FIRST THE FLAME, THEN THE BLAME

By Jack E. White

When he first saw the smoldering ruins of his Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in Fruitvale, Tennessee, on Jan. 13, 1995, the Rev. Sherron Eugene Brown could not imagine anything worse. Then the agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms went to work on him. "They took me and the church treasurer to the federal building, put us in two separate rooms and asked us all kinds of questions about our insurance policies, about whether we were behind in paying off our mortgage or if any members of the congregation were angry," Brown remembers. "They were acting as if we had set our own church on fire."

As of last week--when the Rising Sun Missionary Baptist church in Greensboro, Alabama, and a former sanctuary at Matthews-Murkland Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, were torched--30 black churches in an eight-state arc from Louisiana to Virginia had been burned over the past 18 months. Only a handful of these arson cases have been solved. Such senseless destruction strikes at the soul of congregations. But their anguish deepens when they, the victims, also become suspects.

As Attorney General Janet Reno and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin will hear in meetings this week with the pastors of several burned-out churches, such misguided scrutiny has been occurring all too frequently in the federal investigation of the fires. Dozens of pastors charge that despite the long history of racist terrorism throughout the region, investigators are not vigorously pursuing the possibility that the fires were set by white hate groups. Instead, the ministers charge, they, their families and their congregations have been subjected to harsh interrogation, lie-detector tests and harassment at their homes and jobs. In one instance, a 17-year-old female member of the Rev. Algie Jarrett's Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Bolivar, Tennessee, was taken out of a classroom by an FBI agent and questioned so roughly that she broke down in tears. Says Jarrett: "He tried to make her say something that wasn't true."

"In most cases the lines of inquiry with regard to white supremacists are not being followed by any of the authorities," charges the Rev. Mac Charles Jones, associate general secretary for racial justice of the National Council of Churches, who has visited dozens of burned-out churches over the past three months. "The questioning has been about problems in the churches, about the pastors, about the churches' money or insurance. That was the first line of inquiry, and sometimes it has been the only one."

This is an unsettling allegation. If Jones and the other ministers are right, hundreds of agents from the AFT, FBI and state agencies have been chasing after scapegoats rather than real culprits. The issue surfaced at a hearing last month by the House Judiciary Committee in testimony from witnesses as diverse as Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Rev. Earl W. Jackson Jr. of the Christian Coalition. But their charges came only after several high-ranking officials from the Department of Justice, the FBI and the ATF denied that they had received any complaints about the focus of the investigations.

There is clearly more here than a color-coded difference of opinion. Either the ministers are grossly exaggerating their mistreatment or top Clinton Administration officials are not getting adequate information about their agents' conduct in the field. Deval Patrick, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, insists that every lead is being followed. And he notes that in several cases whites with ties to racist groups have been convicted and sent to prison. Indeed, last week a Baptist congregation in South Carolina opened a new front against the terrorists by filing a civil damage suit accusing the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of being responsible for torching their church.

The real problem is deep-seated black suspicion of law enforcement that dates back to the days when J. Edgar Hoover's FBI put more zeal into collecting dirt on Martin Luther King Jr. than into protecting civil-rights workers. It does not help that two ATF agents who face potential disciplinary action for taking part in the racist shenanigans at the so-called Good Ol' Boys Roundup in May 1995 were originally part of the church-burning task force. They have since been reassigned.

That was a step in the right direction, but it will take more to allay the misgivings of Southern blacks, almost all of whom believe the fires have been set by organized hate groups. They are unmoved by Patrick's insistence that to date there is no evidence of a widespread conspiracy. Even if a vigorous, thorough investigation is taking place, it does not matter if that investigation's results are not believed by those who have lost the most in the church fires, and they won't, unless blacks also become convinced that every possibility is being seriously considered--including the alarming notion that some of the investigators are themselves compromised by racist attitudes.