Simon Cox Blog: What It Means to Burn Down a Black Church

Tuesday, 7 June 2016

What It Means to Burn Down a Black Church

Exploring the relentless tradition of arson in the US.

“Mother dear, may I go downtown
Instead of out to play,
And march the streets of Birmingham
In a Freedom March today?”

“No, baby, no, you may not go,
For the dogs are fierce and wild,
And clubs and hoses, guns and jails
Aren’t good for a little child.”

- from “Ballad of Birmingham” by Dudley Randall

Some 60 years ago, the burning of black churches was a common form of racial violence; according to civil rights historian Taylor Branch, at the height of the civil rights movement, a black church was bombed or burned every week. Most historians agree that back then, opponents of black civil rights saw the burning of black churches as a way to reinforce pre-Civil War power structures, some of which had been legally dismantled with the abolition of slavery. The law may have granted black people their freedom, but racial violence reinforced the idea that white people still controlled where, how, and even whether they lived.

And yet, even in the ostensibly “post-racial” United States of the 21st century, the image of a burning black church was no less chilling to black Christians last June than it would have been in 1954. After a white shooter opened fire during a prayer meeting at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, five predominantly black churches across the South were set ablaze. Local law enforcement suspected arson in three of the fires.

That shouldn’t be surprising, said the Reverend Sharon Ellis Davis, an affiliate professor of pastoral care at McCormick Theological Seminary. “I think people don’t understand that trauma is something that exists when you wake up in the morning, when you turn on the news,” she said. “Trauma ...