John Saillant, visiting assistant professor of Afro-American studies, says the current rash of church arsons in the South is nothing new and its roots in American history go as far back as the 18th and 19th centuries. Linda Mahdesian of the George Street Journal interviewed Saillant about the historical precedents for these current attacks.
What are the historical roots of this disturbing phenomenon?
This is an old pattern that dates back to at least the 1770s. The turning point came when evangelical groups, including Baptists, began preaching to blacks in large numbers. Then came black preachers, then black congregations and eventually separate black churches. Attacks on these churches were very clearly an attack on black self-determination. In the 1790s, black refugees in Sierra Leone, Africa, built a 400-seat church for themselves. But the imperial forces of the British crown destroyed the church; they saw it as a threat to white governance. And in the slave codes, blacks were barred from congregating.
The recent church burnings challenge the notion of major progress in race relations in America. Have we progressed?
I don't think we've progressed all that much; we've just changed things around a bit. ... It's more like a crab-like motion instead of progression. ... I consider the society we live in as a post-slavery society, not a free society. Our society is still defined in some ways by slavery. For example, on average, black people are poorer than white people.
In the Atlantic World for about the past 400 years, black people have formed a kind of reserve pool of labor. They've been employed when it's been profitable and have been discarded when it's not been profitable. That idea is the essence of slavery, which requires a huge pool of people to utilize. ... That situation has continued in our own time and doesn't include just black people anymore. But large masses of black people are retained as this kind of reserve labor pool. During World War I, there was lot of work for black Americans because a lot of white Americans were away at war. During the Great Northern Migration there were great manufacturing opportunities for black men in cities - those have shrunk. The economic system plays the black population like an accordion. This was the essence of slavery and this still survives.
Are these attacks a variation on the theme of angry white males taking out their economically triggered frustrations on blacks?
That's one element - where whites are taking it out on blacks. These are bad economic times, with lots of layoffs and downsizing. There's a long history of white people taking out their frustrations on blacks in difficult times - a kind of displaced anger from a suffering that's economic in nature. I bet you'd see a cyclical pattern of this kind of violence in bad economic times. But I don't think whites understand it that way. They're not thinking "I should be making $20,000 at a good job, but I'm not, so I'm going to burn down a black church." There's probably a meanness and frustration looking for a vent. We have a natural vent built into our culture - it's a racist one. These aren't extremist groups plotting, they're just down-home people in a bad mood, letting their racial frustrations spill over. One friend of a man arrested for burning down a church unwittingly made an insightful point that this is deer-hunting season and his friend was upset that he didn't bag a deer. Another suspect said he and his buddies were drunk. Those kinds of triggers can set off this racist violence.
One of the people arrested was a 13-year-old girl. What does that say about the next generation and their racial attitudes?
That's not unusual. In the 19th and 20th centuries, many lynchings were like parties. They weren't always done secretively at night. These parties were attended by big crowds of families with children. The same impulse that gave rise to the Ku Klux Klan in the 1860s is giving rise to these burnings. You don't need an organized group. Racism is its own organizer. It's like child abuse. You don't need a Child Abuse Network to have violence against children. You don't need a KKK to get racist violence started because it can happen all on its own. You can't lock it into this little box and label it "extremist group" even though it makes you feel comfortable.
Is this business as usual among racists?
The impulse to frame it as a conspiracy by extremist groups is an attempt to contain it, to limit it. I'd be surprised to find any such conspiracy. But people want to limit it, which implies "it's not us, it's not normal, it's not typical, it's just a fringe group." I really don't think so. People don't study American history well enough. There are not enough courses offered on African-American history and religion, so people don't know the basics. ... We still have a lot of places in America where the hand of slavery is still pretty heavy.