A word of warning: the following episode contains racial slurs.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Alright 3536 Skyline …
COURTLAND BRAGG: Late in 2023, I was in Knoxville, Tennessee, looking for the site of NFL Hall of Famer, Super Bowl Champion, and NFL Legend Reggie White’s church. Before Reggie White became a household name across the country playing pro football, he was already famous in Knoxville. He put the fear of God into his competition while he played football at the University of Tennessee.
INTERVIEWEE: He was a man amongst boys out there on the college football field.
BROADCASTER: …(stadium crowd) waiting, looking, being pursued… HE’S STOPPED BY REGGIE WHITE! (crowd cheers)
COURTLAND BRAGG: But he also preached the word of God in his free time. That’s why they started calling him The Minister of Defense.
REGGIE WHITE: I’ve always done my best to honor the name of Jesus.
COURTLAND BRAGG: He used to have a church in Knoxville, but one night, the church was violently destroyed.
KRIS WILSON: There’s no 3536
COURTLAND BRAGG: The address of the church doesn’t exist anymore. The numbers skip, like the church was never there. So I knocked on the door closest to where Reggie’s Church used to sit.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Hello.
COURTLAND BRAGG: A Hispanic couple opened the door. They looked a little confused. But they were smiling and willing to talk.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Hi, how y’all doing?
MAN: Good, how are you?
COURTLAND BRAGG: My name is Courtland Bragg. I am a producer for the NFL, and we’re doing a story on Reggie White. Have y’all ever heard of Reggie White? He used to play for the Green Bay Packers, he’s from Tennessee…
WOMAN: No.
MAN: No. We’re not… We’re not football [nervous laugh]…
COURTLAND BRAGG: So, he used to be a preacher at a church that actually stood on this land, that in 1996, unfortunately, was arsoned. There were racial slurs on the building when it got burned down, it became a big thing. The FBI got involved, the ATF got involved, Bill Clinton got involved, he was the president at the time, So, the land that your house is on, it was a flashpoint for racial tensions in America.
WOMAN: Oh my god!
COURTLAND BRAGG: My name is Courtland Bragg and I’m a producer at NFL Films. I grew up not too far from Philly, in South Jersey. Around here, Reggie White’s name still carries respect from his days as an Eagle.
BROADCASTER: There’s Reggie White. Buddy Ryan says he’s the best defensive player he’s ever had.
CHRIS BERMAN: A hall of fame player—a hall of fame person—I think that’s more important for everybody to understand. Let alone the all-time sack leader when he retired
STUART SCOTT: Reggie White was named to 13 Pro Bowls…
MIKE TIRICO: …sets the record for most sacks in a Super Bowl game and—more importantly—gets his first Super Bowl ring.
SCOTT VAN PELT: The man who wore his faith as proudly as his jersey..
STUART SCOTT: You know when you hit your knees tonight, thank the man upstairs for putting an NFL reverend here on Earth for 43 years.
COURTLAND BRAGG: And I‘m also a preacher’s kid. My dad is a preacher. And So was his dad. The faith community is our home. So last year, when I was directing “The Minister of Defense” ESPN’s 30 for 30 about Reggie White, and I learned that his church was burned down, I’m not going to lie, I was blown away and decided to make a companion podcast.
From 30 For 30 Podcasts and Andscape, this is Through The Flames: Reggie’s Church
The name of Reggie’s church was the Inner City Church. People refer to it as Reggie’s church because he was an associate pastor there. And when Reggie became NFL royalty in the 1990s, and attached himself to Inner City, he brought much more than just the occasional sermon. He brought his star power.
Now, remember: This was before social media. Reggie brought his followers.
While Inner City was primarily a Black church in a Black neighborhood, the church brought together a racially diverse congregation. What do I mean by black churches? Obviously religion doesn’t have a color. When people talk about Black churches and White churches, they’re really talking about the racial makeup of the congregation or the church leadership. At Inner City Church, you had Blacks and whites worshiping together in Knoxville, Tennessee.
A big reason for that was the charisma and appeal of Reggie White.
And then, in 1996, someone burned Reggie’s church down to the ground.
BROADCASTER: In only a matter of moments, this quiet East Knoxville neighborhood church was no more.The main sanctuary consumed in flames when crews arrived shortly after four this morning.
BROADCASTER: Could this fire be related to four other church burnings in West Tennessee? Or was the bomber striking back at the growing number of interracial couples here? Investigators aren’t ruling those theories out.
BROADCASTER: ATF agents will be back out here in the morning to take a look at what’s left. Meanwhile, the Knoxville Fire Department is keeping a 24-hour watch, to make sure no one tampers with the evidence.
BROADCASTER: Reggie White, who’s a defensive end for the Green Bay Packers, says that the firebombing of his church in Knoxville, Tennessee this week was the work of racists who may have been trying to hurt him.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Just seeing the old news footage of Reggie talking about it… It sparked something in me.
REGGIE WHITE: I’m getting tired of hearing, ‘we’re doing our best.’ You know, it’s more than ‘doing your best’. You’ve gotta find out who’s done it.
COURTLAND BRAGG: It’s my job to tell sports stories, but this is different. This story is personal for me. … I guess, in a way, he kind of reminds me of my dad.
REGGIE WHITE: I didn’t do it my way, I tried to make sure I did it God’s way—the way He would have me to do it.
REGGIE WHITE: When I get off the field, I’m a husband, I’m a father. When I have the opportunity to share the gospel, I’m a preacher.
