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In the 10 days following the June massacre of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, six other predominantly black churches across the South burned.
The causes of the fires differed. Electrical wiring is believed to have started one of the blazes. Lightning is thought to have struck the Mt. Zion AME Baptist Church in Greeleyville, South Carolina (which in 1995 was set on fire by two members of the Ku Klux Klan). Arson is to blame for the burning of at least two of the churches. And authorities have labeled another fire as “suspicious.”
All six fires are under federal investigation, but regardless of what those investigations conclude, a burning black church in the U.S. will always carry associations of all-American terror.
There was the 1822 burning of the same AME church in Charleston by white residents after a slave revolt. The mob of 300 white people in Cincinnati who burned dozens of black homes, churches and businesses in 1829. The 14-year period, from 1954 to 1968, when almost every week an American black church was bombed. The 39 black churches set on fire by arsonists in 1995 and 1996, and the four black churches in Mississippi and Alabama set aflame on a single day in 2006.
In August, Scott Carrier, a Peabody Award-winning former NPR producer and “This American Life” alum, made a request of the listeners of his popular podcast “Home of the Brave.”
