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

Except for the tiny, 30-member Catholic church, houses of worship in Greene County remain racially divided. "Eleven o'clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week," one local official said at a recent civic meeting called to discuss the church burnings. Over the last 18 months, some four dozen, mostly rural black churches have been burned in 11 states, including nine in Alabama.

Churches have long been both bastions of the racial divide and focal points of the civil rights movement. In 1965, I had worked on a civil rights newspaper in Tuskegee, where black college students were trying to integrate the local white churches. Sunday mornings ended in mayhem as black worshipers and the press were beaten by white parishioners and local toughs. As the summer ended, a local white gunned down student leader Sammy Young.

Still justifying segregation

Thirty years later, in Eutah, many whites still justify segregated churches. "It's cultural. I want to worship the way I worship," said one white parishioner. White minister Wayne Fair has paid a price for trying to break these taboos. For eight years, Fair, a native of Alabama, was minister at Eutah's First Presbyterian, the town's oldest church. His family lived in the elegant parish house just off the quiet town square, and the church paid his children's tuition at the all-white, private Warrior Academy. Fair says when he and his wife, Pat, decided to withdraw their children from the academy because of "its values, its materialism, classism, racism and emphasis on football to the hilt," some church elders were "very offended." Last year when Fair began inviting a few blacks, including one ex-convict, to attend his church, the elders held a secret meeting and voted to fire him.

Fair moved his family into the all-black Martin Luther King public housing project just outside Eutah to continue, he said, working for "racial reconciliation in Greene County. We're not here to be paternalistic or prove we're God's gift to the black community, but to live out day-to-day life."

Regarding the church burnings, Fair said, "The best thing we can do is show an abundance of concern, that we're not indifferent."

No arrests have been made in connection with the four black churches burned in this area, and the two communities remain deeply divided as well over the motives behind the fires. Like most white community leaders interviewed in Eutah, Betty Banks, owner of The Independent, the newspaper that caters to the white community, said, "I certainly don't think race has anything to do with the church burnings. We work together well. I see no prejudice here in Greene County."

Several whites hinted that blacks themselves may have been responsible. "Could be by blacks who wanted racial tensions to stay or to divert attention from the community's political problems or, in two cases, to collect the insurance," said a minister's wife who asked to remain anonymous.

Black pastors and politicians are incensed by such remarks. They note that the fires began just after three young white men had been convicted in the neighboring county of vandalizing several black churches. A shot was fired into the home of the black circuit judge who sentenced the trio, two of the churches burned on the same night, and in recent months there have been a string of minor racial incidents, said City Councilman Spiver Gordon, local leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. "I know who has a history of burning churches. It ain't black folks. It's very, very troubling and upsetting that there's so much denial in this country about whether race is a factor," Gordon said.