COURTLAND BRAGG: I watched my dad build his church, and I knew firsthand the type of work you gotta put in trying to acquire a building. Trying to recruit and save souls and get people from the community to serve in your church. Building a church is building a movement, a movement for good.
I never had the opportunity to meet Reggie White, so I never had the chance to ask him, but it seemed like, as I reflect, that’s the same legacy that he was trying to build. He was trying to do God’s work. And then, in one night, the symbol of all that hard work goes up into flames.
REGGIE WHITE: I look at it this way, we must be doing something right for someone to burn up a church. I believe that out of every bad thing that happens, something good is about to happen. I’m one who believes that when the devil does something like that, that means God is getting ready to do something supernatural, and spectacular.
COURTLAND BRAGG: It didn’t sit right with me. And I wanted some answers. So me and a team at NFL Films started doing some digging.
But what I found was more complicated than I ever could’ve imagined.
PHIL DURHAM: My name is, is Philip Durham. I go by Phil.
COURTLAND BRAGG: In 1996, Phil worked in Knoxville as a special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the ATF.
PHIL DURHAM: Church fire happened January 8th, 1996. Early Monday morning.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Phil had arrived just as the local fire department was getting the fire under control. But there was significant damage to the sanctuary.
PHIL DURHAM: The roofs and most of the structure to the sanctuary portion was collapsed. I remember one brick wall was still standing, but it was very unstable. As soon as we went into the back portion of the church, the floor was covered in liquid. We quickly found out that we were walking around in gasoline and kerosene. Very, very strong smell. It was probably at least a half inch thick of liquid that we were walking through downstairs. When you walk around all that fluid, you know, that’s, that’s a scary. Aspect right there.
COURTLAND BRAGG: As Phil’s team walked downstairs and found a bunch of bottles with rags sticking out of them.
PHIL DURHAM: What you would – or most people would call Molotov cocktails. None of these Molotov’s were thrown anywhere. They were all standing up on tables. Which was very unusual. Just looking at it going in, we thought this was amateurish. Just having all these Molotov’s sitting on the table didn’t make a lot of sense. They had been overfilled with the gasoline and kerosene. And it basically washed away any potential fingerprints or, or DNA or anything else that could have gotten off of those bottles.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Phil’s team suspected that maybe someone started the fire upstairs. And they had to run before they got around to using the Molotov’s.
PHIL DURHAM: People don’t realize if they pour liquids into a building that, you know, good oxygen flow and they, they light a match that thing’s going to go up in flames really, really fast. It probably scared them away at that point. Never got to finish what they were doing. And then we also saw the racial slurs on one of the doors on the side of the church
COURTLAND BRAGG: The slurs said “Die, niggers”. And “Die, nigger lovers”.
COURTLAND BRAGG: A typewritten letter was also found at the site of the arson saying that quote, “1996 shall be the year of white triumph and justice for the master supreme race”. The letter expressed that they would no longer tolerate integrated communities and quote, “Detractors of the white master race”.
The letter was signed ‘Skinheads for White Justice’.
BROADCASTER: Church members believe the firebombing was an attack on their church, which is known for its interracial congregation.
BROADCASTER: Agents say that doesn’t necessarily mean this was a hate crime.
ATF AGENT: So, we don’t know if that was there, or if it might’ve been put there as a disguise or some way to deflect, uh, suspicion, uh, in a different direction.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Man, was this 1996 or 1956? At the time of the fire, Reggie White and the Packers had just beaten the 49ers in the Divisional Round of the playoffs.
BROADCASTER: Steps up and he gets hit… and the ball goes down… he was throwing says the official… And Young is slow in getting up.
BROADCASTER: He was hit by Reggie White!
But Reggie barely has a chance to enjoy the win. Two days later, he got a phone call telling him that his church in Knoxville had burned down.
Around the same time that Reggie found out about his church burning down, America was finding out that there were many other churches were burning, too.
GARY FIELDS: First there was one fire, then there was another, then there was another.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Gary Fields is a reporter and editor for the Associated Press, but back in 1996, he was at USA Today. Gary and his team at USA Today, they built a national database of church fires. That database became the gold standard.
GARY FIELDS: I’m not gonna say we had every church fire in America, but I think our list and the database that we built was a little more definitive than what most other organizations had and at one point I knew we were doing pretty well when we got a phone call from the ATF and they were asking, ‘Hey, do you mind if we actually start using your list a little bit?’
COURTLAND BRAGG: Gary had been calling around asking state fire marshalls about church arsons and scanning local news reports of church fires.And what he found shocked him.
GARY FIELDS: We weren’t asking for black houses of worship, or white, or mosques, we said ‘give me anything that is a house of worship.’ That’s when it became evident that this was something that we were doing to all houses of worship.
COURTLAND BRAGG: All houses of worship were burning. But Black churches were burning at highly disproportionate numbers.
In ’96, the Black population in the United States was about 13%, but more than half of the church burnings were Black churches.
GARY FIELDS: It was 945 of these incidents over the course of five years. 500 African American churches, you know, compared to roughly about 400 white churches. That’s gonna be disproportionate, period. And there were a lot more white suspects arrested than Black suspects.
COURTLAND BRAGG: The Black church has been on the front lines combatting racism all throughout American history. So an attack on a Black church, if racially-motivated, hits a little different.
GARY FIELDS: First off, if it was black churches, African-American churches… it is exceptionally significant. It’s the top of the pyramid in the community – it was the center of organization. The entire civil rights era was built around being able to use churches.
