The Memphis Commercial Appeal, June 10, 1996:

The state historian, the president of the Arkansas NAACP, and the former president of the Regular Arkansas Baptist Convention don't share President Clinton's "vivid and painful memories" of Arkansas church burnings.

"I've never known of a black church being burned in Arkansas,' said John Ferguson, the director of the Arkansas History Commission.

Clinton used his weekly radio address Saturday to decry a rash of at least 30 burnings of black churches in seven Southern states since early last year. He also recounted what he said was his experience in his home state.

"In our country during the '50s and '60s, black churches were burned to intimidate civil-rights workers. I have vivid and painful memories of black churches being burned in my own state when I was a child," Clinton said. Clinton was born in 1946 and grew up in Hope and Hot Springs. However, neither Dale Charles, the president of the state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, nor Rev. O.C. Jones, former president of the Regular Arkansas Baptist Convention, a group of 530 black churches, could recall any church burnings in Arkansas during the civil-rights era.

A spokesman for the White House had no immediate response Sunday.

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