re: The arson of Black churches

[MethuenProgressive]

OK, so the Pope said something stupid, and Muslims were outraged.
So a freeper I know says "yeah but were they outraged about 4 Gaza churches that were attacked yesterday," and I say "the Muslims were probably not outraged about the string of arsons against Black churches in the U.S. South, either"... and he comes back with "many of those arsons were hoaxes, and some were set by blacks,"

What the heck? Google is coming back with wierd responses- is he right?? And what % of those arsons were hate crimes v. hoax?

[struggle4progress]

1. Here's a 96 article from the Columbia Journalism Review:

September/October 1996
Anatomy of a Story
Who was Burning the Black Churches?

By Joe Holley
Holley is a free-lance writer who lives in Austin, Texas

.. <Gary Fields .. a veteran police-beat reporter at the Shreveport Times> .. was able to report, in late February, that twenty-three black churches had been set afire in the previous thirty-four months ..

<USA Today>'s investigation did isolate "two well-defined geographic clusters or ‘arson zones' where black church arsons are up sharply" and the "patterns suggest racial motives." One was a two-hundred-mile oval in the mid-South that encompasses western Tennessee and northwestern Alabama, and the other "stretches across the Carolinas, where the rate of black church arson has tripled since 1993" ..

USA Today also presented profiles of some church arsonists. They appeared to have acted from a variety of motives, the paper reported on July 1, and most of them were poor, white, uneducated, and often drunk ..

http://archives.cjr.org/year/96/5/churches.asp

According to this article, churches have been a favorite target of arsonists, burning at the rate of about 10/wk, but arson is a rare crime and a few copycats following publicity can make the arson rate soar. Everybody seems to have concluded that, taken as a whole, church arson is a complicated phenomenon, which mixed causes, but about twenty black church arson were identified during this period which were clearly racially motivated