The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

My initial challenge was to develop a liberation theology that could be both black and Christian—at the same time and in one voice. That was not easy because even in the black community the public meaning of Christianity was white.

The cross is a paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.

Although white southerners lost the Civil War, they did not lose the cultural war—the struggle to define America as a white nation and blacks as a subordinate race unfit for governing and therefore incapable of political and social equality.

Blacks knew that violent self-defense was tantamount to suicide; even affirming blackness in a world defined by white power took great courage.

One has to be a little mad, kind of crazy, to find salvation in the cross, victory in defeat, and life in death. This is why the meaning of the cross is intensely debated today, especially by secular and religious intellectuals who reject the absurd idea that a shameful, despicable death could “reveal” anything.

“One can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of a pure regard for truth,” wrote 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]

In the “lynching era,” between 1880 to 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Yet these “Christians” did not see the irony or contradiction in their actions.

Niebuhr taught that love is the absolute, transcendent standard that stands in judgment over what human beings can achieve in history. Because of human finitude and humanity’s natural tendency to deny it (sin), we can never fully reach that ethical standard. The best that humans can strive for is justice, which is love approximated, a balance of power among competing groups. Unlike the advocates of the Social Gospel, who often suggested that we could through love build the Kingdom of God on earth, Niebuhr placed justice, rather than love, at the center of Christian social ethics.

It has always been difficult for white people to empathize fully with the experience of black people. But it has never been impossible.

Suffering always poses the deepest test of faith, radically challenging its authenticity and meaning. No rational explanation can soothe the pain of an aching heart and troubled mind. In the face of the lynching death of an innocent child, black Christians could only reach into the depth of their religious imagination for a transcendent meaning that could take them through despair to a hope “beyond tragedy.” For Mrs. Bradley, the voice she heard was the voice of the resurrected Jesus. It spoke of hope that, although white racists could take her son’s life, they could not deprive his life and death of an ultimate meaning. As in the resurrection of the Crucified One, God could transmute defeat into triumph, ugliness into beauty, despair into hope, the cross into the resurrection.

It is one thing to teach theology (like Niebuhr, Barth, Tillich, and most theologians) in the safe environs of a classroom and quite another to live one’s theology in a situation that entails the risk of one’s life.

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.” What sustained him was the sense of God’s love, which gave him “the interior resources to bear the burdens and tribulations of life,” “come what may.”

King saw in Jesus’ unmerited suffering on the cross God’s answer to black suffering on the lynching tree. Even in the face of the killing of four little girls in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham (September 15, 1963), King did not lose his faith that love is redemptive, even for the whites who committed the unspeakable crime.

King said, I hope you find consolation from Christianity’s affirmation that death is not the end. Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance. Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads man into life eternal. Let this daring faith, this great invincible surmise, be your sustaining power during these trying days.

For King, Jesus never promised that his disciples would not suffer. Quite the opposite: suffering is the inevitable fate of those who stand up to the forces of hatred.

A similar comparison was made about Jesus and King by Benjamin Mays when he was asked whether King’s martyrdom was inevitable. Inevitable, not that God willed it. Inevitable in that any man who takes the position King did . . . if he persists in that long enough, he’ll get killed. Now. Anytime. That was the chief trouble with Jesus: He was a troublemaker. So any time you are a troublemaker and you rebel against the wrongs and injustices of society and organize against that, then what may happen is inevitable.

and poor people throughout the world suffered enough? Giving value to suffering seems to legitimize it. Whatever we may say about the limits of King’s perspective on the cross and redemptive suffering, he did not legitimize suffering. On the contrary, he tried to end it, sacrificing his own life for the cause of others.

An apology, although important and welcomed by many blacks, is not justice.

Du Bois then proceeded to outline the “plain facts”: The church aided and abetted the Negro slave trade; the church was the bulwark of American slavery; and the church to-day is the strongest seat of racial and color prejudice.

Du Bois put the matter plainly and bluntly, even though many of the younger artists disagreed with him. 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]