The deadly shooting massacre at Charleston’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church was a startling reminder of the long history of attacks on black churches in America.
Wednesday’s gruesome rampage was the latest killing spree in a string of racist attacks that have targeted black houses of worship for decades.
“The fact that this took place in a black church raises questions about a dark part of our history,” President Obama said Thursday. “This is not the first time that black churches have been attacked. And we know that hatred across races and faiths pose a particular threat to our democracy and our ideals.”
“Communities like [Charleston] have had to endure tragedies like this too many times,” he said.
Black churches have been targeted by racists and white supremacists who saw houses of worship as one place blacks could congregate legally, a right that many saw as a threat to white dominance. The Charleston church itself was burned in the early 19th century when it was found to be a gathering point for slaves plotting a rebellion against their owners.
The black church has long stood as a potent symbol both for supporters and opponents of equal rights for blacks.
“The people who are intimidated are really the terrorists who attack the church, for they are intimidated by what the church stands for,” Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery told members of Congress during a 1996 hearing on the mysterious surge in reported church fires in the South in the mid-1990s.
Perhaps most notably, black churches in Alabama and Mississippi were targeted by white segregationists during the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. The Ku Klux Klan and other racist individuals routinely bombed and torched well-known black churches that functioned not only as houses of worship, but also as meeting places for the mobilization of prominent civil rights leaders.
In 1958, a dynamite bomb severely damaged the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Just five years later, the KKK blasted another Birmingham church, this time killing four young black girls and injuring 22 others.
The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963 came to represent the horrors of a racially divided America, convincing many people that racism was evil and deadly. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the bombing “one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.”
Throughout the summer of 1964, more than 30 churches were burned or bombed in Mississippi as African-Americans attempted to register to vote in what became known as Freedom Summer.
Attacks on black churches re-emerged in the mid-1990s, with dozens of mysterious church burnings across the South, including Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana and both of the Carolinas.
“An attack on black churches is an attack on the very nerve center of the black community,” said then-liaison for the Christian Coalition, Earl Walker Jackson, Sr. in 1996.
Throughout history, the South has been the focus for violent white supremacy groups looking to carry out racist attacks on the black church community, but black churches in other parts of the country have also been targeted.
Just hours after President Obama was elected in 2008, a white man and several accomplices burned the Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Massachusetts, sending shock waves across a nation that had just elected its first black president.
• Brennan Weiss can be reached at bweiss@washingtontimes.com.
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