COURTLAND BRAGG: The Reverend Elroy Bennett and the Inter-denominational Alliance organized what is commonly known as the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
REVEREND ELROY BENNET: In Montgomery, you will find at times, negroes riding the bus standing from halfway the bus to the back of it with one white passenger perhaps sitting on the tenth seat, and 15 or 20 negroes standing from that seat to the back of the bus. We’re asking that that seating arrangement be changed.
COURTLAND BRAGG: The march for voting rights, from Selma to Montgomery, started at Brown Chapel AME church.
DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: Then if they don’t listen once more, we will dramatize this whole situation, and seek to arouse the conscience of the federal government by marching by the thousands on places of registration all over the state.
COURTLAND BRAGG: If you understand the history of the Black church, and its place in the black community, then you can begin to understand that Reggie was more than a religious football player. He represents a legacy of black community leaders who would step behind the pulpit to bring about social change who were courageous enough to speak truth to power.
GARY FIELDS: So, the flip side of that is when something happens to that church it is more devastating. That would be like removing City Hall. As we knew, because of the fires and things back then, if it became evident that you were really using the church too much, then things would happen to those churches. And that’s really what led to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: The governor of the state of Alabama has to take a great deal of the responsibility for this evil act for his defiant irresponsible words and actions have created the atmosphere for violence and terror all over this state.
COURTLAND BRAGG: The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham is one of the most infamous terrorist attacks of the Civil Rights Movement. In September of 1963, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the church, murdering four little girls. This was just one of over 100 Black churches that were firebombed between 1954 and 1968.
Gary’s investigation into the church burnings in the ‘90s found that racism was often involved. But sometimes it had nothing to do with racism.
GARY FIELDS: There was racial animus in some of them. There were teenagers in some of them. There was one gentleman who burned 28 by himself. His wasn’t racial hatred, his was religious hatred. So, it was for a variety of reasons that these things were actually burning. There were cases where pastors burned churches down because they wanted new churches.
COURTLAND BRAGG: A pastor burning down their own church? For me, the first time I heard that, I was taken aback. But Gary clearly did his homework on church burnings across the country. Including Reggie’s church. It doesn’t surprise me at all that Reggie made it a point to shout out Gary.
REGGIE WHITE: I want to thank one guy here: Gary Fields from USA Today. He’s one of the first people to visit the sites and to find out what was going on.
COURTLAND BRAGG: At the beginning of 1996, black church arsons weren’t really a part of the national conversation. But because of Gary’s reporting and the fire at Reggie’s church, it became one of the biggest stories in the nation.
PHIL DURHAM: And we talked about other church fires across the country,
COURTLAND BRAGG: Former ATF agent, Phil Durham.
PHIL DURHAM: What their motives were, who was doing it. You know, what potential suspects they had on those fires. We would look at do they have any relationship to anyone in Knoxville? And did we have hate groups operating in Knoxville? You know, people were pointing the fingers and I, I know Reggie White pointed the fingers a lot – racial groups, hate groups.
NEWS INTERVIEWER: Is it a feeling among you and the other pastors that there is a racial conspiracy going on?
REGGIE WHITE: Well, yes, it is. I mean, uh, your know, in particular—
NEWS INTERVIEWER: You don’t believe they’re isolated incidents?
REGGIE WHITE: Well, no, I think, uh, that they’ve got to be connected some kind of way.
COURTLAND BRAGG: There’s a long history of white supremacist groups operating in Tennessee. Reggie and his wife, Sara, had had their own personal experience dealing with the KKK.
SARA WHITE: Reggie and I built our home that we thought where we’d be in – in Tennessee – where we were going to stay. When we were preparing to move in there was a wooden cross against our house. We didn’t know that we had KKK people living across the yard.
COURTLAND BRAGG: The Ku Klux Klan was founded in the city of Pulaski. Just four hours west of Knoxville. And just the year before Reggie’s church burned down, three white men were convicted of burning down several black churches in Tennessee using Molotov cocktails.
But Phil says the ATF had a hard time connecting the Inner City Church arson to any known white supremacists.
PHIL DURHAM: There were some white supremacists in the area, but we knew who they were, where they were. We ran that as far as we possibly could, and we could not tie anyone to any aspect of that.
COURTLAND BRAGG: I understood why the ATF would be investigating groups. But what if it wasn’t a conspiracy? One thing I learned from Gary’s research was that sometimes all it takes is one hateful person to devastate a community. You don’t have to join a white supremacist group to commit white supremacist crimes. In 2015 Dylan Roof shot up a black church all by himself. Yeah, he was a white supremacist. But he acted alone.
COURTLAND BRAGG: I think it’s safe to say the initial investigation was frustrating for everyone. But Reggie’s frustration was different because it was so public. He was one of the most famous people in the country and we could all watch him on our televisions.
REGGIE WHITE: I’m ticked off. I’m not happy about this game… I’m not happy because I get an official to tell me that I whine too much.
COURTLAND BRAGG: If this was my dad, I think I know what he’d be feeling. But I’m not sure what he would do. What Reggie did was go on the offensive. He publicly asked other Black celebrities to join in solidarity.
REGGIE WHITE: I’m calling to the forefront my counterparts. Athletes and I’m also calling entertainers. The Oprah Winfrey’s. I’m calling, in my field, the Michael Jordan’s and the Emmit Smith’s. Our communities are being terrorized and we have to do something about it.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Reggie also called out what he saw as racial inequality in the investigation.
REGGIE WHITE: I’m also discouraged with how long it took for, for the media in this country to really accept it. I, I must admit I believe that if, if these were white churches, it probably would have stopped at one. This country didn’t respond quick enough to me.
