Hopewell Baptist church in Greenville, Mississippi was set on fire on Tuesday night and spray painted with the words “Vote Trump” on the side of it. No one was in the church at the time of the fire, and no one was injured.
Mayor of Mississippi Errick Simmons, said in an interview “This fire was “a direct assault on people’s right to free worship,” he said, and later added during a press conference, “I see this as an attack on the black church and the black community.”
This is a tense time in American politics. The burning of Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church is a sign of how bad things have gotten, and what may be still to come. “What we have to do is come together,” Simmons said. “The only thing that conquers hate is love.”
Black churches have long been burned in acts of intimidation and hatred; in the Jim Crow South, members of hate groups would leave flaming crosses on churchyard lawns. The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, came at a time of extreme racial division in the United States; it was that crime, which killed four young black girls, that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
They called their malicious outings “Jafrica” when these Mississippi teenagers from predominantly white Rankin County piled into their cars and drove into predominantly African American Jackson, Mississippi to “kill a nigga“. These trips were named for a portmanteau of “Jackson” and “Africa,” a nod to their specific and evil mission: to terrorize strangers for no other reason than that they were black. An evil act and racist behavior passed down from the Jim Crow era of their ancestors. 
The four men (one of them pictured left), all of whom are white, were previously found guilty of committing a racially motivated act that resulted in Anderson’s death, and they are each serving between seven and fifty (50) years in prison.
Conversations Of A Sistah 