In a span of only 10 days, three separate Black churches were burned down in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana. Churchgoers, many of whom lived through Black church bombings and burnings during the Civil Rights movement, are left wondering: What’s going on?
We know that these church burnings are a way for whites to both incite terror in our communities and destroy an important site of Black community organizing and activism. They have done so for centuries.
Take for example, a memory that will always remain etched in our minds: the 1963 Klu Klux Klan bombing of the 16th Street Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four little girls.
The New York Times reports that hate crimes have gone up every year since Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, the majority in the form of anti-Black hate. The recent tragedy in Charleston in 2015, where a white terrorist shot and killed nine people at a Black church, is just one example.
Police have not yet determined whether the recent church burnings are connected, or are hate crimes, but the evidence is there.
“We’ll keep praying with a building or without a building,” said Curtis Zachary, the Deacon of Morning Star Baptist Church, which has taken in affected congregants from one of the burned churches. “You can burn a building, but you can’t take us, can’t break us.”