COURTLAND BRAGG: As Reggie was publicly bringing the racial tensions of the time to the forefront, the ATF’s investigation diligently continued.
PHIL DURHAM: As part of the investigation, we were going to local stores, local gas stations to, you know, trying to determine if there was anything unusual, if anybody saw anybody buying a lot of gasoline or kerosene or gas cans or anything of that nature. And I actually found where an individual had purchased five to seven, one and two gallon gas containers at the Walmart out of East Knoxville closer to where the church was. That purchase was, I believe, early Sunday morning, the day before the fire.
COURTLAND BRAGG: The ATF questioned the cashier at the WalMart and the cashier didn’t remember who bought the gas cans. But, they did remember that there was another WalMart employee standing in line right behind the person who was buying the gas cans.
PHIL DURHAM: He was on break and he was purchasing a snack. I found him and spoke with him and he actually told me that it was the pastor of the church buying the gas cans.
COURTLAND BRAGG: The pastor of the church at that time, his name was David Upton. He and his brother Jerry, founded the church. They both preached there. They were good friends of Reggie and a big part of why Reggie adopted Inner City Church as his own.
PHIL DURHAM: It was a week or so after the fire or sometime within that week of the fire. He had seen the pastor on TV talking about the fire and that’s when he recognized him. Said, ‘That’s the person that was standing in line in front of me.’
COURTLAND BRAGG: So, Phil is telling me that this witness saw David Upton, the pastor of Inner City Church, buying all these gas cans the day before his church was burned down by arson? The Uptons burned down their own church?
I know what it takes to build a church. It takes years and a huge investment of energy and time. Basically the ATF’s theory here is that the Uptons decided money was more important than all of that. The thought was that at least one of the Upton brothers were looking for an insurance payout.
According to what the Uptons later told a court, the insurance payout on the fire was just over Five-hundred thousand dollars. And from the ATF’s investigation into the arson, it seemed like they needed the money. So, as part of the ATF’s investigation into the arson, they started looking into the church’s finances.
PHIL DURHAM: We quickly realized that they were having financial problems. The money wasn’t there like they had said it was.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Inner City Church was more than just a church. It ran a loan program to help low-income people in the community buy homes and start businesses. That part of Inner City was organized by Jerry Upton.
PHIL DURHAM: And Reggie White had, had come to Knoxville, did a big press conference, about donating a million dollars to that financial fund that the church oversaw. And so we started looking at that money and we actually couldn’t track that money. It came into the church and we couldn’t tell you where it went. We had a motive, with the finances. Because they were struggling with the money – they obviously had an opportunity.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Racism is one thing. I’ve experienced it many times. But a church leader – the head of a church – burning down his own building? That would be wild.
GARY FIELDS: I know from my reporting back then that it was a really sensitive investigation because A, it was high profile.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Gary Fields, from USA TODAY, says people high up in the government started paying attention to the Inner City Church investigation.
GARY FIELDS: It was something that, you know, I think then President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno and a whole bunch of other folks were watching closely. And if you were a special agent on that one you pretty much had to find somebody with a gas can in their hand and a match because you weren’t going to go out there with a circumstantial case.
COURTLAND BRAGG: That was exactly what Phil Durham thought he had: a witness who said they saw Pastor David Upton at WalMart buying gas cans the morning of the fire. But not long after telling Phil’s agents that story, that witness had a change of heart.
PHIL DURHAM: I actually went to do a full interview and statement from the individual and the individual got scared.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Turns out the witness was a minor.
PHIL DURHAM: And he told me that his father told him not to speak to us. Not to get involved. Not to cooperate. So, he refused at that point to cooperate any further after telling me that it was the pastor that was standing in line.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Also, there was no footage from any security cameras. And whoever bought those gas cans paid with cash so there was no paper trail. The ATF’s hot lead was actually a dead end. But Phil’s team still felt that the leadership at Inner City Church was behind the arson. And out of respect for Reggie, they invited him to come talk about the case.
PHIL DURHAM: He actually came to the ATF office there in Knoxville. He came in with his attorney. I actually greeted and walked him into the office. It was because of his status.
COURTLAND BRAGG: One of the ATF’s deputy assistant directors actually came down from Washington to speak with Reggie that day. Phil wasn’t in the room, but he remembers what the agenda was.
PHIL DURHAM: It was more trying to learn about his relationship and what he really knew about the Uptons, which he had known for several years. Reggie didn’t have anything negative to say about the Uptons and, and really was not happy about us asking about the Uptons. Reggie really supported and, and backed Jerry Upton.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Phil told us that everyone at the ATF really liked Reggie, but they still weren’t sold on his theory.
PHIL DURHAM: We did everything we could possibly do to look at anything racially-motivated. It just wasn’t there. Wse just could not convince Reggie otherwise.
COURTLAND BRAGG:Phil and other ATF agents we interviewed all told us the same thing: as the investigation turned more towards the Upton brothers as suspects, Reggie became more and more frustrated.
REGGIE WHITE: I’m getting tired of hearing, we’re doing our best. You know, it’s more than ‘doing your best’. You’ve gotta find out who’s done it.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Those words. The conviction in Reggie’s voice: I can’t unhear it. It’s weird, but I feel like he—or someone, something—is talking to me.
REGGIE WHITE: We’re still talking to the officials about some of the things and some of the concerns that we have concerning investigation and other things going on in the cases.
ARC NEWS INTERVIEW: Tell me exactly what those concerns are.
