DIVIDING LINE: FIRST THE FLAME, THEN THE BLAME

When he first saw the smoldering ruins of his Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in Fruitvale, Tennessee, on Jan. 13, 1995, the Rev. Sherron Eugene Brown could not imagine anything worse. Then the agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms went to work on him. "They took me and the church treasurer to the federal building, put us in two separate rooms and asked us all kinds of questions about our insurance policies, about whether we were behind in paying off our mortgage or if any members of the congregation were angry," Brown remembers. "They were acting as if we had set our own church on fire."

As of last week--when the Rising Sun Missionary Baptist church in Greensboro, Alabama, and a former sanctuary at Matthews-Murkland Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, were torched--30 black churches in an eight-state arc from Louisiana to Virginia had been burned over the past 18 months. Only a handful of these arson cases have been solved. Such senseless destruction strikes at the soul of congregations. But their anguish deepens when they, the victims, also become suspects.

As Attorney General Janet Reno and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin will hear in meetings this week with the pastors of several burned-out churches, such misguided scrutiny has been occurring all too frequently in the federal investigation of the fires. Dozens of pastors charge that despite the long history of racist terrorism throughout the region, investigators are not vigorously pursuing the possibility that the fires were set by white hate groups. Instead, the ministers charge, they, their families and their congregations have been subjected to harsh interrogation, lie-detector tests and harassment at their homes and jobs. In one instance, a 17-year-old female member of the Rev. Algie Jarrett's Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Bolivar, Tennessee, was taken out of a classroom by an FBI agent and questioned so roughly that she broke down in tears. Says Jarrett: "He tried to make her say something that wasn't true."

"In most cases the lines of inquiry with regard to white supremacists are not being followed by any of the authorities," charges the Rev. Mac Charles Jones, associate general secretary for racial justice of the National Council of Churches, who has visited dozens of burned-out churches over the past three months. "The questioning has been about problems in the churches, about the pastors, about the churches' money or insurance. That was the first line of inquiry, and sometimes it has been the only one."

This is an unsettling allegation. If Jones and the other ministers are right, hundreds of agents from the AFT, FBI and state agencies have been chasing after scapegoats rather than real culprits. The issue surfaced at a hearing last month by the House Judiciary Committee in testimony from witnesses as diverse as Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Rev. Earl W. Jackson Jr. of the Christian Coalition. But their charges came only after several high-ranking officials from the Department of Justice, the FBI and the ATF denied that they had received any complaints about the focus of the investigations.