The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

The cross and the lynching tree are separated by nearly 2,000 years. One is the universal symbol of Christian faith; the other is the quintessential symbol of black oppression in America. Though both are symbols of death, one represents a message of hope and salvation, while the other signifies the negation of that message by white supremacy.

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.

how to reconcile the gospel message of liberation with the reality of black oppression.

My first theological cry burst forth with the publication of Black Theology and Black Power in 1969. I found my voice in the social, political, religious, and cultural context of the civil rights and black power movements in the 1960s. The Newark and Detroit riots in July 1967 and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 were the events that shook me out of my theological complacency, forcing me to realize the bankruptcy of any theology in America that did not engage the religious meaning of the African American struggle for justice. What I studied in graduate school ignored white supremacy and black resistance against it, as if they had nothing to do with the Christian gospel and the discipline of theology. Silence on both white supremacy and the black struggle against racial segregation made me angry with a fiery rage that had to find expression.

How could any theologian explain the meaning of Christian identity in America and fail to engage white supremacy, its primary negation?

I embraced them both because I saw

them advocating different methods that corrected and complemented each other, as they worked for the same goal—the liberation of black people from white supremacy. Just as I could not separate Martin from Malcolm, neither could I separate my Christian identity from my blackness. I was black before I was Christian. 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. Martin King and Malcolm X gave me intellectual resources and the spiritual courage to attack white supremacy.

concluded that an immanent presence of a transcendent revelation, confirming for blacks that they were more than what whites said about them, gave them an inner spiritual strength to cope with anything that came their way. I wrote because words were my weapons to resist, to affirm black humanity, and to defend it.

Reading and writing about the lynching nightmare, looking at many images of tortured black bodies, has been my deepest challenge and the most painful experience I have had as a theologian.

The cross helped me to deal with the brutal legacy of the lynching tree, and the lynching tree helped me to understand the tragic meaning of the cross.

The paradox of a crucified savior lies at the heart of the Christian story. That paradox was particularly evident in the first century when crucifixion was recognized as the particular form of execution reserved by the Roman Empire for insurrectionists and rebels. It was a public spectacle accompanied by torture and shame—one of the most humiliating and painful deaths ever devised by human beings.

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.

The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.

At no time was the struggle to keep such hope alive more difficult than during the lynching era (1880-1940).

Both the cross and the lynching tree represented the worst in human beings and at the same time “an unquenchable ontological thirst”[1] for life that refuses to let the worst determine our final meaning. Lynching has a complicated and dynamic meaning in American history.

Lynching was an extralegal punishment sanctioned by the community.

Lynching was not regarded as an evil thing but a necessity—the only way a community could protect itself from bad people out of reach of the law.[3]

Lynching as primarily mob violence and torture directed against blacks began to increase after the Civil War and the end of slavery, when the 1867 Congress passed the Reconstruction Act granting black men the franchise and citizenship rights of participation in the affairs of government.

The white South’s perspective on the Reconstruction was told in Thomas Dixon’s enormously popular novel The Leopard’s Spots (1902), which sold

over one million copies. It was followed by The Clansman (1905). Both novels portrayed the Klan as redeemers of the South. D. W. Griffith transformed Dixon’s novels into that cinematic masterpiece of racist propaganda The Birth of a Nation (1915), first seen at the White House and praised enthusiastically by President Woodrow Wilson.

It was like killing a chicken or killing a snake. The whites would say, ‘Niggers jest supposed to die, ain’t no damn good anyway—so jest go an’ kill ’em.’

equality. In the white imagination, the image of black men was transformed from docile slaves and harmless “Sambos,” to menacing “black beast rapists,” the most serious threat to the virtue of white women and the sanctity of the white home. The image of black women was changed from nurturing “Negro mammies” to salacious Jezebels, nearly as corrupting to white civilization as black men.

Even prominent religious scholars in the North, like the highly regarded Swiss-born church historian Philip Schaff of Union Theological Seminary in New York (1870-1893), believed that “The Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-American, of all modern races, possess the strongest national character and the one best fitted for universal dominion.”[12]

Cole Blease, the two-time governor and U.S. senator from South Carolina, proclaimed that lynching is a “divine right of the Caucasian race to dispose of the offending blackamoor without the benefit of jury.”[13]

The Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had said clearly in the

Dred Scott Decision (1857): “[blacks] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”[14]

Lynching became a white media spectacle, in which prominent newspapers, like the Atlanta Constitution, announced to the public the place, date, and time of the expected hanging and burning of black victims.

