Tag Archives: civil rights movement

Louisiana man sentenced to 25 years for setting fire to Black churches

(Reuters) – A young white man was sentenced on Monday to 25 years in prison by a federal court in Lafayette, Louisiana after he pleaded guilty to setting three historically Black churches on fire.

Federal District Judge Robert Summerhays sentenced Holden Matthews to 25 years but gave him 18 months credit for the time he has already spent in jail.

Matthews, who will serve 282 months, had admitted to burning down three predominantly African American churches and pleaded guilty to both state and federal charges in February.

The judge also ordered him to pay about $2.7 million in restitution to the churches he burned.

Matthews had burnt three churches – St. Mary Baptist Church, Greater Union Baptist Church and Mount Pleasant Baptist Church – over a 10-day span in 2019. The three churches, all in St. Landry Parish, burned down between March 26 and April 4.

Matthews was arrested and charged with three counts of simple arson on religious buildings and three hate crimes charges.

Authorities said back then that Matthews had “a relationship with a type of music called black metal,” an extreme subgenre of heavy metal. Black metal has an association with church burnings in other parts of the world, they said.

The judge said on Monday that even though Matthews’ acts were not driven by race, they brought back fears to a “dark time in history”.

The judge was referencing the time when Black churches were burned by white supremacists during the civil rights movement.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

The world’s largest Confederate Monument faces renewed calls for removal

By Rich McKay

ATLANTA (Reuters) – Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial, a nine-story-high bas-relief sculpture carved into a sprawling rock face northeast of Atlanta, is perhaps the South’s most audacious monument to its pro-slavery legacy still intact.

Despite long-standing demands for the removal of what many consider to be a shrine to racism, the giant depiction of three Confederate heroes on horseback still towers ominously over the Georgia countryside, protected by state law.

The monument – which reopens on Independence Day weekend after the COVID-19 pandemic forced it to close for weeks – has faced renewed calls for removal since the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died during an arrest by a white police officer who pinned his neck to the ground with a knee.

The brutality of Floyd’s death, captured on cellphone video, triggered a national outcry against racial injustice, and revived a long-simmering battle between those demanding the removal of racist symbols from the public sphere, and those who believe the monuments honor Southern tradition and history.

“Here we are in Atlanta, the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement, and still we have the largest Confederate monument in the world,” said Gerald Griggs, a vice president of the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP civil rights group, which staged a march last week calling for the carving to be scraped from the mountainside. “It’s time for our state to get on the right side of history.”

The sheer scale of the monument makes its removal a daunting task to contemplate. Longer than a 100-yard American football field, it features the likenesses of Jefferson Davis, the president of the 11-state Confederacy, and two of its legendary military leaders, Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, notched in a relief 400 feet above ground.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans is an organization that staunchly defends Stone Mountain and other Confederate statues and emblems. Dedicated to teaching the “Southern Cause,” according to its website, it believes their removal is akin to purging American history.

The Southern or “Lost Cause of the Confederacy” holds that the war was fought over a heroic, but lost, effort to defend states’ rights to secede from the Union in the face of Northern aggression, rather than the preservation of slavery.

Martin O’Toole, an official of the Georgia chapter, said the monument is not a totem of racism at all. It’s history, plain and simple, he says.

“It’s three men on horses,” O’Toole said. “What’s racist about that?”

Maurice J. Hobson, an associate professor of African American Studies at Georgia State University, counters this, describing the Southern Cause as “a false history” that downplays slavery’s role in the Civil War.

He said the Confederate leaders were traitors to the United States who fought to hold on to a Southern economy that depended on slavery.

All three men featured on the monument, Davis, Lee and Jackson, were slave owners.

“The whole of Stone Mountain was erected to show what some white Georgians revered,” he said.

Stone Mountain has long held symbolism for white supremacists. The Ku Klux Klan, a hate group that was formed by Confederate Army veterans and has a history of lynchings and terror against Black people, held its rebirth ceremony atop the mountain in 1915 with flaming crosses. Klansmen still hold occasional gatherings in the shadows of the edifice, albeit now met with protesters behind police tape. Many of those cross-burnings took place on or around July 4.

The monolithic monument was proposed more than a century ago and had numerous false starts over the years.

But with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, segregationist officials in the state pushed for the creation of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association in 1958 and purchased the park. The carving was completed in 1972.

“This debate has been going on for years, and we’re sensitive to it,” John Bankhead, a spokesman for the group, said. “We want to tell history as it is, not as some say it is.”

In the past, others have suggested putting more balance into the monument. There was a proposal to build a memorial to Martin Luther King Jr., the Atlanta-based civil rights icon, but the Sons of Confederate Veterans, as well the King family, rejected the idea.

