AFTER THE BURNING

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

If any Southern community could be said to have somehow avoided racial strife, Kossuth, Mississippi, might have made the claim. Situated far north of the old plantations in the Delta, the tiny, oak-dotted hamlet (pop. 248) has historically enjoyed a lack of tension between white and black communities. In the 1940s and into the 1950s, children of both races played and ate together, and Kossuth achieved legal integration without the horrible spasms that wrenched most of the South. It was always a point of pride to Linda Lambert, the wife of Kossuth's mayor, that 109 years ago her ancestors donated the land on which black ex-sharecroppers built the Mount Pleasant Missionary Baptist Church--a big, beautiful edifice that housed a $10,000 baby-grand piano, the congregation's pride.

Last Monday night, however, the Lamberts' phone rang: Mount Pleasant was ablaze. Lambert's husband Steve, who is not only the mayor but also chief of the Kossuth volunteer fire department, rushed to the local fire barn and discovered to his astonishment that the engines were already gone, to another black church, Central Grove Missionary Baptist, which was burning a few miles away. Finally, the county fire department arrived, but by then, Mount Pleasant was lost. As the roof caved in and the steeple crashed to the ground, Linda Lambert glanced over at Sheriff's Deputy Billy Dilworth, a big, quiet man who serves as the church's deacon. There were tears streaming down his cheeks. She thought to herself, "They had labored so for that church!"

And soon enough, Lambert and others in town would be laboring to understand how the national epidemic of violence against black churches could have found its way to their little town. "You sit and watch it happen in other states, and it feels foreign until it comes home," says Steve Lambert. "We believe it is local, but what could they have been thinking?" The 50-some federal agents who swept down on the town while the embers were still warm quickly determined that both fires were indeed the result of arson. (They also confirmed a failed arson attempt at an all-white church nearby.) They ruled out an insurance scam by church personnel. And since no outsider would have known the tiny Central Grove church existed, the culprit was probably a local.

For months, black leaders who remember the vicious church burnings by white racists in the '60s have been saying the recent 18-month acceleration in fires at small black churches like Kossuth's represents a re-emergence of something big and evil: as National Urban League president Hugh Price puts it, "The flames of bigotry and intolerance are soaring higher than they have in a generation." Now each new bit of evidence about the arsons in their backyard forced the people of Kossuth to question whether their confidence in local harmony had been misplaced--and to reconsider their own behavior. "It's scary to think of people doing something so mean so near," says Pauline Morton, who lives close to the Central Grove church. Her neighbor, James Wilbanks, a white man, says sadly of its congregation, "I hate now that we weren't more friendly with them."

Wilbanks' self-examination and regret reverberated throughout the country last week. In the halls of Congress and the boardrooms of large foundations and religious groups, there was a sense that America's ugly strain of racial hatred is again coming to the surface. And suddenly everyone was trying to be "more friendly," each after his own fashion.

Two weeks ago, for instance, when Bill Clinton made a pilgrimage to the site of a burned and rebuilt church in Greeleyville, South Carolina, Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour dubbed the appearance "shameless, transparent politics." By last Wednesday the R.N.C. had jumped on Clinton's bandwagon, faxing out a press release to announce the unanimous passage through the Republican-controlled House of a bill making it easier for the Federal Government to prosecute church-burning cases and allowing victims to be compensated by a federal fund. A Senate version adds a $12 million appropriation for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms' arson investigations and frees $10 million of Housing and Urban Development money for loans for rebuilding. It is co-sponsored by Massachusetts liberal Edward M. Kennedy and archconservative North Carolinian Lauch Faircloth. At this point, notes congressional Black Caucus member John Conyers Jr., "you'd have to be insane to oppose this. All the people in the right wing are looking for ways to appear better on the race issue."

And indeed, the rural, religious, often elderly black victims of the arsons are the sort of minorities upon whom an astounding array of people can vigorously demonstrate their brotherhood. On Thursday the National Council of Churches, which has been toiling on behalf of burned-out congregations for months, announced that eight large foundations had pledged $2.7 million toward rebuilding. Not to be outdone, the conservative Southern Baptist Convention, which only recently repented its pre-Civil War support of slavery, ponied up $282,000. Jewish groups pitched in, invoking their own history of religious persecution and the spirit of civil rights-era cooperation. The donor with the most to gain p.r.-wise may have been the Laborers' International Union of North America, which promised to provide thousands of construction workers to both rebuild and guard the churches. Not only were the construction unions notoriously hard to integrate, the union is also under investigation for being Mob controlled.

The most controversial largesse, however, was the Christian Coalition's pledge to collect $1 million. Coalition head Ralph Reed acknowledged that white Evangelicals had often been "on the wrong side" of the civil rights struggle: "We come with broken hearts, a repentant spirit and ready hands to fight this senseless violence." Yet some of Reed's co-donors, who oppose his group's long-standing positions on welfare and affirmative action, were unmoved. N.A.A.C.P. officials pointed out that until recently the coalition had fought the extension of ATF powers to investigate the burnings.

On Wednesday, when he met with seven Southern Governors on the issue, Clinton announced, "There is no politics in this." And perhaps in an odd way, he was right: with everybody piling on the issue, there was no advantage to be gained by any one party, except the overtaxed enforcement agencies. Since being accused of responding sluggishly to the arson epidemic in its early months, the FBI and ATF have assigned a combined task force of 236 agents to the case, many of whom have been working 14-hour days for several weeks without a day off. The ATF, which is spending an average of $180,000 a week on the investigation, has had success with both low-tech gambits (an accelerant-sniffing Labrador retriever established the Kossuth fires as arsons) and cybersleuthing (a computer database helped pin arson charges on two Klansmen in two South Carolina cases).

But investigators cannot assume that all the fires are racially motivated. Among those arrested so far: a white firebug, an emotionally unstable 13-year-old girl and two black contractors who had done restoration work on the church they allegedly burned. "If there was one group doing this, it would give law enforcement a single target," says Neil Gallagher of the FBI. "Much more difficult and to some degree more unnerving is the fact that what we're facing isn't a national conspiracy but a mind-set of a large segment of our society."

Yet it is just possible that in the end, the furor over the fires may bring some adjustment of that mind-set, especially on a local level. Throughout the South, white citizens donated money, labor, soft drinks and even choir robes to their burned-out black neighbors. Security firms distributed free fire alarms, and several groups volunteered for 24-hour vigils to guard churches. That thought is pleasing to the Rev. Joseph Darby of St. Phillip AME Church in Eastover, South Carolina, who is organizing such a church watch. "We would love to have white volunteers serve on the watch squads," he says. "If you stand out in the countryside together in the middle of the night, you are going to have to talk."

--Reported by Cathy Booth/Kossuth, Adam Cohen/Atlanta, Tammerlin Drummond/Miami and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by CATHY BOOTH/KOSSUTH, ADAM COHEN/ATLANTA, TAMMERLIN DRUMMOND/MIAMI AND DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON