Another historical African-American church went up in flames on Tuesday night in South Carolina, days after the tragic Charleston shooting of nine black worshippers at a church.
The Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church located in South Carolina's Williamsburg County had been burnt to the ground 20 years ago by white supremacist Ku Klux Klan.
Although Tuesday's fire was brought under control, the church's roof was reportedly destroyed in the blaze.
The reasons behind the fire at the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church is still not clear, but it is the seventh black church to have gone up in flames in the 'South' since the dastardly shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on 17 June that was described as a 'hate crime'.
Dylann Roof, 21, sat for an hour through a Bible meeting at the church, before getting up to open fire at the worshippers, killing nine people, including Church pastor Clementa Pinckney, a Democratic South Carolina senator.
Many of the church fires following the Charleston shooting have been described as "possible hate crimes" by the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, a racial crime monitoring group, according to The Post and Courier.
Church members told the local newspaper that Tuesday's fire at the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church gave them a feeling of 'deja vu', coming 20 years after it was burned down by Ku Klux Klan members on 20 June, 1995.
Rev. Joe Darby, presiding elder of the black church's Beaufort District said he saw a "pattern of interrelated hate crimes", as several bomb threats at churches have also been reported apart from the fires.
The timing of the incidents is also suspicious, as they follow the Charleston shooting and the subsequent call to pull down the Confederate flag by South Carolina governor Nikki Haley.
While investigations into Tuesday's fire are also considering a possible lightning strike as a storm had passed the area, concerns are growing in the neighbourhood.
