Jackson Jambalaya

It is a strange and sorrowful thing to watch history come full circle like a stubborn ghost. On a cold January morning in Jackson, flames scorched the walls of the Beth Israel Congregation — Mississippi’s largest synagogue and a house of worship with roots dating back to the 19th century — reducing its library and administrative center to charred ruins.

We've seen this story before. Nearly sixty years ago, during the civil rights upheaval, members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed synagogues in Jackson and Meridian. Among those involved in these terror campaigns was Thomas Albert Tarrants III, a young man swept up in the violent white supremacist fervor of the 1960s.

After his conviction and imprisonment for bombing Jewish targets like the Meridian home of courageous business leader Meyer Davidson in 1968, Tarrants experienced a significant personal transformation in prison — a religious and moral conversion that caused him to renounce his hatred, pursue higher education, and ultimately dedicate his life to Christian ministry and reconciliation.

Today, the suspect in the Jackson arson, Stephen Spencer Pittman, 19, is jailed on state arson charges and is the focus of an ongoing federal hate crime investigation.

Authorities have shared troubling details with the news media: surveillance footage allegedly shows a masked individual pouring what appears to be accelerant inside the synagogue; the suspect allegedly confessed to law enforcement and even to his father, calling Beth Israel the “synagogue of Satan” and targeting it because of its Jewish identity.

Let the record be clear: Pittman has been indicted, not convicted, and is entitled to the presumption of innocence. But damaging initial evidence paints a disturbing picture of a young man immersed in contemporary strains of hate that are all too familiar.

Mississippi’s history with antisemitism extends beyond the civil rights movement. What has changed — and what has stayed the same — reveals a lot about our state and nation.

In 1968, Tarrants and his associates operated within a segregated society where the Klan was a prominent force, and anti-Jewish bombings were part of a larger campaign of domestic terror. Today, such groups are marginalized and universally condemned.

The recent arson at Beth Israel is being actively prosecuted by both state prosecutors and federal civil rights authorities, reflecting a legal framework that did not really exist in the 1960s.

After the recent attack, churches opened their doors to the Jewish community; civic leaders of various faiths and backgrounds came together to condemn it. That collective act of support — unthinkable in many parts of Mississippi just fifty years ago — shows moral progress.

The motivations attributed to Pittman — conspiracy thinking, portraying Jewish people with hateful language, and endorsing violence against a place of worship — are echoes of deep-rooted prejudices.

Unlike the analog world of Tarrants’s era, today’s young people navigate a global digital ecosystem filled with misinformation, conspiracy theories, and extremist narratives at the tap of a finger on the internet and social media—things unimaginable in the 1960s.

Nationally, antisemitic incidents have climbed in recent years, often linked to a toxic mix of extremist ideologies, geopolitical tensions, and domestic polarization. Mississippi is not immune to these larger global currents that feed fear and hatred.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Tarrants’s story took a remarkable turn: isolated in prison, he faced the consequences of his hatred, sought deeper understanding through reading and reflection, and emerged a changed man. Could something similar happen for Pittman? The answer isn’t straightforward.

Today’s antisemitic currents are reinforced by online groups that reward grievance and affirm bias instead of challenging it. For a young man to reject that later in life requires not only personal reflection but also a wider cultural change — one that denounces hate and promotes empathy and truth.

Yet hope should never be dismissed. Mississippi has evolved in ways that Tarrants could hardly have imagined. But that choice — like all choices between hate and humanity — starts with truth. And truth requires us to face our past honestly, identify hatred wherever it appears, and work every day to create a society where no one’s house of worship is under threat of firebombing.

Sid Salter is a syndicated columnist. Contact him at sidsalter@sidsalter.com.