The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

Throughout the twentieth century, African Americans continued to struggle to reconcile their faith in God’s justice and love with the persistence of black suffering. Writer James Baldwin spoke for many: “If [God’s] love was so great, and if He loved all His children, why were we, the blacks, cast down so far?”[55] No one knows the answer to that question.

supremacy. But one could correctly say that the spirituals and the church, with Jesus’ cross at the heart of its faith, gave birth to the black freedom movement that reached its peak in the civil rights era during the 1950s and 60s.

The blues prepared people to fight for justice by giving them a cultural

identity that made them human and thus ready to struggle.

The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American theological discourse and preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching. 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.

70 years lynching/exile

Crucifixion was a Roman form of public service announcement: Do not engage in sedition as this person has, or your fate will be similar. The point of the exercise was not the death of the offender as such, but getting the attention of those watching. Crucifixion first and foremost is addressed to an audience.[3] The crucifixion of Jesus by the Romans in Jerusalem and the lynching of blacks by whites in the United States are so amazingly similar that one wonders what blocks the American Christian imagination from seeing the connection.[4]

A case in point is Reinhold Niebuhr, widely regarded as America’s most influential theologian in the twentieth century, and possibly in American history. Among his contemporaries he was unusually attuned to social reality and the “irony” and tragedy of American history. Among white theologians he was particularly sensitive to the evils of racism and spoke and wrote on many occasions of the sufferings of African Americans. Few theologians of the twentieth century focused as much attention on the cross, one of the central themes of his work. And yet even he failed to connect the cross and its most vivid reenactment in his time. To reflect on this failure is to address a defect in the conscience of white Christians and to suggest why African Americans have needed to trust and cultivate their own theological imagination.

and later professor of Christian Social Ethics and Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York (1928-1960), where he was the dominant voice in defining the discipline of Christian social ethics, the study of Christian action in society.

McGeorge Bundy called Niebuhr “probably the most influential single mind in the development of American attitudes which combined moral purpose with a sense of political reality.”[7]

Best known for his realist approach in Christian social ethics, Niebuhr rejected pacifism (which he had once espoused), idealism, and perfectionism—the idea that individuals and groups could achieve the standard of love he saw revealed in Jesus’ life, teachings, and death. 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.

earth, Niebuhr placed justice, rather than love, at the center of Christian social ethics.

nature. As he put it famously in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”[9]

power between groups, whether classes, races, or nations, he saw it always in a state of flux, never achieving perfection in history.

For Niebuhr the revelation of God’s transcendent love hidden in Jesus’ suffering on the cross is not simply the “keystone” of the Christian faith; it is the very key to history itself.[13]

“The crucified Messiah [is] the final revelation of the divine character and divine purpose.” He was rejected because people expected a Messiah “perfect in power and perfect in goodness.” But “the revelation of divine goodness in history must be powerless.”

Peter went from being “the mouthpiece of God” to a “tool” of Satan, because he could not connect vicarious suffering with God’s revelation. Suffering and death were not supposed to happen to the Messiah.

the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to naught things that are: That no flesh shall glory in his presence. (1 Cor 1:26-29)

Or as Niebuhr put it, “The Christian faith is centered in one who was born in a manger and who died upon the cross. This is really the source of the Christian transvaluation of all values.

“Faith is able to sense and appropriate an ultimate truth too deep for human reason.”[17] This faith is defined by humility and repentance.

“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]

“Christianity is a faith,” Niebuhr wrote, “which takes us through tragedy to beyond tragedy, by way of the cross to victory in the cross.”[22]

Niebuhr’s focus on realism (“facts of experience”) and the cross (tragedy) should have turned his gaze to the lynching tree, but he did not look there, even though lynching trees were widely scattered throughout the American landscape. Why did Niebuhr fail to connect Jesus’ cross to the most obvious cross bearers in American society?

nation.” “If,” he concluded, “the white man were to expiate his sins committed against the darker races, few white men would have a right to live.”[24]

language.” He even says that the 1896 Supreme Court doctrine of “separate but equal,” which made Jim Crow segregation legal in the South, “was a very good doctrine for its day,” since it allowed “the gifted members” among ex-slaves, a “culturally backward” people, to show, as a few had done in sports and the arts, “irrefutable proof that these deficiencies were not due to ‘innate’ inferiorities.”