Even though that idea floundered, Hobson advocates adding more carvings to the rock face, including African American historical figures and leaders.

“It needs to be put in a context that forces a conversation, a serious conversation,” he said. “The easiest way to rectify it, is surround it.”

Griggs of the NAACP said that the civil rights group has consulted with stone masons who said it would cost about $300,000 to $400,000 to remove the towering images.

“Take it down,” he said. “Restore the mountain to its original condition.”

(Reporting by Rich McKay; Editing by Frank McGurty and Aurora Ellis)

After George Floyd’s death, a groundswell of religious activism

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – George Floyd’s death has triggered a groundswell of outrage and activism by religious leaders and faith-based groups across the United States, reminiscent of what occurred during the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

Conservative and mainstream religious leaders are joining with Black churches, progressive Catholics and Protestants, Jewish synagogues and other faith groups in calling for police reforms and efforts to dismantle racism.

Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man, died after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes on May 25. The officer has been fired and charged with second-degree murder, but protesters and activists around the world are pushing for deeper change.

“We’re seeing it at the grassroots level. We’re seeing rabbis walking alongside Muslim leaders, walking alongside Catholic priests and religious sisters,” said Johnny Zokovitch, executive director of Pax Christi USA, a national Catholic peace and justice group. “We are seeing that race cuts across all religious denominations.”

More than 1,000 rabbis, pastors, imams and other religious leaders held an online conference last week to brainstorm ways to address systemic violence against African Americans.

There is a new “breadth and depth” in the faith-based response, said one participant, Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, citing a great hunger for connection after months of social distancing and lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Folks are just so angry. They’re angry about enduring racism, they’re angry about the incompetent response to COVID, they’re angry about bigotry and racism, about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, and white supremacy,” he said.

Progressive religious groups had an important role in shaping the emerging movement, much as they did in the civil rights movement, but today’s actions are attracting a more diverse set of participants, Pesner said.

ELECTION ISSUE

Republican Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election with strong support from evangelical Christians and Catholics. But Floyd’s death and Trump’s criticism of protesters may be a factor when members of those religious groups go to the polls in November.

While federal tax rules prevent houses of worship from taking an overt partisan stance, clergy are not banned from expressing their personal opinions.

Trump was sharply criticized by mainstream Catholic and Episcopal leaders after protesters were forcibly cleared for a staged photo of him last week in front of Washington’s historic St. John’s Episcopal Church across from the White House.

Some right-leaning religious leaders have since called him out or joined protests, unlike in the 1960s when some white evangelical leaders, including the Rev. Billy Graham, did not take part in the civil rights movement.

Televangelist Pat Robertson chided the president last week for threatening to send in military troops if governors did not quell violent protests. “He spoke of them as being jerks. You just don’t do that, Mr. President. It isn’t cool!”

Joel Osteen, the senior pastor from Texas megachurch Lakewood, marched with protesters last week in Houston. “We need to stand against injustice and stand with our Black brothers and sisters,” said Osteen.

Republican Senator Mitt Romney, a Mormon, joined hundreds of Christian evangelicals at a march in Washington on Sunday, and tweeted out “Black Lives Matter.”

Some churches have also stepped up efforts to boost voter registration in recent weeks, much as churches did in the 1960s.

Data collected after Floyd’s death from the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute showed 37% of white Catholics held favorable views of Trump, down from 49% in 2019, and a drop from the 60% who voted for Trump in 2016.

POOR PEOPLE’S CAMPAIGN

Religious leaders held an online eulogy for Floyd and interfaith service on Sunday, staged a day of fasting on Monday, and observed eight minutes and 46 seconds of silence to mark the exact amount of time Floyd was held down as he pleaded: “Please, I can’t breathe.”

A June 20 online “assembly” including 16 religious denominations seeks to revive the “Poor People’s Campaign” launched after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Subtitled “A National Call for Moral Revival,” it will also focus on Floyd, organizers say.

“We are in a deep moral crisis,” said the Rev. William Barber, pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, who is one of the key organizers.

“What we have to do at this moment is not only address what happened to George Floyd, but the interlocking problems of systemic racism, police brutality, the lack of healthcare, poverty and militarism,” he said.

Najuma Smith-Pollard, a Black pastor and community activist in Los Angeles, said the protests had already triggered action that once seemed impossible – the Los Angeles mayor yanked $150 million from the police department’s budget and diverted it to programs for youth jobs, healthcare and trauma recovery.

“I don’t think it’s a blip,” she said. “Too many things are at stake and too many people are engaged. This is no longer a local matter – it’s national, it’s global.”

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Peter Cooney)