REGGIE WHITE: Well, some of the, some of the situations pretty much boil down to church members being interrogated. Also, ministers being interrogated.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Tragically, Reggie died in 2004. Near the end of his life he saw his friend and mentor Jerry Upton sent away to prison. Not for arson, but for drugs. In 2000, Jerry Upton was convicted of selling cocaine and illegal possession of a firearm. Reggie died never knowing who burned down his church— the Inner City Church.
David Upton died in 2015, but his brother Jerry’s still alive. And he’s out of prison now. As I reported this story, I started to think that if I could talk to Jerry, or talk to the right people in Knoxville, that might, in some way, help Reggie. Maybe it could resurrect the legacy that the arson tried to extinguish. I don’t know. But, before I decided to go to Knoxville, I wanted to see if I could actually get Jerry on the phone.
JERRY UPTON: Hello.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Hello, may I please speak with Apostle Upton?
JERRY UPTON: This is he.
COURTLAND BRAGG: How you doing, Apostle Upton? My name is Courtland Bragg –
JERRY UPTON: Who did you say you were with?
COURTLAND BRAGG: I’m with NFL Films.
JERRY UPTON: NFL Films! Ok. Yeah. Yeah, Reggie and I were very close.
COURTLAND BRAGG: I was surprised Jerry was open to talking to me. He hadn’t done an interview in over 20 years.
JERRY UPTON: I first met Reggie when he was playing football for the University of Tennessee. It was in the eighties. And, you know, he started attending a bible study that we were doing. Reggie, he just, he loved it. And he loved the Bible, he loved the Word, and it just grew from there. I don’t have any hesitation in saying I loved him like he was my own brother or my own son.
COURTLAND BRAGG: I’m not sure what I expected Jerry Upton to sound like, especially with all the accusations against him and his brother. But when I talked to him, he seemed very proud of what he accomplished at Inner City Church decades ago.
JERRY UPTON: Knoxville was very segregated. There was a lot of racial barriers that had to be brought down. Blacks worshiped only with blacks, whites with whites and we broke through that barrier. I think it fulfilled a void that was in the community. People felt at ease.
COURTLAND BRAGG: We’re going to be coming down to Knoxville. If you had time, I would just love to see if I could just talk to you in person.
JERRY UPTON: If I’m here, I’d be more than glad to meet with you, and let you see what Reggie’s influence has done in Knoxville.
COURTLAND BRAGG: There’s a deeper story to be told about Reggie’s church and the city of Knoxville. Something deeper than ashes and accusations. I needed the perspective of those who lived and breathed the same air as the church. I needed to go to Knoxville.
KRIS WILSON: Courtland, where are we?
COURTLAND BRAGG: So we just arrived to Knoxville, Tennessee.
COURTLAND BRAGG: In October 2023, NFL Films producer Kris Wilson and I went to Knoxville. We were there to learn more about Reggie White’s Church, the Inner City Church. We were also there to speak with Jerry Upton, the former pastor at the church and the man the ATF believed had burned it down. I was looking forward to hearing what Jerry had to say, but when I got off the plane there was a text message waiting for me.
COURTLAND BRAGG: I had received a text message from Jerry Upton. He texts me and said he would be unfortunately unavailable to interview this week. He came down with the illness, um, from his trip that he took overseas last week.
COURTLAND BRAGG: I like to think the best about people, give them grace. Maybe Jerry really was sick. But Kris pushed back a little.
KRIS WILSON: What do you think in your mind were the possibilities?
COURTLAND BRAGG: I mean, your first thought is like, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me’, like, we’re all the way down here, we set up this interviewm. Maybe he’s just not interested and he’s taking me on a ride, you know, you never know. I still have hope that we may be able to try to still convince or persuade him to still sit with us and talk with us, but uh, right now I’m just kind of waiting to hear back from him, so…
KRIS WILSON: Cool. So right now, where are we headed?
COURTLAND BRAGG:Our first reporting stop in Knoxville was Honey Rock Victorious Church International. Jerry Upton’s current church, which he founded over a decade ago. Even though Jerry wasn’t feeling well, we hoped that Tuesday services wouldn’t be canceled.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Is this the church? This is a thrift store.
JESSE ALEJANDRO COTTRELL: It’s the Honey Rock Victorious Church Thrift store.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Y’all ready? Let’s go.
COURTLAND BRAGG: There’s a certain energy that surrounds a place of worship; a mix of peace and power. That’s what I felt when I walked up to Honey Rock.
As soon as we walked in the door, I could feel the presence of the Praise and Worship team playing music in the main hall. On the walls of the church, I saw pictures of the missionary work Jerry and his congregation do in Africa. Over the years, they’ve helped build churches and high schools. They’ve helped dig wells for water. Seeing the pictures really impressed me. It kind of hit on my heart strings. It’s the kind of work I know my dad wants to do.
After listening to the music for a bit we stepped out into the main hallway looking for someone to speak with.
We saw this sharply dressed older man using a cane walk in through the front door. He actually walked past us. Afterward, one of our producers, Jesse Alejandro Cottrell, asked another man, who seemed like he was working security, if the older man we had just seen was Jerry Upton.
JESSE ALEJANDRO COTTRELL: That’s Pastor Upton?
SECURITY: Apostle Upton.
JESSE ALEJANDRO COTTRELL: Oh.
COURTLAND BRAGG: It was. Jerry Upton was there. But he didn’t want to talk to us. The recording isn’t great because of all the music. The man we spoke to told us that although Jerry didn’t want to talk to us tonight, if he said he’d speak to us, he would. So, we left the church and hoped Jerry would talk to us before we left town.