Niebuhr himself analyzed this dilemma, having persuasively pointed out in his classic, Moral Man and Immoral Society, that groups are notoriously selfish and have limited capacity to step outside of their interests and see the world from another group’s standpoint.

What made Darrow so effective was his capacity to empathize with blacks and to persuade others to do so, arguing that blacks have as much right as whites to defend themselves when their home is under attack.

capitalization. He seemed only marginally concerned about justice for black people, even though he firmly opposed racial prejudice in any form.

When Niebuhr saw suffering, he described the facts as he saw them: “Thousands in this town are really living in torment while the rest of us eat, drink and make merry. What a civilization!”[31]

Niebuhr’s successor, Adelbert Helm, correctly insisted that racial inclusiveness was a test of the Christian identity of the church.

“Here I have been preaching for thirteen years, and crying, ‘Woe unto you if all men speak well of you,’ and yet I leave without a serious controversy in the whole thirteen years.”[33] This indicates that he did not engage the race issue—the greatest moral problem in American history—in any practical way. During most of Niebuhr’s life, lynching was the most brutal manifestation of white supremacy, and he said and did very little about it. Should we be surprised, then, that other white theologians, ministers, and churches followed suit?

Niebuhr discovered that talking about race was a divisive issue, even, or, shall we say, especially among white ministers in Mississippi, who were more concerned about the mixing of the races than about justice for whites and blacks.

expediency. Economic cooperation is so necessary that it is worth establishing it even if scruples must be sacrificed to prejudices in the matter of social and educational relationships.”

Niebuhr himself preserved class solidarity at the expense of racial justice, which many liberal white-led groups were inclined to do when fighting for justice among the poor.[34]

The Gospel of Mark says that “they compelled” Simon “to carry his cross” (15:21), just as some African Americans were compelled to suffer lynching when another could not be found. Niebuhr could have explored this story with theological imagination, seeing blacks as crucified like Jesus and forced like Simon to carry the crosses of slavery, segregation, and lynching. But he did not.

Malcolm was not interested in proximate justice defined by liberal whites. “The price of freedom is death,”

“While Dr. King was having a dream,” Malcolm told a reporter shortly after King’s 1963 March on Washington address, “the rest of us Negroes are having a nightmare.”[40]

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]

When he sent a manuscript of The Irony of American History to his historian friend Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Schlesinger called Niebuhr’s attention to the glaring omission of the Negro: One irony deserving comment somewhere perhaps is the relationship between our democratic and equalitarian pretensions and our treatment of the Negro. This remains, John Quincy Adams called it

in 1820, “the great and foul stain upon the North American Union”; and I think you might consider mentioning it.[46]

The only people in this country at the moment who believe either in Christianity or in the country are the most despised minority in it. . . . It is ironical . . .

the people who were slaves here, the most beaten and despised people here . . . should be at this moment . . . the only hope this country has. It doesn’t have any other. None of the descendants of Europe seem to be able to do, or have taken it on themselves to do, what Negroes are now trying to do. And this is not a chauvinistic or racial outlook. It probably has something to do with the nature of life itself. It forces you, in any extremity, any extreme, to discover what you really live by, whereas most Americans have been for so long, so safe and so sleepy, that they don’t any longer have any real sense of what they live by. I think they really think it may be Coca-Cola.

Despite all Niebuhr’s writing and speaking about racism, he expressed no “madness in his soul,” no prophetic outrage against lynching.

But Niebuhr seemed not to understand the insult of sending a football coach and Army Secretary to heal the deep wounds of racism in Birmingham. 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. Lacking empathy, he lacks the passion to engage the unspeakable evil of killing black children.[54]

“The white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so,”

After all, the negroes are the most genuine proletarians that we have in our middle class culture, and there is bound to be some resentment in our negro minority which he expresses adequately.”

Roger Shinn,

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]

One who made the connection real was Billie Holiday, with “Strange Fruit,” her signature song about southern lynching.

White theologians do not normally turn to the black experience to learn about theology. But if the lynching tree is America’s cross and if the cross is the heart of the Christian gospel, perhaps Martin Luther King Jr., who endeavored to “take up his cross, and follow [Jesus]” (Mark 8:34) as did no other theologian in American history, has something to teach America about Jesus’ cross.