By The Rev. Dr. Mac Charles Jones
Associate to the General Secretary for Racial Justice, The National
Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.
JUNE 27, 1996
Mr. Chairman, Distinguished Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sisters and Brethren.
On behalf of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, I wish to thank you for the opportunity to be part of these historic hearings on one of the most critical issues confronting our nation today the epidemic of domestic terror directed at the African American community and the underlying racism fueling the fires at scores of Black churches across this land.
The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA is the preeminent expression in the United States of the movement for Christian unity. Its Protestant and Orthodox member communions, to which 52 million people belong, work together and with other church bodies, to build a wide sense of Christian community and to deepen the experience of unity.
While
I do not purport to speak for all members of the communions
constituent to the National Council of the Churches of Christ of the
USA, I do speak for our policy-making body, the General Assembly,
whose 270 members are selected by those communions in numbers
proportionate to their size. I wish to commend this august committee
for deliberating on bipartisan legislation that would outlaw a wide
range of hate crimes, including the deliberate arson and desecration
of houses of worship, and I urge the Senate to enact this draft
legislation as swiftly as your colleagues in the House did last week
with the Hyde-Conyers bill.
I wish also to take this opportunity to commend the Congressional Slack Caucus and its chairman Representative Donald Payne for holding hearings last week on the church burnings.
This committee's action today will send a powerful signal of concern to the African American community that their most sacrosanct institution, the church -- will be protected against acts of domestic terror.
The frustration and anger is welling up as Black people watch church after church burn to the ground in a seemingly endless orgy of hate, as they witness the destruction of what has become for millions of African -Americans a sanctuary and refuge of last resort, a house where they can find the love, respect and fellowship denied them by society at large.
Mr. Chairman, on June 9 & 10, the National Council of the Churches of Christ of the USA brought to Washington a delegation of 38 pastors, deacons and families whose churches and homes had been burned, firebombed, shotgunned and vandalized over the past two years in seven southeastern states. The delegation met with Attorney General Reno, Secretary of the Treasury Rubin and other high-ranking officials of the Justice and Treasury Departments. Two of the pastors met with President Clinton.
In all their meetings, the delegation expressed passionately the pain and loss that they and their communities experienced from the attacks on their churches and homes and from the indignities and affronts meted out to them by local, state and federal law enforcement agents assigned to investigate the crimes. They complained that in far too many cases the victims were being treated like the criminals.
Since their visit, eight more churches have been burned across the south, six of them predominantly Black or multi-racial churches. This plague continues to spread its ugly tentacles but more voices of condemnation are now being heard from every corner of this country.
Indeed, this crisis has generated a magnificent outpouring of concern and sympathy from people of all races and ethnicities. Furthermore. It is creating exciting new opportunities for dialogue and common action.
However, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. discovered during his lifetime, compassion and togetherness are wonderful antidotes to racism but by themselves they are insufficient. Today, it must be accompanied by an honest recognition that racism is not a thing of the past but remains a living and vibrant force of negativity in the here and now. It is expressed in overt and covert ways too numerous to mention. These manifestations are ugly and dehumanizing to all of us, Black and White, Jew and Gentile, Christian and Muslim.
Racism does not simply render Blacks the victims and whites the victimizers. Racism victimizes us all. It robs us of our common humanity, defames our sense of decency, undermines our respect for each other and for ourselves. Racism is more than prejudice. It is more than bigotry. It is the insidious entrenchment in our culture and in our institutions of attitudes and actions that deny millions the opportunity to fulfill their human potential and utilize their God-given talents for the common good.
The test of democracy in America is its ability to deliver on the promises of racial equality and racial justice. not just as it is codified in the letter of our laws but as it is acted out in the day-to-day deeds of all Americans.
Mr. Chairman, the world is watching America today. Can our beloved country truly exercise moral leadership in the global community by ignoring the open wounds of racism or worse, by pouring salt into those wounds with divisive rhetoric and with public policies laden with demagogic and race-coded language.
The issue of racism in America is not an issue of integration or assimilation but of common ground. We must understand that what connects the tree, the lily and the rose is not their sameness but their rootedness in the earth, the common ground that provides the nourishment and power for all that lives.
The other concern that the burning of churches, synagogues and mosques raises is the barrenness of spirituality in our national culture. One of the reasons that we at the National Council of the Churches of Christ of the USA are focusing so fervently on racism and white supremacy is that hatred based on race has weakened our spiritual moorings, thus creating intolerance and a climate of violence that gives license to the burning and vandalizing of houses of worship.