JESSE ALEJANDRO COTTRELL: Thank you so much. What was your name?
SECURITY: Lawrence.
JESSE ALEJANDRO COTTRELL: Jesse. Thank you.
COURTLAND BRAGG: So we are heading to Diane Jordan’s residence.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Diane Jordan is a former commissioner of Knox County, and used to work closely with Jerry Upton and Reggie White. We thought that if anyone had insight into what was going on at Inner City Church in the mid ‘90s, it would be Diane. But we couldn’t get her on the phone so we showed up at her door hoping she would talk to us.
DIANE JORDAN: Hello.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Diane? How are you doing, my name’s Courtland Bragg. I’m doing a story on Reggie White and his ties here to Knoxville and him being a preacher at Inner City Church. I just wanted to see if there’s any chance I could maybe do a short interview with you?
DIANE JORDAN: OK.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Diane took us to her kitchen table. Above it, Kris noticed this picture of Diane from a couple decades back.
KRIS WILSON: So, you were known around town as the most stylish?
COURTLAND BRAGG: In this picture, from a local magazine, Diane is dressed up super stylishly in this cowboy hat.
DIANE JORDAN: : I never go out of the house without it. Nobody’s hardly seen me without a cowboy hat. And it has to match whatever I have on. So that’s how my constituents know me. You got to have a gimmick!
COURTLAND BRAGG:It was through her work with the community back in the ‘90s that Diane’s path crossed with Reggie White’s. She has fond memories of him.
DIANE JORDAN: Reggie was just a big giant to me, you know, just a jolly green giant kind of person, you know, just fun to be around. He enjoyed life. He loved people. We thought a whole lot of him and especially, to us, he was like a movie star.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Shortly after she became a county commissioner, Reggie actually hired Diane for a job.
DIANE JORDAN: I got elected for County Commissioner in 1994 and so in 1996, Jerry Upton and Reggie White gave me a job working for Reggie’s Bank.
COURTLAND BRAGG: What Diane is talking about when she says ‘Reggie’s bank’ is the non-profit loan operation Jerry Upton ran. The one that helped people with low income get loans. Diane was a Public Relations Director and loan officer at the program.
DIANE JORDAN: I would take loan applications and it was for low income or people that were, kind of, fell through the cracks and couldn’t get loans anywhere else.
COURTLAND BRAGG: In our interview with ATF agent Phil Durham, he told us that the finances at the loan program were mishandled. But Diane? She’s proud of the work the program did.
DIANE JORDAN: Small businesses don’t have a place to get money like the larger businesses. And so, this was definitely a need. And Reggie and Jerry Upton were in this together. Reggie financed Jerry to help get this bank started.
COURTLAND BRAGG: We pressed a little further, but Diane told us that she wasn’t knowledgeable about the finances at the loan program. All she could do was comment on how hard Jerry was working.
DIANE JORDAN: Jerry, like I said, was there every day trying to do whatever, I’m sure, to keep the lights on or what.
COURTLAND BRAGG: What we found in our investigation was evidence that the loan program was extremely underfunded. The government had promised millions of dollars in funding, but that never came through. Reggie White promised to match the government’s funding with a million dollars of his own money, but then the government backed out. It’s unclear if Reggie ever gave any money to the program.
And so for the few years that it existed the program was under-resourced. In the words of one local journalist we spoke to, Diane and Jerry were trying to fund projects that would cost millions of dollars. But they only had hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The ATF suspected the Upton brothers of embezzling the loan program’s money. But to me it seems possible that the loan program was promised money that never came through. And the Uptons were trying to make the best out of a bad situation.
We’d heard so many things about Jerry Upton. A lot of bad things. But talking to Diane was the closest we’d gotten to someone who actually knew him personally. Diane only had good things to say about Jerry.
DIANE JORDAN: Jerry was very easy to talk to. Very likable person. He’s a real down-to-earth, southern guy. He seems to have such wisdom of the Bible and he had a large following. I mean, it seemed like it just kept growing.
COURTLAND BRAGG: But of course it didn’t continue to grow. On a cold winter night in 1996, Jerry Upton and Reggie White’s church was burned to the ground. I asked Diane how Jerry reacted to the fire.
DIANE JORDAN: I know it hurt Jerry, uh, it really hurt Jerry because this was a dream of his that had come true and, and, uh, and bringing all races and creeds together was something Jerry always wanted to do. He would come in and talk to me and, and it was just such a downer for him. It took a lot out of Jerry.
COURTLAND BRAGG:Given the racial climate, do you feel like people might’ve had a problem with that, see whites and blacks fellowship together here in Knoxville?
DIANE JORDAN: Oh yes. I’m sure they did. I don’t know if that’s what caused the fire, or what. And it could have, because Knoxville, to me, is still quite racist, even now, but definitely then. It’s always been kind of difficult for African Americans in Knoxville. I can remember growing up here, we had colored bathrooms and white bathrooms when we would go downtown. I was like six or seven years old, I wanted to sit and talk to the bus driver, and they told me I couldn’t sit there, that I had to go to the back.
On my job, I never got promoted. They would always have somebody come in, a young white girl come in, and I would have to teach her my job, and then they would promote her to my boss. That’s the one reason I got into politics, was because I needed a voice.
COURTLAND BRAGG: But once she got elected, Diane found out that some people didn’t want to hear her voice. She says that the treatment she received from some city officials went way past harassment. Things got so bad for Diane that, ‘til this day, she still doesn’t want to talk about what happened to her on the record.
