Bill Clinton, Racism, And The Black Church Burnings Lorenzo Komboa Ervin Last week, January 16, 1997 the U.S. Department of Justice [DOJ] released its year end report on black church burnings in the South. After years of cover-ups, denials and stonewalling, federal government spokespersons now claim "success" in fighting these racist attacks. They say they arrested at least a third of all those who torched the churches, and that the others will be likely captured soon. The government spokesperson intimated that the Clinton administration and his DOJ was "very much interested" in stopping the burnings. Yet, this same Bill Clinton and his DOJ pretended for over two years that there was "only a few fires", that "hardly any" were racially motivated, and generally tried to ignore the entire matter. However when this became a serious media issue in the electoral year of 1996, Clinton spoke out as did other government officials. Clinton then "denounced" the burnings and the DOJ admitted that there had been almost 150 fires over the previous 18 months, and that at least half of them were acts of racist terrorism by "known racist groups or individuals." In the Spring of 1996, Clinton promised church leaders and civil rights activists like Jesse Jackson and Joseph Lowery of the Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Council that he would assign 200 federal law enforcement agents to these cases, but the first thing the agents did was make the pastors and churchgoers of the burned churches into the main suspects. They were forced to take lie detectors tests, grilled for hours on end, and told they were lying about how the crimes occurred. Because of this federal government attitude of blaming the victims, most of the actual arrests had been by state and local authorities, rather than by the FBI, ATF or other federal agencies. The burnings of the churches were strange and distressing, but the strangest thing of all is that although the civil rights movement developed in the South as a mass protest movement, there had not been any mass protests over the torchings until November 2, 1996 when the Ad Hoc Coalition Against Racism and Police Brutality held a demonstration in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee to not only protest the church burnings, but also the fire bombing of two local activists' homes earlier that year. In January of last year, Ralph Williams, a city bus driver had his house burned down for apparently bringing a racial discrimination lawsuit against his employer, the Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority; and then last Summer, Rev. Amos Baker had his duplex apartment made uninhabitable after a firebomb was tossed inside destroying all the furniture and property inside, apparently to intimidate or retaliate against him for conducting a camapaign in the black community against school consolidation. Although the Coalition is a Southern-based predominately black group, over 100 persons came to Chattanooga for the event from all over the U.S., from as far away as Vermont, Maine, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, New York, Nevada and New Mexico, in addition to folks from other parts of the South, who also came. They joined with 50-75 other persons called out for this emergency demonstration from all over the city. The march, though small in numbers, was extremely spirited and got a great deal of local media attention, even though local and national press had tried to ignore it for months. They marched through the business and tourist district downtown, and through the main streets of the city, disrupting traffic and startling tourists. Then marched on the city-county courthouse for an hour-long rally against racist violence, and in support of the victims of this terrorism. A number of groups came to this event, the IWW, Youth Empowerment Network of Chicago, SE Center for Ecological Awareness, Black Autonomy, Native Forest Network, Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, Workers World Party, Local Org. Comm.-MMM, People Wanting A Change, the Bus Riders Union, Center for Democratic Rights, the Chicago A-Zone, AANCO, Chattanooga Operation PUSH, and a number of others. Speaker after speaker accused the racist governments in Chattanooga and other parts of the South of quietly allowing these fire bombings, acts of police police brutality, and other acts of terrorism. But they also denounced the National Council of Churches, SCLC, Jesse Jackson, and other so-called civil rights activist groups for not leading similar demonstrations all over the South, instead of depending on Bill Clinton. So the real issue is that Black people and the poor are being sold out by liberal politicians, treacherous preachers, pseudo-militants, and sellout civil rights groups. There should have been militant demonstrations long before now, and it is only because of such treachery that they have not been. The fire bombings continue, in fact, just this month a church was fire bombed outside Chattanooga because they opposed publicly racial "tracking" and consolidation of the city-county school system. Other preachers and activists have been threatened to "shut up" during the Martin Luther King annual ceremonies, which apparently angered some white racists. In the South, we must keep up the fight and have more demonstrations against racism and oppression, and mobilize the black community and their allies for self-defense. As one person said at the Nov. 2nd demo "If the government ain't gone do it, the preachers ain't gone do it, if the civil rights groups ain't gone do it, then clearly we grassroots people is gone have to do it!" Back to Anarchism And The Black Revolution