Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 4, 1994 TAG: 9401040216
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PETER APPLEBOME THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: SMITHDALE, MISS. LENGTH: Long
But eight months after three white youths torched two black churches on the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, something remarkable has unfolded in this corner of southwest Mississippi, where racial violence was almost a daily fact of life in the civil rights era.
It is not just that volunteers from white and black churches got together to rebuild the churches or that the culprits were brought to justice, something rarely, if ever, done 30 years ago. More important is the way that lives, black and white, were touched by what has unfolded.
"God took a tragedy and made a miracle out of it," said Rex Cowart, 63, a white mail carrier from nearby Summit, who was one of a dozen or so volunteers doing carpentry work on a new sanctuary for the Springhill Freewill Baptist Church in the chill morning air Sunday. "It bonded people together who had lived here all their lives without really getting to know each other."
The crime would have been shocking anywhere.
On April 4, three white youths, Charles W. McGeehee Jr. and Roy J. McGovern, both 18 and from Summit, and Jerome A. Bellelo, 17, of Franklinton, La., kicked in the front door of the old cinder-block Springhill church, they later told the authorities. The youths, who said they had been drinking heavily, used hymnals and a basket of artificial flowers to start a fire. One yelled "Burn, nigger, burn," as flames engulfed the building.
From there, they said, they drove about 12 miles to the venerable Rocky Point Missionary Baptist Church, another black church that dates to well before the turn of the century. They torched it as well, shouting more racial epithets as they left.
If the church burnings would have been a nightmare anywhere, they had a particular resonance here. For almost everyone, they brought back memories of the 1960s, when church burnings, between 200 and 300 across the state, were the signature crime of white resistance. No place was the terror more pronounced than in southwest Mississippi, where at the peak of white resistance in 1964, violence against blacks, their homes, churches or businesses was almost a daily occurrence.
For Bernice Dixon, Rocky Point's clerk, whose uncle was lynched in 1922 and buried in the church graveyard, the arson evoked a primal sort of fear.
"When this happened, it scared people and it still scares them," Dixon said.
The initial pace of the investigation only heightened the fears. Word soon spread who the culprits were, but no arrests were made or charges filed. To some, it was yet another echo of the 1960s, when the only thing more certain than racial violence by whites was the disinclination of white law officers and courts to investigate and prosecute it. Blacks, asserting a cover-up, called for action.
But rather than indifference, the slow pace reflected an effort by state and federal officials to maximize punishment and determine whether the youths had any links to organized hate groups. Officials found none.
The case could have been prosecuted as arson under state law, which would have meant prosecution in the two counties where the churches were situated and a likely prison term of about 2 1/2 years. Instead state and federal officials agreed to prosecute the crime as a federal civil rights violation.
Two youths were given mandatory prison sentences of three years and one month and the other, who had a previous conviction for a gun offense, was sentenced to three years and 10 months. They were also ordered to pay $138,000 in court-ordered restitution, write a 10-page research paper on the history of the civil rights movement and perform 384 hours of community service work after their release.
Many people, black and white, wanted longer sentences, but officials said the sentences were the longest permissible by law in state or federal court.
If the sentencing on Dec. 3 brought one element of closure to the case, what is happening at the Springhill site is bringing another. In early December, 150 volunteers from 38 churches, black and white, turned out to begin building a new church. After three work sessions, they are about 40 percent done on a new brick church that is being paid for by donations and volunteer work.
Work on the Rocky Point church will begin when the new Springhill church is completed.
It is not as if anyone sees a racial utopia in Mississippi. Frank Lee, a leader of Rocky Point, says he is skeptical about many things related to the burnings, including the sentences of the youths and the motives of some whites who are helping the churches rebuild. He said he believed some whites hoped their help would somehow mitigate the sentences of the offenders. And he said he believed too little had been made of the underlying racial hostility behind the church burnings.
"The idea you hear is that Mississippi has moved away from much of the hatred of the past," Lee said. "But beneath the surface, the same hatred that was present then is present today."
Some white volunteers conceded that not all their neighbors support what they are doing.
"Some people, maybe 10 percent, say they deserve what they got," said one white volunteer, Marvin Taylor of Summit, referring to the church burnings. "A lot of others say this, the rebuilding, is the greatest thing to happen in southwest Mississippi in a long time. But I think most people feel a lot of wrong has been done over the years, and this was one thing we could do to make it right."
Still, in Mississippi, where race is such a fact of life that change is something more sensed that expressed, what lingers for many people are the small details.
For Jack Honea, one of the white organizers, whose church group builds Baptist churches around the country, it was the surprise meal of catfish and fried chicken that women from the Springhill church made for 75 workers one recent day. For Carl Young, one of the Springhill deacons, he said it was the sense of relief, like a burden being lifted from his back, that he felt when the white churches found the resources to do a rebuilding that Springhill could not have done on its own.
"I was here in the 1960s," said W.A. "Bubba" Mathis, a black restaurant owner. "All the bombing and church burning and what have you, I was here. And this is different altogether, as different than daylight and dark. There's room for improvement. But it's 99 percent better than it used to be."
by CNB