Denying Church Fires' Link to Race
The Story | ||
| Synopsis | ||
| Civil Trial | ||
| Brown vs. Board of Education | ||
The Filmmaker | ||
| Michael Chandler Interview | ||
 | Michael Chandler Editorial | |
| Michael Chandler Friday, May 1, 1998 © 1999 San Francisco Chronicle This week my film on the burning by Klansmen of two black churches in South Carolina will play at the San Francisco Film Festival. I filmed more than a year's time in a small community where three of the men who burned the churches had grown up. From the beginning I decided not to make a survey of the burnings across the South, but instead to limit my investigation to one community, to talk to the men who did the crimes and to look inside the mind of a racist. I began this film because I was upset with the coverage in national and local newspapers. I had just read Daniel Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners" and found his sentence about Kristallnacht hauntingly apt: To destroy a community's institutions is psychologically almost the same and almost as satisfying as destroying its people. Major newspapers were burying the story. Some ran a headline at the time proclaiming, "One-Third of Black Churches Burned by Blacks." When I would tell friends what subject I was filming, I would invariably have that headline quoted back to me, but never its converse: "Two-Thirds of Black Churches Burned by Whites." No sooner had I made my first trip the South than the black-church backlash began in earnest. On July 8, 1996, on the Editorial page of the Wall St. Journal, Michael Fumento declared the burnings 'a myth, probably a deliberate hoax', a plot by the Atlanta-based Center for Democratic Renewal to drum up support for its progressive agenda. Fumento's ranting was reinforced in more sober fashion by respected journalist Michael Kelly, then a reporter writing for the New Yorker. Kelly gave an in-depth analysis, backed by interviews with Southern law enforcement personnel, which stated that 'the true picture of black-church fires is less clear, and less apocalyptic, than what the public has been led to believe.' But Kelly, too, had his ideological axe to grind. He would later become editor of The New Republic, until his Clinton-bashing became so strident that the publisher let him go. Newspapers began treating us to a familiar litany of arsonists: the pastor who burned his own church in South Carolina, the white fireman who set a blaze in Alabama, and the unstable thirteen year-old girl in North Carolina. We never heard about the cross burning in front of the church in Heflin, Alabama, the arson accompanied by racial epithets in Meridian, Mississippi, or the two fire-bombings in Maury County, Tennessee  all committed by whites against black churches for racial
reasons. In fact, what was striking about the coverage of the burnings
was the palpable need to find a reason, any reason, for the fires, other
than race. The favorite explanation was copycat arson, implying that
mimics could not also be racists, followed by anti-theism, more accurate
reporting, rural isolation and targeting believers of God. There is no
way to know how many churches burned for racial reasons. A reporter
close to the story in South Carolina told me that he estimated one-third
of the burnings in his state were hate crimes. The four Klansmen
featured in the film all received Federal sentences ranging from 15 to
21 years. That is real time, eighty-five percent of which must be
served. The church fires have subsided, but not because they were
fabricated. Stiff sentences have a way of sobering even the most
outspoken racists. It was the government, not the press, that made the
burnings go away. 
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