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Church pastors plead for action
By Errin Haines
The Associated Press
National Coalition For Burned Churches board member the Rev. Daniel Donaldson, left, and National Coalition For Burned Churches president and executive director the Rev. Terrance G. Mackey speak Friday in Atlanta.
-- John Bazemore
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ATLANTA -- Several pastors of burned Southern churches came together Friday to call on President Bush to make the issue of church burning a national priority.
The recent fires that have damaged or destroyed 10 rural Alabama churches highlight a serious problem that is hardly new, said Rose Johnson-Mackey, program director for the National Coalition of Burned Churches and Community Empowerment. She noted there have been 59 church fires in Alabama in the last five years -- an average of about one a month.
"Until President Bush denounces the church burnings in Alabama, it is not a national priority. Then the resources will flow. The nation needs those resources to be brought to bear," she said.
The Charleston, S.C.-based coalition, which claims 200 member churches, was established in 1997 following a series of church arsons.
"We knew churches would continue to burn across this country and somebody needed to be there to help them recover," said the Rev. Terrance G. Mackey Sr., president and executive director of the coalition.
It was at the ruins of Mackey's charred church, Mount Zion A.M.E. in Greeleyville, S.C., in 1996 that former President Clinton condemned church burnings and made their investigation and prosecution a priority. Clinton established a church burning task force and pushed for federal legislation against church arsons.
Race was found to be the motivation in a relatively small number of arson cases during a period in the mid-1990s in which arson increased at both black and white churches.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference spokesman Dexter Wimbish said every American citizen should be allowed to worship without fear or intimidation. He added that church burnings should qualify as hate crimes.
Five Alabama churches were burned on Feb. 3, and four more were burned on Feb. 7. Another was burned Feb. 11. Investigators have said they don't know a motive, but there is no racial pattern. Five of the churches had white congregations and five black. All were Baptist, the dominant faith in the region.
The Rev. Glenn Harris of Spring Valley Baptist Church in Gainesville -- one of the four burned Feb. 7 -- said those who burned his church's sanctuary have not discouraged the congregation that has worshipped there since 1876.
"You have failed in that effort," he said at a news conference Friday. "We are determined to rebuild. We are praying for the perpetrators. The God they hate is the only God that can save them."