ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, June 24, 1996 TAG: 9606240010
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
IN A telephone conversation last week, a caller criticized us for editorializing about the arson attacks on black churches.
White churches have been burned too, he pointed out. And besides, why focus on a few arsons against black communities while failing to mention the black crime wave, including rape and murder and other offenses, perpetrated every day in this country against white people?
Just another eruption of bigotry. Still, the call troubles. Is this what we're coming to - race war?
Let's hope not.
It was good to see Gov. George Allen at the White House last week, meeting with President Clinton and other governors to coordinate strategy. Outrage, like law enforcement, ought to be bipartisan.
But more than that, the rebuilding needs to be communitywide. It's not enough just to track down arsonists - or, in the case of Pulaski County last week, sentencing to detention and community service two teen-agers who burned a cross in a black family's yard.
The church burnings are less the issue in themselves than as symbols of black pain and white racism.
This is why communities need to come together in shared commitment to fight hatred and prejudice. This is why it is heartening that the rebuilding of burned churches in the South is becoming a community affair, with volunteers stepping forward and contributions pouring in.
That we control our destiny is what James Baldwin, at the end of his famous essay, was trying to tell us:
``Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we - and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others - do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.
"If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!''
LENGTH: Short : 46 linesby CNB