Firefighters on the scene of the Mount Zion AME Church fire during the night of June 30, 2015. (Photo: Elijah James Curtis)



Daylight showed the full extent of damage to the Mount Zion AME Church, the seventh black church to be burned in the past few weeks. (Photo: Elijah James Curtis)

Since a massacre on June 17 when a white man killed nine black worshippers at a church bible study in Charleston, South Carolina, the media has reported an explosion of arsons targeting black churches across the US south. However, our Observer says that this rash of fires is not out of the ordinary. In the past twenty years, black churches have been going up in flames monthly, sometimes weekly—it’s just that no one was paying attention.On the night of June 30, Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church in Greeleyville, South Carolina was burned to the ground: the seventh black church in the American south to go up in smoke in the past few weeks.Yet Mount Zion’s burning was especially tragic because it wasn’t the first time this congregation has walked through the fire. In 1995, Mt Zion AME was burned down by two former KKK members during an 18-month spree in which white supremacists torched more than 30 black churches. To take a stand against the rampant racism, then-President Bill Clinton attended the inauguration of Mount Zion AME’s new church in 1996.President Clinton also gave a radio address , during which the Arkansas-native said:"In our country, during the fifties and sixties, black churches were burned to intimidate civil rights workers. I have vivid and painful memories of black churches being burned in my own state when I was a child."Fast-forward twenty years to June 2015 and President Obama made a similar comment in the wake of the deadly shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.“The fact that this took place in a black church obviously raises questions about a dark part of our history,” President Obama said on June 18.But here’s the thing: burnings of black churches are not relegated to the past nor the immediate present. They’ve been occurring constantly for years.As the former pastor of Mount Zion AME Church, Terrance Mackey said:“The told story about church burnings is that churches were burning. The untold story is that they never stopped burning.”