The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

Unfortunately, during the course of 2,000 years of Christian history, this symbol of salvation has been detached from any reference to the ongoing suffering and oppression of human beings—those whom Ignacio Ellacuría, the Salvadoran martyr, called “the crucified peoples of history.” The cross has been transformed into a harmless, non-offensive ornament that Christians wear around their necks. Rather than reminding us of the “cost of discipleship,” it has become a form of “cheap grace,”[3] an easy way to salvation that doesn’t force us to confront the power of Christ’s message and mission. Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a “recrucified” black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.

They put him to death by hanging him on a tree. —Acts 10:39

Lynching was an extralegal punishment sanctioned by the community. Many scholars date its origin in Virginia during the Revolutionary War when Charles Lynch or William Lynch (both were called the original “Judge Lynch”), with the support of the community, punished Tory sympathizers.

Many western movies show a romanticized view of lynching as hanging rustlers or bank robbers and murderers.

When KKK members were tried in courts, they could usually count on their neighbors and friends to find them “not guilty,” since all-white male juries almost never found white men guilty of lynching a black man.

After seeing Birth, one white man in Kentucky left the theater so excited that he shot and killed a fifteen-year-old African American high school student.

Following Reconstruction and the removal of federal troops from the South (1877), the black dream of freedom turned into a nightmare “worse than slavery,”[5] initiating what black historian Rayford Logan called the “nadir”[6] in black history and what journalist Douglas A. Blackmon appropriately called “slavery by another name.”[7]

“The blues,” as Ralph Ellison put it, “is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.”[26]

In the black experience, there was what novelist Richard Wright called the “endemic capacity to live.”[27]

But the singing of the blues was also a way for ordinary working class and poor blacks to assert loudly and exuberantly their somebodiness, twisting and turning their sweaty bodies to the “low down dirty blues.” “You’ve never heard a mule sing, have you?” intoned a bluesman, asserting his humanity.

When an adult black male is treated like a child in a patriarchal society—with whites calling him “boy,” “uncle,” and “nigger”—proclaiming oneself a “man” is a bold and necessary affirmation of black resistance.

The more black people struggled against white supremacy, the more they found in the cross the spiritual power to resist the violence they so often suffered. They came to know, as the black historian Lerone Bennett wrote, “at the deepest level . . . what it was like to be crucified. . . . And more: that there were some things in this world that are worth being crucified for.”[42] Just as Jesus did not deserve to suffer, they knew they did not deserve it; yet faith was the one thing white people could not control or take away.

Penniless, landless, jobless, and with no political and social power in the society, what could black people do except to fight with cultural and religious power and pray that God would support them in their struggle for freedom?

If the God of Jesus’ cross is found among the least, the crucified people of the world, then God is also found among those lynched in American history.

The spirituals “Wrestling Jacob,” “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” and “Wake Up, Jacob” are black people expressing their solidarity with Jacob and his struggle for a new identity. Their identification with Jacob stretches back deep into slavery.

W. E. B. Du Bois called black faith “a pythian madness” and “a demoniac possession”—“sprung from the African forests,” “mad with supernatural joy.”[46] One has to be a little mad, kind of crazy, to find salvation in the cross, victory in defeat, and life in death.

Leaving white churches helped blacks to find their own space for free religious and political expression, but it did not remove their need to wrestle with God about the deeply felt contradictions that slavery created for faith. “Does the Bible condemn slavery without any regard to circumstances, or not?” roars Reverend J. W. C. Pennington in 1845. “I, for one, desire to know.

The blues was an individual’s expression of a cultural defiance against white supremacy, a stubborn refusal to be defined by it. The blues prepared people to fight for justice by giving them a cultural identity that made them human and thus ready to struggle. The blues sent people traveling, roaming, looking for a woman or a man to soothe one’s aching human heart. But it was Jesus’ cross that sent people protesting in the streets, seeking to change the social structures of racial oppression.

French philosopher, activist, and mystic Simone Weil. “Christ likes for us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.”[56]

But what does the cross in the Christian scriptures and the black experience of the blues have to say about these enduring atrocities? This is the question that both black secular thought and prophetic faith seek to explain for the African American community, for America, and for the world.

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

“Ultimate religious truth,” Niebuhr wrote, “can be grasped only in symbolic form, and the Christ of the cross is the supreme symbol of divine grace.”[19] For that reason, Niebuhr said, “Only poets can do justice to the Christmas and Easter stories and there are not many poets in the pulpit.”[20]

The Delta Farm was a collection of poor white and black farmers laboring together “to throw off the tenant farming system.”

Simon of Cyrene, the African, bearing Jesus’ cross. Black ministers, searching for ways to identify racially with the story of salvation in the scriptures, have since slavery times liked to preach about “Black Simon” (as they called him) who carried Jesus’ cross.

the famous anti-lynching poem “If We Must Die” exploded from Jamaican writer Claude McKay during the “Red Summer” of 1919. It was later recited by Winston Churchill, one of Niebuhr’s heroes, in a speech against the Nazis, and it was found on the body of an American soldier killed in action in 1944. McKay, however, was speaking to blacks who were being lynched by whites in northern riots.

