Clinton's Memories About Fires Clarified

LITTLE ROCK - President Clinton's recollection of black church burnings during the civil-rights era may be a bit clouded.

The president, who grew up in Hope and Hot Springs, Ark., said Saturday in denouncing a rash of church burnings in Southern states that he has "vivid and painful memories of black churches being burned in my own state when I was a child."

But state historian John Ferguson and Dale Charles, president of the Arkansas NAACP, along with the Rev. O.C. Jones, former president of the Regular Arkansas Baptist Convention - a group of 530 black churches - couldn't recall any church burnings in Arkansas during the civil-rights era.

Sunday, a Clinton spokeswoman clarified the president's remarks.

"The president's recollection is that there were burnings of some black community buildings in the '50s when he was a child," White House spokeswoman Mary Ellen Glynn said.

On Monday the White House released the names of three black churches in Arkansas that burned - Bethel AME Church in North Little Rock, Mount Nebo AME Church in College Station and Collins Temple Baptist Church, now Canaan Baptist, in Little Rock.

Officials at the churches confirmed that their buildings burned, but none said the fires were arsons.

The Rev. Clarence Boyd of Bethel AME said his church burned Feb. 3, 1970. Larry White, a trustee of Mount Nebo AME, said the church burned in the 1960s.

The Collins Temple Baptist Church was destroyed by fire Dec. 16, 1965, two months after being renovated. The cause of the blaze was not determined.

A fire at the Roanoke Baptist Church in Hot Springs in 1963, when Clinton was 17 years old, was not on the White House list.

Then-Roanoke Baptist Pastor James Donald Rice, president of the local NAACP, demanded an FBI investigation. But the Little Rock FBI office determined an investigation was not warranted, according to a 1963 news account. Local authorities said at the time that there was no evidence of arson.