One night at the beginning of November an African-American church in Greenville, Mississippi, was spray-painted with the slogan “Vote Trump” and then torched. There was no hesitation to pronounce the arson a hate crime perpetrated by vicious Trump-inspired racists. “I see this as an attack on the black church and the black community,” Mayor Errick Simmons said the day after the fire, calling it a “direct assault on people’s right to freely worship.”
Greenville police chief Delando Wilson leapt to the obvious political conclusion: This “is a church,” he said, “a predominantly black church, and no one has a right to try and … pressure someone into the way they want to decide to vote in this election.”
The chairman of the Mississippi Democratic party had no doubt who to blame: “There are no coincidences in politics, and we’ve got a burnt-out church with political messaging on the side.”
Right away, efforts to raise money for the church, Hopewell Missionary Baptist, centered on decrying the Trump crowd: “The animus of this election cycle combined with the potent racial history of burning black churches as a political symbol makes this event something we must not ignore,” read an online fundraising campaign. (In an impressive show of support, the effort raised some $200,000 in two days.)
The Mississippi NAACP wasted no time in putting the fire—and the election—into the context of church burnings of the past: “During the historically black church’s 111-year history, Hopewell served as a meeting place for organizers during the civil rights movement,” their statement said. “It is important to remember this same violent action was taken to intimidate and impede African-Americans from voting in the ’50s and ’60s.”
Helping the Greenville police investigate were the full resources of state and federal government, everything from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation to the FBI and ATF. From the beginning the fire was investigated as a hate-crime.
On Wednesday, an arrest was finally made. Was it a Trumper? A Ku Klux Klan member? No. The man arrested, Andrew McClinton, is not only himself African-American, he is a member of Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church.
Mayor Simmons did come out and seem to acknowledge that what was done was a political act of a sort different from what he had first believed. In a press release late Wednesday he commended investigators and said of the suspect’s alleged crime: “There is no place for this heinous and divisive behavior in our city.”
It will be interesting to see whether other officials and politicos who were so eager to cast aspersions on Trump voters, will be anywhere near as eager to admit they were wrong to do so.
