FORUM ^ j
Church burnings
should ignite more
protests
Julianne
Malveaux
Guest
Columnist
It's possible that light
ning may have caused one
of the fires. Another may
be the result of faulty elec
tricity. Still, in the past cou
ple of weeks, there were
fires at churches in North
Carolina, South Carolina,
Georgia, Florida, Ohio and
Tennessee. At least two
have been
ruled arson
by local fire
departments.
Several are
still being
investigated.
Is it a coinci
dence that
churches are
burning in
the days
since the
massacre at
Emanuel
A . M . E .
Church in
Charleston,
South
Carolina?
Obama spoke to the histor
ical importance of Black
churches when he eulo
gized the Rev. Clementa
Pinckney. The church, he
said, "is and always has
These church burnings
fire me up. They ought to
fire us all up. The burnings
ought to spark a resistance
to racism unlike any we
have seen in the past. These
church fires ought to infuse
us with the passion of Bree
Newsome, the African
American woman [from
Charlotte, North Carolina]
who climbed up a pole and
snatched the Confederate
flag from the pole outside
the South Carolina State
House. She didn't wait for
Gov. Nikki Haley to take
the Confederate flag down;
she was too fired up to
wait. After all, Haley's
post-massacre announce
ment that the flag should
not fly on State House
grounds is symbolic until
the South Carolina legisla
bolize the energy needed
for change.
In the wake of these
church burnings, the right
eous need to be fired up
and ready to go in disman
tling the racism that has
plagued our nation since its
founding. We need to col
lectively debunk the myth
that the Confederate flag is
about history and heritage
- it is simply about White
supremacy. We need to go
to school boards, especially
in the South, to demand
curriculum revisions when
young people are force-fed
inaccurate history about the
;i u/o.
V_IVI1 "ttl.
We need to
put those
employers
"on blast"
when they
can't "find"
any African
Americans
to hire. We
ought to
encourage
the Office of
Federal
Contract
Compliance
Programs
(OFCCP) to
ensure that
those who
get federal
contracts comply with the
law ? that those who get
federal contracts do affir
mative action hiring.
The Mother Emanuel
massacre demonstrates that
"To set fire to a
Black church, to kill
people in a Black
church, to bomb a
church strikes at the
very heart of our
community.'"
Veasey Conway/The Morning News via AP
Smoke rises from Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal church, early
Wednesday, July 1,2015, in Greeleyville, S.C. The African-American church,
which was burned down by the Ku Klux Klan in 1995, caught fire late Tuesday
night.
been the center of African
American life." He went on
to describe Black churches
as "hush harbors" for
enslaved people, "praise
houses where their free
descendants could gather
and shout hallelujah, rest
stops for the weary along
the Underground Railroad,
bunkers for the foot sol
diers of the Civil Rights
Movement."
To set fire to a Black
church, to kill people in a
Black church, to bomb a
church strikes at the very
heart of our community.
These acts of terrorism are
meant to intimidate, to send
a message. That these
recent fires have happened
in the wake of protests
against the vile
Confederate flag suggests
that these fires may be
pushback from the protests,
a continuation of work of
the man who murdered
nine people in Emanuel
A.M.E. Church. Whoever
is burning churches,
though, forgers that it is not
1815, but 2015. The intim
idation tactics that worked
during slavery won't work
now.
ture votes to take the flag
down .Meanwhile,
Alabama Gov. Robert
Bentley, not needing leg
islative approval, ordered
four Confederate flags to
be taken down from the
Capitol grounds that served
as the first headquarters of
the Confederacy.
A South Carolina
woman, Edith S. Childs,
came up with a slogan
when candidate Obama
visited Greenwood (popu
lation about 23,000) for an
event that drew a scant 20
people. To energize the
small crowd, Childs
walked through the crowd
attempting to fire them up.
The call and response
phrase, "fired up, ready to
go" not only galvanized the
small gathering, but
became a central chant of
Obama's 2008 campaign.
Used everywhere from
civil rights gatherings to
country clubs, "fired up"
captured the energy of the
first Obama campaign.
Indeed, organizations used
the "fired up" slogan to get
people out to vote, to work
on issues other than the
Obama campaign, to sym
racism is alive and well in
these United States. We
experience it everywhere
we turn, from our national
statues (fewer than 10
Black women are com
memorated in public stat
ues) to persistent housing
segregation. Too many of
us have accepted this
racism, or feel powerless to
fight it. Thus, it persists.
It was gratifying to see
the multiracial crowds that
mobilized in solidarity with
the Mother Emanuel Nine.
It would be interesting to
see how many of those
mobilized are willing to be
involved in anti-racist
work. All of us need to be
"fired up, ready to go" to
persistently and consistent
ly dismantle the racism that
is woven into the very fab
ric of our national con
sciousness. President
Obama, are you in?
Julianne Malveaux is a
Washington, D.C.-based
author and economist. She
is the former president of
Bennett College, also. She
can be reached at
www.juliannemal veaux .co
m.
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