Documentary burns brightly

By JAMES BREIG- | Comments: 0 | Leave a comment

It has not been uncommon in recent years to pick up the morning paper or turn on the nightly news and see that a church has been burned. Most likely a Black church and probably in the south. But what lies behind that headline? What happened to cause the arson, and what occurred after the embers cooled?

Those questions are addressed in a stunning documentary titled "Forgotten Fires," airing on many PBS stations. This one-hour film goes to a specific location, Clarendon County, South Carolina, to find out why two Black churches were burned there in 1995.

The documentarians, Michael Chandler and Vivian Kleiman, got access to the victims of these crimes, which you would expect. What is unique is that they also got access to the perpetrators. As a result, they discovered the many lines that tied the two sides together. These were people who worked, hunted and fished together, and who sat beside each other in school.

KKK influence

But several factors began to slice at those bindings, factors that the Ku Klux Klan exploited for its own purposes. The ultimate result was division, hatred and, eventually, violence.

"Forgotten Fires" expertly captures the lunacy of this downward spiral in several scenes, but one stands out: A Black man who rips down the signs posted by the KKK talks calmly to Klan members about what each side is doing, and they offer to respect each other's views and even shake hands. Within days, however, the man's car is torched.

Caught up in the Klan rallies and cross-burnings is one young man in particular, Timothy Welch, who ends up attacking a retarded Black man and setting the church fires. Talking from prison, where he is serving time for his arsons, Welch recalls his youth when he would sit in a pecan tree outside a Black church on Sundays, listening to the singing and waiting for a friend to come out and play.

Selfishness

He also remembers an elderly Black woman whose pies delighted him and in whose bed he slept when she was his nanny. When he finds out that it was her church he burned, he says he never would have done it had he known.

"She's a wonderful old lady," he says. "She always has been. At the time, I wasn't thinking about her. I was thinking about me."

That succinctly captures one theme of "Forgotten Fires": When people begin thinking of themselves and excluding others, in families or in communities, what follows is destruction.

Aftermath

The aftermath of the fires in Clarendon County brought many ironies. The pastor of one of the churches writes to Welch, offering forgiveness. One of the most racist men in town turns to the NAACP to help him with a court case. And the ancient Black woman sits in a new church, as firm in her faith as ever.

That firmness comes in part from the historic role Blacks in the county played in the civil rights movement, a history that provides a background to the events of 1995.

"Forgotten Fires" takes its time to tell its story and fills the screen with one memorable image after another: a minister smoking his pipe on the porch after dark...a woman bringing a dead raccoon to a neighbor...a prisoner starting to understand how wrong he was...a sign reflected in a river. This program is not sensational or simplistic. Its purpose is to uncover why a quiet town became a place of fiery hate, and it succeeds.

("Forgotten Fires" will be shown on WMHT, channel 17, June 1 at 9 p.m.)

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