“This is the barbeque we had last night.”[17]

When the anti-lynching Dyer Bill was passed in the House of Representatives, January 26, 1922,

Unlike Bishop Turner, however, few blacks in the South could fight back with pen or gun and survive. “You couldn’t do nothing about those things,” Mississippi bluesman Willie Dixon said, as he reflected back on the lynching era in his autobiography. “The black man had to be a complete coward.”[22] Yet cowardice is not the right word to describe the black response to lynching and white mob violence; even Willie Dixon had the courage to leave Mississippi for Chicago, where he joined other bluesmen and women, like Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, and Etta James, together creating a musical response to lynching that told the world about the cultural power of blacks to preserve and protect their humanity.

There were many “sundown towns” in the South and the North—some with signs warning, “Nigger, don’t let the sun set on your head,”[23] and others with no signs but which could be fatal to blacks who happened to be passing through.

For most blacks it was the blues and religion that offered the chief weapons of resistance.

Both black religion and the blues offered sources of hope that there was more to life than what one encountered daily in the white man’s world. At the Saturday night juke joint, bluesmen like Robert Johnson, often called the most influential bluesman, spoke back in defiance, refusing to be defined by death’s brutal reality—the constant threat of the lynching tree. I got to keep movinnnn’, I got to keep movinnnn’, Blues fallin’ like hail And the day keeps on worryin’ me, There’s a hellhound on my trail.[24]

Blues singers lifted African Americans above their troubles by offering them an opportunity to experience “love and loss” as a liberating catharsis.

Blacks found hope in the music itself—a collective self-transcendent meaning in the singing, dancing, loving, and laughing. They found hope in the stoic determination not to be defeated by the pain and suffering in their lives. James Baldwin called this hope an “ironic tenacity”! “I’ve got the blues and I’m too damn mean to cry.” “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]

As long as African Americans could sing and play the blues, they had some hope that one day their humanity would be acknowledged.

This dialectic of despair and hope defined black existence.

had never in my life been abused by whites,” wrote Richard Wright in Black Boy, as he reflected back on his boyhood in Mississippi, “but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings.”[31]

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 blues expressed a feeling, an existential affirmation of joy in the midst of extreme suffering, especially the ever-present threat of death by lynching. B. B. King, who saw a lynching as a child in Mississippi, gave a powerful interview on the meaning of the blues: If you live under that system for so long, then it don’t bother you openly, but mentally, way back in your mind it bugs you. . . . Later on you sometime will think about this and you wonder why, so that’s where your blues come in, you really bluesy then, y’see, because you hurt deep down, believe me, I’ve lived through it, I know. I’m still trying to say what the blues means to me. So I sing about it.[35]

If the blues offered an affirmation of humanity, religion offered a way for black people to find hope. “Our churches are where we dip our tired bodies in cool springs of hope,” wrote Richard Wright in Twelve Million Voices, “where we retain our wholeness and humanity despite the blows of death. . . .”[36]

While the lynching tree symbolized white power and “black death,” the cross symbolized divine power and “black life”—God overcoming the power of sin and death.

To sink down was to give up on life and embrace hopelessness, like the words of an old bluesman: “Been down so long, down don’t bother me.” It was to go way down into a pit of despair, of nothingness, what Søren Kierkegaard called “sickness unto death,” a “sickness in the self”—the loss of hope that life could have meaning in a world full of trouble. The story of Job is the classic expression of utter despair in the face of life’s great contradictions:

The spirituals, gospel songs, and hymns focused on how Jesus achieved salvation for the least through his solidarity with them even unto death.

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.

The final word about black life is not death on a lynching tree but redemption in the cross—a miraculously transformed life found in the God of the gallows.

Although Jacob was left with a limp, he won his struggle with God.

As Jacob, the God-wrestler, received a new name to reflect his new self, black people’s struggle with God in white America also left a deep and lasting wound. Yet they too expressed their hope for a new life in God: “Ah tol’ Jesus it would be all right, if He changed mah name,” another spiritual that connects with Jacob’s experience. The change of name initiates a new conflict, a new struggle. “Jesus tol’ me the world would be ’gainst me if He changed mah name.”

But the cross speaks to oppressed people in ways that Jesus’ life, teachings, and even his resurrection do not. As the German New Testament scholar Ernst Käsemann put it, “The resurrection is . . . a chapter in the theology of the cross.” Or the cross is “the signature of the one who is risen.”[47] The cross places God in the midst of crucified people, in the midst of people who are hung, shot, burned, and tortured.

Bishop Payne of the A.M.E. Church was so troubled that he questioned God’s existence: Sometimes it seems as though some wild beast had plunged his fangs into my heart, and was squeezing out its life-blood. Then I began to question the existence of God, and to say: “If he does exist, is he just? If so, why does he suffer one race to oppress and enslave another, to rob them by unrighteous enactments of rights, which they hold most dear and sacred? . . . Is there no God?”[53]