The Racism and Incompetence Behind the Unsolved Firebombing of an NFL Legend's Church

During Super Bowl XXXI's Media Day in 1997, Green Bay Packers Defensive End Reggie White delivered a passionate speech about the state of race relations in the United States.

"I think we have a major problem in our country that we don't want to admit and that has to do with racism," White said. "We kind of shove that aside. We shoved it aside with the church bombings. People's lives have been devastated, mainly because federal investigators have tried to indict some of the ministers, and some of the members."

White was speaking on the subject for a reason. Just over a year earlier, his Knoxville, Tennessee ministry, Inner City Church, was the target of one of those church firebombings. That season, White—known as "The Minister of Defense"—had notched 12 sacks in 13 games for the Packers and been elected to his tenth straight pro bowl. He had also led the Packers' defensive line to their best performance of the season in the NFC divisional playoffs, a 27-17 victory over Steve Young and the San Francisco 49ers.

The blast at Inner City Church came two days after the game, as the Packers prepared to take on the Cowboys for a shot at the Super Bowl. The perpetrators had placed kerosene and gasoline inside the empty church before lighting it ablaze with molotov cocktails. They spraypainted "DIE NIGGERS" and "DIE NIGGER LOVERS" on an outside wall and left a typewritten letter at the scene with an ominous warning:

1996 shall be the year of white triumph and justice for the master supreme race. We will no longer tolerate the following situations to take place in our region: Integrated communities, schools, organizations and churches, interracial marriages, the NAACP and detractors of the white master race.

Another copy of the letter was found at the Knoxville Community Investment Bank, which White had helped found in order to extend lines of credit to black businesses and bring black families out of poverty. The signers of the letter called themselves "Skinheads for White Justice" and "BFI Brotherhood."

Investigators from the FBI claimed that they had never heard of either hate group. Nobody was ever arrested in association with the bombing. But newspaper reports from the days after the attack reveal something curious about the whole thing: Green Bay Packers security director Jerry Parins received a phone call the day before the Packers-Niners game—three days before the attack—warning him that White's church would be burned down. White, however, was not informed of the threat.

Parins told reporters, "We're looking into it, and so are the FBI and ATF," but refused to offer much else of substance. "This all happened, and that's all I can say," Parins said. Neither the Packers nor Parins' charitable foundation responded to requests for comment from VICE Sports.

But White was certainly aware of the rash of church bombings that preceded the attack on Inner City Church. By May 1996, federal agents were reportedly investigating 23 such church fires all set in the previous year and a half, including the one at Inner City. According to the National Church Action Task Force, 99 suspects were arrested in "150 burnings, bombings or attempted bombings of houses of worship of all sorts" between January of 1995 and June of 1997. The Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta showed 45 southern black churches attacked between 1990 and 1996. By then, the attacks had spread as far north as New York and New Jersey.

The bombing of White's church only days before the NFC Championship brought the epidemic of racial violence to America's attention. Even then-President Clinton spoke out on the subject: "We need to come together as one America to rebuild our churches, restore hope, and show the forces of hatred that they cannot win." In June of 1996, he asked Congress to allocate $12 million for investigations. Meanwhile, the investigation of the Inner City fire led to nothing but suspicion and stress.

In a press conference a few days after the attack,White told reporters he suspected that "maybe the police department is not taking this seriously enough." He elaborated in an interview with the New York Daily News. "My stepfather got murdered four years ago and the Chattanooga police department said they're doing their best," White said. "There's a murderer on the loose. I'm getting tired of hearing, 'We're doing our best.' If anything is making me mad more than anything, it's that instead of pointing the finger in the right direction and trying to figure out what happened, it's somewhat been swept under the rug and the finger's been pointed at people who have nothing to do with it."

Dissatisfaction would become a theme of the investigation. Nearly a month after the bombing, ATF agent Grant McGarrity told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that the motive for the attack remained unclear. In other words, despite the racist graffiti and letters, investigators were not ready to call the bombing a hate crime. "We have not found anything to date that connects this to the other church fires," said McGarrity. "We're still working toward [an arrest], but we don't have anything imminent yet."

