar of support for Blacks, and the church’s religious teaching gave birth to the passive activism of the Civil Rights Revolution.
Despite the philosophy of non violence eschewed by King, Rev. James Lawson of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and many other civil rights notables, racial aggression and hostility were turned toward these churches which were easy prey to vandalism and arson.
“It could have been our church,” said James Parker, another parishioner at First A.M.E. Church. “Believe it or not, people of faith of certain communities … [faith] alone does not protect you from evil.”
Home is where the hate is
Even in ‘liberal’ Southern California the presence of hate groups reverberates
By Gregg Reese
The recent tragedies in South Carolina, just the latest in a string of race-related violence, also serve to highlight the growing paranoia about our increasingly multi-cultural population. This phenomenon, in place for a decade, was punctuated by the election of a multi-racial president in 2008, with a corresponding rise in the members of what are defined as “hate groups” in virtually every state of the union (Interestingly, some of the more sophisticated White supremacists welcomed the ascension of Barack Obama to the Oval Office, reasoning that it would accelerate the cause of racial separatism. No less a personage then Klu Klux Klansman David Duke declared that “Obama is a visual aid for White Americans who just don’t get it yet that we have lost control of our country.”)
Curiously enough, the state with the largest number of such factions is California, with 57 according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the Montgomery, Ala. based nonprofit legal advocacy organization that monitors and initiates legal proceedings against what it calls hate groups.
These groups are defined in California Assembly Bill 242 thusly as:
…a criminal act committed, in whole or in part, because of one or more of the following actual or perceived characteristics of the victim:
(1) Disability.
(2) Gender.
(3) Nationality.
(4) Race or ethnicity.
(5) Religion.
(6) Sexual orientation.
(7) Association with a person or group with one or more of these actual or perceived characteristics.
Chock full of nuts?
“Why are Californians like a bowl of granola? Because what isn’t a fruit or a flake is a nut.” —anonymous
The Golden State is a study in contradictions. Known far and wide for nurturing alternative lifestyles, it has spawned such innovations as the counter culture (or “hippie movement”) and information technology, and by reputation is the most liberal bastion of all the 50 states.
By the same token, it has been a haven for various extremist groups ranging from radical Islamic factions who have provided a fertile environment for such entities as the anti-Zionist, possibly Hamas (a U.S. designated Palestinian terrorist group) linked Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). These college activists allegedly graffiti-ed a Jewish fraternity house at U.C. Davis with swastikas in February of 2015, and engaged in physical altercations with demonstrators at a pro-Israeli rally in front of the Westwood Federal Building in Los Angeles in July of 2014.
California also produced one Adam Yahiye Gadahn (also known as “Azzam the American”) who served as a leading al-Qaeda propagandist and perhaps the most visible spokesperson for the infamous Osama bin-Laden before his death in a January 2015 drone strike.
Extremist groups are saturated throughout the state prison system. In 2005, a plot was uncovered at Folsom Prison in which an al-Qaeda-linked gang aimed to attack military sites and synagogues as part of a statewide “holy war.” This entity was named Jam’iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheed (the Assembly of Authentic Islam) or JIS, and allegedly was formed by former “Crip” gang members who’d been radicalized after they converted to Islam. These members reportedly commissioned a series of gas station robberies to raise capital for these attacks.
The cauldron of financial adversity
“We are the voice of the new, embattled White minority!”
—from the website of the White nationalist, neo-Nazi internet forum, Stormfront.
Perhaps predictable in light of the diverse ethnicities that make up California’s nearly 40 million residents, political and other groups of every ilk may be found within its boundaries. Hence, one might travel no further than the north county enclave of Antelope Valley to encounter such kindred spirits as the Nazi Low Riders, the supremacist crew known as the Peckerwoods, old-school Ku Klux Klansmen, along with a substantial presence of garden variety skin heads. Their ranks have swelled due to an influx of Black and Hispanic families driven by the desire to escape the gang infested inner city, the stagnating post 1990 economy, and plummeting property values.
The family dynamic of youngsters drawn to White supremacy cliques mirror those of people of color seeking refuge in gang culture: fragmented single-parent-home life with little or no supervision, and a desperate need to identify, even with anti-social elements.
Nothing stokes the fire of intolerance like economic hardship. The Klu Klux Klan enjoyed its zenith during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and in an example of history repeating itself, the past two decades have seen a corresponding rise in the growth of far-ring organizations, more or less corresponding with the ebb and flow of the economy.
Needless-to-say, the specter of the War on Terror and groups like al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and others promoting religious Jihad are more news worthy, and have dominated the headlines, at least over the past few years. But perception is often radically different than reality.
The non-profit think tank New America Foundation (http://www.newamerica.org/) has reported that home-grown White supremacists have been responsible for twice as many violent deaths as their Islamic ideological counterparts since the faithful date of Sept. 11, 2001. In their recently released study titled “Homegrown Extremism: Deadly Attacks Since 9/11,” the right wing posted 48 people killed opposed to 26 killed in Jihadist attacks during the same time period.
Academics and non-profits such as the SPLC use this as credence that the federal government was perhaps overzealous in their pursuit of exotic (and media attractive) foreign interlopers like Osama bin Laden.
Their study, “The Age of the Wolf,” released in February of 2015, summed up this oversight:
Federal agencies must reinvigorate their work in studying and analyzing the radical right, helping law enforcement agencies around the country understand and counter the very real threat of domestic terrorism from the milieu that produced mass murderer Timothy McVeigh. It’s not a question of focusing on one or another type of terror. No matter the source, we simply cannot afford to ignore the ongoing carnage.
The title reference to lone wolf or “leaderless resistance,” fits Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church assassin Dylan Storm Roof to a “T.” Documenting that “a domestic terrorist attack or foiled attack occurred, on average, every 34 days,” it noted that of the 60 domestic terror incidents in the report, three-quarters were perpetrated by “a lone wolf, a single person acting without accomplices.”
“The lone wolf’s chief asset is that no one else knows of his violent plans, which makes them exceedingly difficult to disrupt,” SPLC extremist expert Mark Potok said.
“It is imperative that authorities, including those gathering at the White House next week, take this threat seriously. Anything less would be an invitation to disaster.”
Obama, podcaster talk racism
A podcaster said Monday he’s “a little sad” that the media focused on President Barack Obama’s use of the “N” word during an interview done in the comedian’s Highland Park garage-cum-recording studio. During Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast released Monday but recorded last Friday when the president was in town for a series of fundraisers —Obama said the legacy of slavery “casts a long shadow, and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on.”
“We’re not cured of it,” Obama continued. “And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say ‘nigger’ in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not.”
The president’s comments came in the aftermath of the apparent racially motivated shooting deaths of nine Black people at a church in Charleston, S.C.
Maron told ABC7 that he’s “a little sad that the media has just isolated the use of the n-word as the lead story and taken it out of context, which was really a powerful statement about the state of racism in our country.
“But that’s what you guys do, right?”
Maron told Vanity Fair that he got the interview, which lasted about an hour and was in the planning stages for months, because a member of Obama’s staff is a WTF fan.
