While emphasizing that it's (supposedly) only a partial list, it appears that the Associated Press felt compelled today to try to claim that there's a long and recent history of murderous racist attacks on black churches (or predominantly black churches) in the U.S.
Somehow, the wire service forgot that a genuine trend needs to continue uninterrupted or at least have some consistency before it can legitimately be called a trend. What AP's list really shows is how out of the ordinary the horrible massacre allegedly committed by 21 year-old Dylann Roof on Wednesday in Charleston, South Carolina really was. AP's list might have been far more enlightening, fair and balanced if had included other recent murderous attacks at U.S. churches of all types. As far as I can tell from the list which follows, until the Charleston massacre, there had not been a congregant murdered in a black church since 1963, over a half-century ago.
Here is AP's list (presented in full for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes):
As seen above, the most recent event involving murder was in 1963, over a half-century ago.
Mississippi's Freedom Summer in 1964 was violent, but the church bombings which took place didn't kill or injure anyone — or AP would almost certainly told us that they did.
Separately, but quite useful to know in historical context, historian Josh Zeitz last year virtually celebrated the strategy — placing naive college kids from the Midwest and the Northeast in harm's way in a murderous environment — which arguably led to the murders of Andrew Goodman, and Michael (“Mickey”) Schwerner. You see, Freedom Summer's leadership believed that "no privileged group in history has ever given up anything without some kind of blood sacrifice." Well, they got what they sought — dead bodies and the continuation of bloody racial strife which may well have ceased being a major national issue if enforcement of the just-signed 1964 Civil Rights Act had been allowed to proceed without distraction.
As to the alleged wave of arsons in the mid-1990s, the AP appears to be perpetuating a scam.
An AP report in October 1998 summarized what a national task force found a few years after a wave of publicity about an alleged spike in black church burnings:
Key points:
- There was no clear pattern in the reported arson attacks.
- The entire episode has been accurately labeled "The Great Church Fire Propaganda Campaign," aka, as Scott Swett at American Thinker described it in 2011, "how an obscure radical group teamed up with a leftist national church organization, an unprincipled President and a legion of compliant news outlets to create a media firestorm -- one based entirely on lies." Journalist Michael Fumento found that those promoting the idea that there was an epidemic of racially motivated arsons against black churches "regularly ignored fires set by blacks and those that occurred in the early part of the decade, and labeled fires as arson that were not -- all in an apparent effort to make black church torchings appear to be escalating." Fumento also noted that certain states did not begin reporting on such fires until the mid-1990s, falsely creating the impression of a crime wave which came out of nowhere.
- During the course of "The Great Church Fire Propaganda Campaign," then-President Bill Clinton talked of his own "vivid and painful memories of black churches being burned in my own state when I was a child." The problem was that "no church burnings had occurred in Arkansas during Mr. Clinton's childhood, the president's 'vivid and painful' memories notwithstanding."
- Again, apparently no murders occurred. If there had been any, AP almost certainly would have told us.
If AP had been interested in establishing a trend of murderous attacks in churches in general, it would have at least included the following:
- "The 2007 Colorado YWAM and New Life shootings were a killing spree that occurred on December 9, 2007. In the early morning hours, 24-year-old Matthew J. Murray opened fire at the Youth With A Mission training center in Arvada, Colorado, with a pistol, killing two and wounding two others before escaping. Later that afternoon, he attacked the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with a number of firearms, killing two more people and injuring three before being shot and wounded by a member of the church's congregation; he then committed suicide."
- In the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting, "On August 5, 2012, 40-year-old Wade Michael Page fatally shot six people and wounded four others at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Page committed suicide by shooting himself in the head after he was shot in the stomach by a responding police officer."
Instead, the wire service insisted on sticking with the racial angle, and in the process, while apparently believing it is helping to whip up national outrage, has only demonstrated, absent other evidence, that there hasn't been a murderous attack at a black church in over 50 years.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
