During the civil rights era, black churches served as holy ground. A place where black organizers could meet, strategize, pray, and give thanks. The organization of black resistance has always sparked white fear, never greater than when violent bigots see a building where black people are praying to the same God that they do, and doing it with so much fire, so little worry. When a place like this also becomes a base of power for social and political movement, it becomes a target. Taylor Branch, a historian of the Civil Rights Movement, once estimated that from 1954 to 1968, there was a church
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