2023 Trip

MILLBURY — The Rev. Cliff Davis was 10 years old in 1968 when he heard that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated.
The young paper delivery boy had gone to the drugstore in West Brookfield to pick up his bundle of newspapers.
"I remember hearing about it uptown and running home and trying to find out about it on the TV," Rev. Davis recalled. "I wasn't politically savvy then, but I remember thinking it was a shame that there was a man who was senselessly killed."
During the past 18 years, the pastor of Millbury Federated Church has walked along some of the paths of the slain civil rights leader and met others who worked with him as he and MFC's The Lord's Builders missionaries travel to the South to help rebuild mostly old African-American churches that were burned down as an expression of racial hatred.

Rev. Davis said members of the men's prayer group started talking about doing something to help out in the early 1990s, during a time when there was a rash of church burnings. They initially considered sending some Bibles and pews to help the burned churches start over.
"Finally, someone said, 'Let's go. We don't want people thinking evil and hatred wins. We love our brothers and sisters in Christ and we want to help them out,' " he recalled. They formed The Lord's Builders and took on the mission of helping to rebuild churches primarily with black congregations that had been destroyed by arson.
 
The Lord's Builders and others from the church and area have worked on 17 churches in Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Mississippi and Texas.
"These churches are half dilapidated as it is. A lot are left over from slave days," said Rev. Davis. "Most of the time, white kids get drunk and just for kicks, they say let's go burn down a black church. Many churches burned down aren't going to be rebuilt."
The group also helped rebuild the predominantly black Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Springfield, Mass., that was torched by three white men Nov. 5, 2008, hours after Barak Obama was elected the country's first black president. The men were sentenced to prison terms of 4½ to 14 years.
Millbury Federated Church worked with the National Coalition for Burned Churches until it was disbanded in 2011 because of difficulty raising money. The national organization was established after Congress enacted the 1996 Church Arson Prevention Act, following mostly hate-based or racially motivated burnins of hundreds of churches in the rural South.
Rose Johnson-Mackey of Gainesville, Ga., one of the leaders of the former organization, said many of the burned churches had little or no insurance. A church arson would get some publicity when the fire happened. But when the news media went away, the churches were left on their own. She said the national organization's primary job was to assess the needs of impacted churches and connect them with volunteer rebuilding teams.
"That kind of preparatory work needs to be done to prepare the way for the volunteer teams and that's not being done now. It's not that churches are not still being burned. Across the rural South, churches continue to burn," Ms. Johnson-Mackey said in a recent telephone interview. "Without the help of people like those at Millbury Federated, many of the churches would not have been rebuilt."

Ms. Johnson-Mackey visited the Millbury church in 2011, when she was on a panel that discussed black church burnings in contemporary America at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School.

The Millbury group, about 30 including teens, will make the annual trip to the South during school vacation, Feb. 14-23."We've had people who are licensed contractors to people who don't know the difference between a hammer and a screwdriver on a good day. But they still come and they get busy," said Rev. Davis.This will be the group's third year of helping to rebuild Friendship African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Greenville, Ala. The former wooden church was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. The group took on the task after not being able to find a burned church to work on. 
The first year, the Millbury group put a roof on the new, sturdier cinder-block building. Last year, the volunteers did a lot of sheetrock work and room partitions and put electricity in and brought water to the building. On this trip, they hope to install a septic system, if they can find someone in that area to draw up the plans.