The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

Like Wells and other black Christians, club women viewed white Christianity as a contradiction of true Christian identity, largely because of its support of segregation and lynching. “Would to God that it were,” complained the National Baptist leader Nellie Burroughs, when she rejected America’s Christian identity, “but it is the most lawless and desperately wicked nation on the globe.” Lynching, she insisted, was “no superficial thing . . . it is in the blood of the nation. And the process of eliminating it will be difficult and long.”[51] Though Nellie Burroughs was a deeply committed Christian, she, like many black women leaders before and after, urged blacks to resist the temptation of spiritual passivity, as if God would liberate them without their own participation. Speaking in 1933 on the theme “What Must the Negro Do to be Saved?” at Bethel A.M.E. Church in Washington, DC, she said: “Don’t wait for deliverers. . . . There are no deliverers. . . . The Negro must serve notice to the world that he is ready to die for justice. . . . We are a race on this continent that can work out its own salvation.” Therefore, she urged, “Work as if all depends upon you. Pray as if all depends upon God.”[52]