Rebuilding burned church is a first step: Alabama small town has two of everything, one Black, one White

National Catholic Reporter, August 23, 1996 by Martha Honey

BOLIGEE, Ala. -- The two-day drive from Washington, D.C., to Greene County in the heart of Alabama's black belt felt like a journey back through time. Three decades ago, during the summers of 1964 and '65, I had driven south to work in the civil rights movement in Mississippi and Alabama. Now I was returning in early July with my 15-year-old son, Jody Avirgan, to join a Quaker-run project rebuilding three of the black churches destroyed by arsonists since December.

A fourth Baptist church in the area is being rebuilt by the Mennonites.

While my son pounded nails, I talked with old-timers and activists, blacks and whites, about what has changed, what's remained and why the upsurge in hate crimes.

Many are numbed by a sense of deja vu. At the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, advisory board member Carolyn McKinstry, 47, said, "When I started hearing about these church burnings, it became very real it was happening again. You always think things won't happen again."

In 1963, McKinstry was attending Sunday school in Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church when a bomb exploded, killing four young girls. "I lost four friends that day, and it instilled a lot of fear in me," recalled McKinstry. "Church burnings. Church bombings. It's like the ultimate in evil."

As happened in the '60s, the presence of Northerners and proclamations from Washington have turned a public spotlight on hate crimes in the South. "Since we arrived June 1, a dozen more churches have been burned nationwide, the president has made it the hot issue of the summer and thousands of people from around the world have responded," said Harold Confer, 55, a Washington builder. Confer heads Washington Quaker Work-camps, which is spearheading this reconstruction project, the first in the country. Volunteers from across the United States and as far away as Tanzania and Yugoslavia have arrived in tiny Boligee, population 300, and turned "a modest summer work camp program into a movement," said Confer. In late July, with construction on the churches well ahead of schedule, the Quakers offered to do repairs in the local public high school.

"At first I was in disbelief, but it's real," said Abraham Kinnard, 56, principal of Boligee's cash-strapped, all-black Paramount High School, as he watched volunteer carpenters cutting and relaying the gymnasium's badly buckled wooden floor. "I'd been wondering how to make the repairs before school opens, and the answer finally came with our good friends." The work camp donates labor, expertise and tools, while the school furnishes the supplies and lunch. Every day more local youngsters have shown up to help with the repairs.

Work teams are also scouring, painting and refurbishing the school's bathrooms. "In a sense this is a new re-creation of racial relations in American because for the last 200 years it's been poor black women who have scrubbed the toilets," said Philida Hartley, 44, an Australian volunteer who initiated the school repair project. "Now the toilets in this black school are being scrubbed by American and international white people who are doing it of their own free will, as a labor of love."

Greene County is the smallest, poorest and most heavily black -- 82 percent -- in the state. The economy is in decline and more than half the population lives below the poverty line. Cotton is no longer king. It's been replaced with pine tree plantations, catfish farms and a huge toxic waste plant. Young blacks and whites move out, and "remittances" from up north help many families here.

A strong voter rights drive in the 1960s, however, succeeded in making Greene County the first in the nation to elect a full slate of black candidates. "All the meetings were in churches, and it was almost a religious conversion the way people found it so important to register to vote," recalled longtime black activist Carol Zippert. Except for Boligee and Eutah, the county seat, which both still have white mayors, elected officials are African-Americans. Some other vestiges of segregation have disappeared. In the mid-1960s I witnessed a Ku Klux Klan rally held in a cotton field in rural Alabama, but today no one here can recall a recent cross-burning. "Nobody's beating anybody. Nobody is openly oppressing anyone. But it's done in other oppressing anyone. But it's done in other ways," said one black political leader.

Little has changed

In many other ways, the civil rights movement appears to have achieved little change in Greene County. "Here we have two of everything," said Henry Carter, 79, a deacon at Little Zion, one of the burned churches. In practice, if no longer in law, Greene County has black public schools and a private all-white academy; a black and a white newspaper; a black bank and a white bank; a black public swimming pool, a predominantly white public pool and an all-white private country club; and racially separate funeral homes and cemeteries.

Some doctors' offices still have separate waiting rooms, and at the Boligee Cafe, white visitors are ushered to tables in the air-conditioned back room, while blacks customarily sit at the counter in the front room.