McGarrity praised Knoxville citizens for cooperating, but meanwhile, those same citizens were growing tired of an investigation that seemed to be focused more on the church itself than whoever was responsible for the attack. "We've been asked question after question," pastor David Upton told the Journal-Sentinel. "I don't want to be too critical. They have not come out and accused me, but some of the things they said have made us look like suspects, not victims." Upton said FBI agents asked him about a report that he was buying gasoline at a local Walmart before the blaze, that other administrative staff at the church had been "interviewed extensively," and that some 200 of the church's 450 members had been contacted by authorities.

According to the Gettysburg Times, Upton and White had received an anonymous letter with a Knoxville postmark outlining concerns citizens had over the investigation. Shortly thereafter, White telephoned Vice President Al Gore, a former Tennessee senator. Gore arranged a meeting between the local heads of the FBI and ATF and Upton. "Just talking with the heads in charge made us feel better," Upton told reporters. "We feel like we have accepted some things today. They could not go into detail to tell us what was going on."

What was going on was nothing. The attackers left behind a great deal of evidence—especially for an arson case. There were the letters found at the scene and at the bank soon after, and there was also the graffiti on the church walls. But the investigation continued to stall out. In January 1997, a year after the attack, an officer with the Knoxville police department's arson squad gave an interview to the New York Daily News. "Some cases are easy, and others like this one take a lot longer," he said. "The investigation is ongoing. It is very much open."

For some, both in Knoxville and across the south, this refrain was becoming too familiar. The National Council of Churches issued a written testimony to the House Judiciary Committee in May 1996 which said their independent investigations of the church attacks had uncovered "striking similarities in these incidents, parallels that constitute a pattern of abuses."

The most detailed report on the aftermath of the Inner City attack comes from Matthew T. Everett at the independent Knoxville publication Metro Pulse Online. By 2000, Everett writes, nearly all records involved with the church were in the hands of law enforcement. Following the arson, the uncertainty surrounding the future of the church and the costs associated with recovery from the arson led to numerous financial problems. Poor bookkeeping and grant applications made what was already a tight cash situation even worse, and by 2000, both Inner City Church and the Knoxville Community Investment Bank had dissolved. A bail bond and printing service has since moved into the building formerly hosting the investment bank. "As you can tell, there wasn't a very reliable document trail, and the FBI refused to talk about an ongoing investigation," Everett told VICE Sports in an email. "I suspect the investigation did target members or leaders of the church. Whether that was reasonable or not, I don't know."

White continued to speak out on the issue over the next couple of years, as the arson moved further and further into the past and was subsequently forgotten. "This is just what I feared would happen," White said roughly a year after the incident. "In an election year, the awareness was heightened. But now it's gone. You're not hearing about it any more."

White died in 2004 from a fatal cardiac arrhythmia. He was 43 years old. He never did find out who burned down Inner City Church, and 19 years after the fact, it appears none of the many questions arising from the arson has ever been answered. The church's pastor, David Upton, passed away late last year after an extended illness.

Meanwhile, violence against black Americans continues unabated. Earlier this month, a man attempted to set off a bomb at the offices of the NAACP in Colorado Springs. Bishop Melvin G. Talbert, who was an executive with the National Church Council in the 90s and helped investigate the rash of church bombings, says things have not exactly changed.

"When I heard of some of the cases going on now," Talbert said, "I said to myself, there we go again. It's the same-old, same-old. It seems to me that we still have similar problems of people expressing their hate through that kind of action."

It's safe to say that Reggie White saw this all coming when he took the podium at Super Bowl Media Day a year after the Inner City Church Fire—a year that saw his own pastor investigated and no suspect arrested. According to T.J. Simers, the Los Angeles Times reporter covering the press conference that day, the NFL's cameras were rolling on White the whole time. They were rolling as he excoriated the authorities responsible for investigating the church bombings and the media that covered them. But when the transcripts were released a few hours later, none of White's remarks on race made it in.