Langston Hughes, another New Yorker and poet laureate of Black America, also articulated black dreams not realized. What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— Like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags Like a heavy load. Or does it explode?[44]

While Niebuhr agreed, he did not want to throw out “the white man as white man,” and asked “whether there is not a leaven in the other classes that would correspond to the light of truth in the despised minority.” Baldwin replied that “I don’t mean to say the white people are villains or devils or anything like that,” but what “I do mean to say is this: that the bulk of the white . . . Christian majority in this country has exhibited a really staggering level of irresponsibility and immoral washing of the hands, you know. . . . I don’t suppose that . . . all the white people in Birmingham are monstrous people. But they’re mainly silent people, you know. And that is a crime in itself.”

the most important thing I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problems. The most urgent and most disgraceful, the most shameful, the most tragic problem is silence.”[51]

This suggests why it is so hard for whites and blacks to talk about white supremacy; even among progressive intellectuals like Niebuhr, there is too little empathy regarding black suffering in the white community.

The Social Gospel advocates held conferences on the status of the Negro in Mohonk, New York, in 1890 and 1891 and felt no need to invite any blacks, because, as Lyman Abbott said, “A patient is not invited to the consultation of the doctors on his case.”[61]

In a sermon (1903), Atlanta minister John E. White of Second Baptist Church asked a penetrating question but did not develop it: “Will it be considered ‘one-sided’ if I suggest that Christ was lynched by a legalized mob, and coming out of that stupendous event was a divine force and truth which will cure the lynching evil and settle all problems of evil in the world?”[62]

One Mississippi court awarded the family of a lynched victim just one dollar for their loss.

Secular activists like Robert Moses, James Forman, and Stokely Carmichael drew inspiration from other sources, like Albert Camus’ The Rebel and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. With Camus, they said, “Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.”[13] But for poor southern blacks, who had little formal education in philosophy or political philosophy, it was religion that offered the only resource—and the language—to fight against segregation and lynching.

King believed that love in society is named justice.

They felt something redemptive about Jesus’ cross—transforming a “cruel tree” into a “Wondrous Cross.” Blacks pleaded, “Jesus Keep Me near the Cross,” because “Calvary,” in a mysterious way they could not explain, was their redemption from the terror of the lynching tree.

As he would later note, we do not know what we truly believe or what our theology is worth until “our highest hopes are turned into shambles of despair” or “we are victims of some tragic injustice and some terrible exploitation.”

“I can’t be neutral on this [Vietnam],” he said to his staff. “The word of God is upon me, [and] it’s like fire shut up in my bones. And I just have to tell it.”

So in spite of the darkness of this hour we must not despair. We must not become bitter; nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence. We must not lose faith in our white brothers. Somehow we must believe that the most misguided of them can learn to respect the dignity and worth of human personality.

It takes a powerful imagination, grounded in historical experience, to uncover the great mysteries of black life. “We have been in the storm so long,” “tossed and driven,” singing and praying, weeping and wailing, trying to carve out some meaning in tragic situations. The beauty in black existence is as real as the brutality, and the beauty prevents the brutality from having the final word. Black suffering needs radical and creative voices, prophetic advocates who can tell brutal and beautiful stories of how oppressed black people survived with a measure of dignity when they were not meant to.

“the United States of Lyncherdom”[5] (to use Mark Twain’s provocative and apt phrase),

This is a cruel land, this South, And bitter words to twist my mouth

One cannot correctly understand the black religious experience without an affirmation of deep faith informed by profound doubt. Suffering naturally gives rise to doubt. How can one believe in God in the face of such horrendous suffering as slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree?

doubt is not a denial but an integral part of faith. It keeps faith from being sure of itself.

“O Silent God,” Du Bois prays, Listen to us, Thy children: our faces dark with doubt are made a mockery in Thy Sanctuary. . . . Bewildered we are and passion-tossed, mad with the madness of a mobbed and mocked and murdered people; straining at the armposts of Thy throne, we raise our shackled hands and charge Thee, God, by the bones of our stolen fathers, by the tears of our dead mothers, by the very blood of Thy crucified Christ: What meaneth this?

All art is propaganda and ever must be, despite wailing of purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.[37]

“I believe that anything which makes people think of existing evil conditions is worthwhile,”

it was his poem “Goodbye Christ” that particularly disturbed Christians

Indeed, it was white slaveholders, segregationists, and lynchers who defined the content of the Christian gospel. They wrote hundreds of books about Christianity, founded seminaries to train scholars and preachers, and thereby controlled nearly two thousand years of Christian tradition.

Black artists are prophetic voices whose calling requires them to speak truth to power. Their expressions are not controlled by the institutions of the church.

Rejecting the teaching of black and white churches that Jesus’ death on the cross saved us from sin and that we too are called by him to suffer as he did, some black scholars, especially women, reject any celebration of Jesus’ cross as a means of salvation. Theirs is a just and powerful critique of bad religion and theology, which must be reckoned with so as not to make suffering a good in itself.