DIANE JORDAN: Do we have to have this on tape? This part I want off record because I don’t want to be attacked again.
COURTLAND BRAGG:As we talked more about the racial climate in Knoxville in the ‘90s, she says that she experienced abusive treatment because she was a Black woman standing up for the Black community in Knoxville against overt racism.
What Diane told us off the record was horrible. It shocked me to see a woman like Diane, a former elected official and a community leader, too scared to talk. From her perspective, the racism was bad in Knoxville and still is.
GARY FIELDS: I’ve got respect for the ATF, but they also had the skeletons in the closet to say the least.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Gary Fields, the former USA Today reporter, says that many people didn’t have faith in the ATF, because of these gatherings that some Tennessee ATF agents attended in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
GARY FIELDS: They had been going to the, to those ‘good ol boys roundups’ where there would be all kind of, you know, racist, you know, materials and stuff that was clearly out in the open.
COURTLAND BRAGG:Gary’s not making up that term, “Good Ol Boys Round Up.” That was the actual name of a yearly gathering of hundreds of local law enforcement and ATF agents in Tennessee. These events were mostly segregated with Black ATF agents rarely ever invited. And the ones who did attend say they were openly called the n-word.
The Good Ol Boys Round Up had been happening every year since 1980, but it wasn’t until 1995 that the news media broke the story. It was a huge embarrassment for the ATF and even led to a congressional investigation.
ORIN HATCH: I think we on the Judiciary Committee, uh, to the extent we know about it, are deeply troubled.
COURTLAND BRAGG: That’s Senator Orin Hatch, at a congressional hearing on the Good Ol Boys Round Up in July of 1995.
ORIN HATCH: According to news reports and our own investigation, some participants in at least some of the events have put on racist skits. Displayed blatantly racist signs and sold t-shirts displaying, among other things, a picture of an African American man sprawled across a police car with the words, ‘Boys on the Hood.’
COURTLAND BRAGG:The ATF agents I spoke to while reporting this story, including Phil Durham, claim that the racist actions at these events were committed by a few bad apples.
PHIL DURHAM: There were obviously some things that occurred at those, at those gatherings. Some of the bad things that happened were not related to the ATF or any other federal agency. It was some local law enforcement officers that actually came in, and one particular individual actually caused problems, and the ATF actually kicked him out. Said, ‘You cannot be here, you have to leave.’ And that particular individual didn’t take it very well, and actually hung signs—racially-motivated signs—on different parts of the campgrounds, and took photographs, and actually released all of that himself.
COURTLAND BRAGG: But whatever actually happened, the Good Ol Boys Round Up controversy was still fresh in people’s minds as the ATF investigated the arson at Reggie’s Church.
GARY FIELDS: That really created some difficulties in terms of, A) the trust factor for the African American community because you’re going to an agency that is now being associated with going to one of these things where racial animus was kind of the order of the day.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Before leaving Diane Jordan’s house, I had to ask her straight up if she thought Jerry Upton or his brother could’ve burned down the Inner City Church themselves.
DIANE JORDAN: I never heard that and maybe I didn’t hear it because I would have not entertained that Jerry Upton and his people burnt the church down. They wouldn’t bring that to me. They’d know, she’s not going to believe us anyway because that’s not the character of Jerry Upton.
COURTLAND BRAGG: While there was reason to question the ATF’s investigation, there were also reasons why people might question Jerry and David Upton’s character.
BROADCASTER: Earlier this year, Packer Reggie White received a check to help rebuild his church in Knoxville, Tennessee.
COURTLAND BRAGG: In the aftermath of the arson at Inner City Church, people and groups from across the country sent in donations to try and rebuild the church.
GREEN BAY REPRESENTATIVE: On behalf of the city of Green Bay, we’d like to present Reggie and Sarah a check for 143,261 dollars.
REGGIE WHITE: You might see a big man cry right here in a minute.
COURTLAND BRAGG: People from the city of Green Bay, where Reggie played as a member of the Packers, donated 143,000 dollars for the rebuilding effort. 100,000 dollars came from the National Council of Churches. And Jesse Jackson’s non profit donated building materials.
But the rebuilding never happened. The money simply vanished. And the building materials Jesse Jackson donated were sold off. Some suspected that Jerry and his brother David embezzled the money. Others suspected that they merely mishandled it. There isn’t concrete evidence either way.
COURTLAND BRAGG: All right. One thing is if he doesn’t answer, leave a voicemail.
COURTLAND BRAGG: It was our last day in Knoxville. We were boarding a flight in a few hours. We still hadn’t heard back from Jerry Upton. So, I decided to try one last time.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Alright, let’s go.
<PHONE RINGS>
AUTOMATED PHONE MESSAGE: The wireless customer you are calling is not available. Please try again later.
COURTLAND BRAGG: It went to voicemail. So, I texted Jerry to say we still wanted to talk with him. Honestly I didn’t expect to hear back. But then, just as I was bringing the rental car around to check out of our hotel, my phone buzzed. I ran back inside to tell my team.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Alright, so, got a text back from Jerry Upton that he will only be free from 1pm until 1:30. We got an address, so, uh. Oh, snap! Definitely a surprise, ‘cause I had low hopes.
WOMAN: Hello.
JERRY UPTON: Hello gentlemen.
COURTLAND BRAGG: As our team walked up to the place where we were supposed to meet Jerry, we actually bumped into him.
COURTLAND BRAGG: My name is Courtland Bragg.
