In January 1985, Ammie Murray, a white labor organizer, committed herself to helping rebuild the primarily African-American South Carolina church of her friend Barbara Simmons after it suffered terrible vandalism. Johnson, a columnist for the State, South Carolina's largest newspaper, offers a journalistic account of their 13-year friendship and struggle—the church underwent many more attacks including an arson that completely destroyed—that is a shocking and ultimately heartening case study of political involvement, social action and religious faith. Johnson spins a far wider web and covers the rise of the Klan in the South; an enormous, seemingly planned, epidemic of vandalism inflicted upon Southern black churches in the 1980s and 1990s; and the complicated racial politics of the Southern law enforcement and legal system. She also draws on the personal stories of Murray, whose daughter nearly died in an automobile accident, and Simmons, whose troubled son is convicted of murder and whose case goes to the Supreme Court. Johnson, who herself got involved with the rebuilding efforts, has a superb sense of storytelling that dovetails with the terrifying facts of her story: Murray's involvement with the church's ongoing troubles generated such enormous hatred in the South Carolina town of Dixiana that she was verbally and physically harassed and her beloved pet dogs brutally murdered. By the end, the book becomes a stimulating whodunit and courtroom drama. (May)
Forecast:The
New York Times recently challenged the idea that there was an organized epidemic of violence against black churches, and
Harper's ran a piece critical of Morris Dees, one of the heroes of this book in terms of rebuilding efforts. Unfortunately, any discrepancies probably won't find much national media bandwidth for hashing out.
