"When Hell Freezes Over" was about Black-Church Burnings?
I'm watching SE 4, Ep. 11, and I had started sympathizing with the woman being interviewed, until she described the burning of a black church as the following:
"I discovered a strange history about the town of Hindsberg. Our house was where a church once stood. I thought of the old stone wall in our house. And I had to wonder, did these stones come from the church. The church belonged to a strange Baptiste sect, lead by a fire and brimstone preacher. Their belief system was pretty extreme. These folks believed that the end of the world was eminent and sinners would be engulfed in flames. Someone from the town got fed up with them, and set the whole area ablaze."
That was the interviewee's summary of a black church burning in 1800s, and I sat back a little stunned. Her experiences took place in 1997 and it wasn't until 2015 that she and her friend, decided to share what they'd gone through; but what caught my attention was how she interpreted the events that brought about the burning of a church and the murder of people. It doesn't seem as if it occurred to her that it isn't normal for anyone to get "fed up" and "set an area ablaze," with men, women and children still congregating inside a church.
There were all kinds of radical churches/congregations in the United States during the 1800s but only black churches were routinely targeted for burning. Yet that significant historical fact was summed up as "someone got fed up."
And the minute that came out of her mouth, I stopped my DVR, stared at the woman being interviewed and clicked off my television. That episode aired in 2015, and yet the notion that racial tension ignited the flames that murdered people in a church...did not, for one second, click.
It blew my mind. I couldn't believe people, in 2015, were that uninformed. share