JERRY UPTON: Ok. I’m Jerry Upton.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Jerry is an older man who uses a cane, but he has a lot of energy. Again, He’s well-dressed. This time, in a well-pressed charcoal gray suit.
JERRY UPTON: This is my church. This is my thrift store.
COURTLAND BRAGG: This is really amazing to see what you’ve done.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Everything seemed to be going well, but suddenly Jerry stopped walking and took a more serious tone.
JERRY UPTON: Now, If this interview is gonna be positive, I’m all for doing it. If it’s gonna have any negativity on my past, then I ain’t willing. So, break it down for me.
COURTLAND BRAGG: So, we want to talk to you about Reggie White. Your relationship with Reggie. As well as what happened as Inner City Church grew, and then unfortunately in ‘96 e—
JERRY UPTON: See, I’m not willing to go into that anymore.
JERRY UPTON: [to Jesse]: If you’re recording—
JESSE ALEJANDRO COTTRELL: Oh, oh, sir, I will stop recording, sure, no problem.
COURTLAND BRAGG:In the end, Jerry Upton didn’t want to talk to us with our mics on. However, to our surprise, he did talk to our crew for over an hour. I think he feels that the church arson was a hate crime. And he’s always felt that way. But our investigation revealed that not everyone in the city of Knoxville agrees.
In regards to his past, I get the feeling he believes that he already paid for the crimes that put him in prison and that God had redeemed him. That was the reason he hadn’t given an interview in over 20 years: He didn’t want to talk about a past he felt he was redeemed for.
I know some people might hear about his redemption and think, ‘He sounds like he’s dodging’. But to my ear, it sounds to me as if Jerry believes his faith forgave him of his sins.
As for Reggie White, Jerry said that Reggie continued visiting him in prison right up until he died.
Since seeing him in Knoxville, our team has reached out to Jerry repeatedly on the phone and over text. We’ve asked him to respond directly to suspicion that he or his brother burned down Inner City Church. And to suspicions that he embezzled the rebuilding money. Jerry hasn’t responded.
The circumstantial evidence that Jerry or his brother were involved in the arson of Inner City Church is as follows: Upton’s loan program was underfunded, there was over 500 thousand dollars paid out by insurance as a result of the arson, and hundreds of thousands of dollars were donated for an Inner City Church re-build that never happened.
In addition to all of those funds not being accounted for, Upton was using and seeling cocaine during the years immediately after the fire. However, a drug problem doesn’t indicate his involvement in the arson. But it doesn’t help public opinion on his character, either. And then of course there’s the witness who said they saw David Upton buying gas cans at WalMart the morning of the fire. But on the other hand, that witness never gave a formal statement and neither Jerry nor David were ever charged.Also, white men with racist motivation burnt down multiple churches in Tennessee the year before Inner City burned down.
For Black people in Knoxville, the climate of racism in the 90s was very real. The ATF had just been wrapped up in the Good Ol Boys scandal and the next year they’re the ones investigating – possibly – the most high profile hate crime in the country at that time. Not a good look.
We tried to verify that the ATF did their best to link the arson to white supremacists. But when we requested to see the case file, an ATF representative responded that, quote, “Due to the fact that the incident for which you seek records occurred in 1996, some of the records were eligible for destruction in 2016 or in the years following. Case files have a 20-year retention period.” Or in other words, the case file was old enough to be eligible for destruction. So, they destroyed it.
There wasn’t enough evidence to support an arson conviction motivated by financial gain or racial hate.
When I asked ATF agent Phil Durham directly why the case was never solved, he responded, quote, ‘Because of the attention, publicity, Reggie’s involvement and the overall scrutiny of the investigation, we knew we would have to build a case beyond all doubt in order to make arrests and get a conviction. We never reached that point so still today we cannot say who is responsible for the fire that day.’
In the U.S., the FBI reports that fewer than a quarter of all arsons are ever solved. So from the beginning, the odds were against the Inner City Church arson case being solved.
I don’t know who burned down the Inner City Church, but I do know it was a tragedy. The place meant a lot. Not just to Reggie White, but to an entire community that lost their place of peace and worship.
And of course it wasn’t just Reggie’s church that burned down. Hundreds of churches burned in the ‘90s. Those fires weren’t all hate crimes. But still, a disproportionate number of churches burned were Black churches.
I can’t help but think back to something Gary Fields, the USA Today reporter, said to me:
GARY FIELDS: A society that is burning down its houses of worship, and not do anything about it, is a society that’s standing at a dangerous place.
COURTLAND BRAGG: The burning of Inner City did have one major silver lining. It turned Reggie White into an activist for the cause.
REGGIE WHITE: I think we have a major problem in our country that we don’t want to admit. And that has to do with racism. We kind of shoved that aside. We shoved it aside in the church burnings. This year you don’t hear much about churches burning no more.
COURTLAND BRAGG: Reggie continued his crusade to spotlight the burning of churches. And his fame, his eloquence, his relentlessness all played a key role in inspiring real change.
BROADCASTER: The president endorsed a new bill to fight religious terror.
COURTLAND BRAGG: After publicly pressuring President Bill Clinton, the federal government set up a national task force on church burnings.
BILL CLINTON: To make it easier to prosecute anyone who attacks any house of worship, of any religious faith, of any race in America.
COURTLAND BRAGG: And a number of laws were changed to make it easier to prosecute someone for burning a church. These efforts had an impact. According to Gary, the number of church arson cases that led to arrests almost doubled.
Reggie’s activism helped people across the country find justice for their churches being burned down. And helped end the church arson epidemic.
