Another Black church set on fire in Charlotte. White people must help end this.

On Oct. 29 someone tried to burn down Matthews Murkland Presbyterian Church, a historically Black congregation in south Charlotte. They did not succeed, but they did enough damage to the structure that the congregation had to cancel worship last Sunday.

This Sunday they will have to worship with police protection. The church’s pastor, The Rev. Albert Moses, told me that Charlotte-Mecklenburg police and local DOJ officers are investigating the fire as an act of arson. (The Observer editorial board has reached out to CMPD for confirmation.) Astonishingly, this is not the first time someone has set fire to Matthews Murkland. In 1996, a 13-year-old white girl set fire to the original wooden sanctuary, burning it to the ground.

It’s important to understand that nothing about this is random. Black churches have been targeted and attacked in America for as long as they have existed.

In 1822, a crowd of angry white men in Charleston, S.C. burned down Emmanuel AME church — the oldest Black church in the southern United States, known as Mother Emmanuel. In 1921, Black churches were burned in the bombing of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Okla. In 1963, white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. on a Sunday morning, murdering four young Black girls — Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley — and wounding 22 other worshipers.

In June 2015, Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, S.C. was attacked again, a white supremacist teenager attended Bible study and then murdered nine parishioners in the hope that the brutal attack would start a race war. Later that summer, six other Black churches were attacked by arsonists. One was Briar Creek Baptist in east Charlotte.

But most of the attacks don’t make the news. The National Coalition For Burned Churches and Community Empowerment documented 2,000 church burnings between 1995 and 2005. The organization dissolved in 2007 for lack of funding. The attacks never stopped, we just stopped paying attention.

The Matthews Murkland congregation doesn’t have that option. This is the second time someone has attacked their community and they have to live with the possibility that it could happen again. Their sanctuary no longer feels safe.

Black churches are the rare American institutions that unequivocally celebrate the sanctity of Black lives, thus they have always been the target of terrorism. I don’t know who tried to burn down Matthews Murkland Presbyterian. But I know that the white supremacy fueling church fires was created and is still sustained by white people. As a white person that makes it my responsibility to denounce and delegitimize it.

White supremacy is not disappearing spontaneously. It was conceived and propagated with effort and intentionality, and it will need to be exposed and dismantled the same way.

I know that white supremacy must be replaced by something, a way of understanding whiteness that is not destructive or demeaning to other groups of people. And here’s the other thing I know: In the 19th and 20th century, white supremacist terrorist attacks were carried out by adults. In the 21st century, teenagers are being groomed and recruited as terrorists. That means, it’s long past time for white parents to begin to have the kinds of painful conversations with our children about the dangers of white supremacy that Black parents have been been having with their children for generations.

This story was originally published November 5, 2022 at 6:00 AM.