ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 9, 1996 TAG: 9606100034
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
NOTE: Above
President Clinton spoke out Saturday against the rising number of fires devastating black churches throughout the South and announced stepped-up federal measures to arrest the arsonists.
In his weekly radio address, Clinton appealed to people with clues to come forward, and asked all Americans to look into their hearts for ways to stop the destruction.
``We must come together, black and white alike, to smother the fires of hatred that fuel this violence,'' the president said.
As he spoke, the president's desk in the Oval Office was flanked by two of the more than 30 pastors arriving in Washington this weekend from ravaged black churches to pray together and ask for answers to the crimes.
In his address, Clinton told the story of one of the pastors, the Rev. Terrance Mackey, whose Mt. Zion AME Church in Greeleyville, S.C., was burned down last summer. The church has now been rebuilt. Two men, one said to have been carrying a Ku Klux Klan membership card, have been arrested and are awaiting trial for that fire and for the burning of another nearby church.
``We do not now have evidence of a national conspiracy,'' the president said, ``but it is clear that racial hostility is the driving force behind a number of these incidents. This must stop.''
The president also announced the establishment of a toll-free number, (888)ATF-FIRE, set up to accept clues in solving the crimes.
And he endorsed a bipartisan bill now before the House that would make it easier for prosecutors to bring federal civil rights charges against suspected arsonists.
The bill, co-sponsored by Illinois Republican Henry Hyde and Michigan Democrat John Conyers Jr., is known as the Church Arson Prevention Act.
Emerging from the Oval Office, the two pastors commended the president for his support.
``He's done very well,'' Mackey said. ``We appreciate it very much. It helps the parishioners of the church to know that the president stands behind us and with us'' against ``these hideous crimes committed against the church.''
The second pastor, the Rev. Alvin Anderson, whose Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in Columbia, Tenn., was heavily damaged by a January 1995 firebombing, endorsed the high-level attention now being given to the fires. He said it was better to speak out than to keep silent, out of fear of playing into the hands of publicity-seeking arsonists.
Anderson said it was especially important to break the silence in communities where such hate crimes are played down or kept ``hush-hush.''
``I feel like after this, more people will come out and speak out against this,'' he said.
Three white men are now serving time in federal prison for civil rights crimes in the Friendship Missionary fire and the burning of another local black church and a tavern.
The culprits, Anderson said, ``made the statement that `we are just trying to put blacks back in their place.'''
The pastors gathered in Washington on a day when the front pages of newspapers carried scenes from the latest destruction: flames shooting through the wooden sanctuary of Matthews-Murkland Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, N.C.
While in Washington, the pastors plan to hold a church service and to discuss the crimes with Attorney General Janet Reno, other top law enforcement officials and their congressional representatives.
Thirty such fires set in black churches since the beginning of 1995 have been under investigation by the Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, with arrests in five cases so far.
(EDITORS: STORY CAN TRIM HERE)
Many of the ruined churches were old and vulnerable, set in rural, isolated places. Though at least some were said to have been underinsured or uninsured, they had deep historic and personal significance, built in many cases by hand by members' ancestors.
The pastors' visit to Washington was organized by the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., which represents an array of Protestant and Orthodox denominations with more than 50 million members. The council led a team of investigators from denominational and civil rights organizations on trips to the sites of the destroyed and damaged churches.
The team walked where the acrid smell of the fires still hung in the air and the ashes were under their feet, said one member, Diane Porter, a senior executive with the Episcopal Church. Porter found it chilling ``to walk in a place where there was such absolute hate.''
Many of the older pastors she spoke with on her trip harked back to the days of the civil rights movement, when the Ku Klux Klan and others targeted black churches for burning.
But based on other interviews the team conducted, Porter left the South wondering if the new fires might have origins that are harder to trace than the Ku Klux Klan - in ``hate groups that are more covert than the Klan, but just as deadly.''
Perhaps the fires have become a kind of initiation rite for such hate groups, she suggested. ``If you want to prove your manhood you have to burn down a church.''
But a battery of local state and federal law enforcement officials have been wary of assigning any clear link among the fires.
Four more churches have been burned in suspected arsons since May 21, when the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing into what was even then a rising frequency of church fires.
At the emotional hearing, top law enforcement officials assured the committee that they were struggling to find connections between the fires and to arrest culprits.
They suggested they might never find a grand conspiracy at the heart of the arsons. But so far, they said, many clues and a few arrests point to a more insidious form of racial hatred.
``If we locked up every church arsonist in the United States, it's not going to stop it,'' said Robert M. Stewart of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, which has seen five churches burned since the beginning of 1995.
Since the hearing, churches have been burned in Cerro Gordo, Lumberton and Charlotte, N.C., and in Greensboro, Ala.
LENGTH: Long : 117 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. 1. (headshot) Mackey. color. 2. Rev. Larry Hill,by CNBpastor of Matthews-Murkland Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, N.C.,
looks over its charred remains Friday.