Mourners gather at Emanuel AMA the morning after the shooting
In the wake of the murder of nine black Americans in a historic Charleston church, a spate of suspicious fires have burned black churches throughout the south. At least three, in Macon, Georgia, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Knoxville, Tennessee, have been
identified as arson.
The series of fires – some of them suspicious and possible hate crimes — came in the week following a murderous rampage by a white supremacist who shot and killed nine people at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C.
The fires also occurred at a time when there is increasing public pressure to remove the Confederate flag – one of the last hallmarks of white superiority — from government buildings and public places as well as banning assorted Confederate flag merchandise sold in retails stores and online.
At the Knoxville church, the arsonist set fires in multiple locations around the church, including lighting hay bales set in front of the church's door.
Given the long history of church arsons perpetrated by white supremacists and pro-segregation groups as well as the current red-hot fury over the Confederate flag and its legacy as symbol of both those things, the obvious question is whether these arsons were racially motivated. Both the FBI and the ATF are investigating, but the short answer is that it's too early to say.
The National Fire Protection Association reports that between 2007 and 2011, there were an average of 280 intentionally set fires at houses of worship in America each year, although a small percentage of those took place at other religious organizations, like funeral homes. One of the organization’s staffers, Marty Ahrens, said that tracking church arson has become much more complicated since reporting standards changed in the late ‘90s. Sometimes, fires that are reported to the National Fire Incident Reporting System are considered “suspicious,” but they can’t be reported as arson until they’re definitively ruled “intentional.” Even then, it’s difficult to determine what motivated an act of arson. “To know that something is motivated by hate, you either have to know who did it or they have to leave you a message in some way that makes it very obvious,” she said. “There are an awful lot of [intentionally set fires] that are not hate crimes—they’re run-of-the-mill kids doing stupid things.”
If there's 280 intentionally set church fires a year in America—a depressing thought in itself—then four in the last week-ish is well within the average horrible range. As for how many of those were intended as race-specific hate crimes, we simply don't know. Yet, at least.