When the Godly spirit of love, justice and mercy is absent and when the culture's obsession is the accumulation of capital and the exercise of raw power the nation is in the midst of self-destruction. So as we rebuild and restore churches we must reclaim our essential selves, our spirit and our humanity.
We in the NCCC are convinced that both the overall climate of racism and the organized hate groups spawned by this climate are primarily responsible for this wave of domestic terrorism. These are not random, disconnected acts carried out by "disturbed" or "deranged" youngsters but rather a systematic campaign of intimidation directed and orchestrated by organized white supremacist groups. These groups are in contact with each other in a national and international network. They are armed, violent and more sophisticated in their tactics than the old-style Ku Klux Klan. Their common denominator is an ideology akin to Hitler's Nazism. They are currently misusing and manipulating naive white teenage boys and girls as pawns to carry out their dirty deeds.
Indeed, Mr. Chairman, we as a nation are at risk of losing thousands of our white youth to organized hate crime syndicates. Moreover, we are at risk of losing even larger numbers of white males to the growing militia movements and to a host of right-wing groups created by the deep-seated economic insecurities encountered by millions of Americans.
We call on federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to mount a vigorous investigation of the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, the Neo-Nazi Skinheads and other white supremacist groups engaged in these campaigns of terror. Expose them for what they really are and prosecute the perpetrators of these heinous crimes. We also call on our government to investigate the penetration of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies by white supremacist groups.
We have destroyed Jim Crow segregation but we have not yet triumphed over racism.
We are saddened to say, Mr. Chairman, that white supremacist ideas and practices are pervasive in modern American culture. Hate does not reside exclusively in white supremacist groups. Hate and bigotry permeates all respectable institutions in both the public and private sectors; in the halls of government as well as in the boardrooms of corporate America.
White supremacy cannot be cured with gentle measures. This cancerous organ in the body politic must be cut out definitively. It is born of the false notion that skin color affords rights to some that others should not enjoy. It is fed and nourished by a system of privilege and power based on race. It began as a sickness of the soul but it has evolved into a sickness of our system. It is the responsibility of clerical leadership to mend those broken souls and it is the responsibility of civic and corporate leadership to rectify the systemic injustices.
We must replace this climate of intolerance towards those who are different from the majority with a climate of intolerance for hatred and bigotry towards any group of Americans.
For us to remain one nation under God we must have liberty and justice for all Americans, irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity.
We commend President Clinton for his forceful moral leadership on this issue and we urge him to go even further in leading the entire nation in an all-out war against racism and white supremacy in the coming months. We are appreciative of the tireless work of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Deval Patrick and Assistant Treasury Secretary Jim Johnson who lead the President's task force investigating the church burnings. Theirs is an unenviable undertaking and they deserve our support and cooperation.
In the coming weeks and months. the National Council of the Churches of Christ of the USA will intensify its advocacy campaign on behalf of the churches that have been burned, firebombed and vandalized. We have established the Burned Churches Fund with a goal of raising $4 million to assist in the restoration of the destroyed churches. The Ford Foundation and seven other major foundations have joined forces to contribute $2.7 million to the Burned Churches Fund.
Tomorrow, we will continue visiting burned church sites throughout the southeast as we have been doing over the past four months. Along with our collaborators in this campaign, the Center for Democratic Renewal in Atlanta and the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, we will continue our own investigations into these crimes. Soon we will be undertaking a national tour of a dozen cities promoting a message of unity through dialogue among the various racial and ethnic groups in our country. We will hold ecumenical services and town meetings. We will engage local communities in frank, open discussions about racism and we will explore what we can all do pro-actively to confront this disease.
Fire can destroy or it can galvanize and purify. The burning bush in the story of the Exodus in the Hebrew scriptures was not consumed but rather was a prelude to liberation. The site of the burning bush became holy ground, the initiation of a movement. This prompts us to recall the image of the refiner who sends precious metals through the fires to bum away the impurities and leave that which is most valuable.
Is it possible that these fires can galvanize this nation and initiate a movement that will mobilize us against racism, white supremacy and hatred in all of its forms? Is it possible that these burned sites can become our holy ground on which we build and restore community? Is it possible that these fires are moral demands that we submit ourselves to the painful process of honest and truthful engagement in communities, hamlets, towns, cities, and rural countrysides until we are purged of our intolerance and of all attitudes of superiority?
Yes, we believe all of the above to be possible and we trust that the good people of this country will respond in such a way that will turn tragedy into triumph.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the Senate Judiciary Committee for this opportunity to share our thoughts and perspectives.
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