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The only minister I found who came close to opposing both lynching and white supremacy was Quincy Ewing. In his book Christ, Jack Miles makes a revealing comment: “The crucifix is a violently obscene icon. To recover its visceral power, children of the twenty-first century must imagine a lynching, the body of the victim swollen and distorted, his head hanging askew above a broken neck, while the bystanders smile their twisted smiles”
To a remarkable extent, the Till lynching would provide the spark that lit the fire of resistance in the Negro masses, inspiring them, as King said, to “rock the nation” and to demand their “freedom now.”[3]
Roy Wilkins, the executive head of the NAACP, spoke for many: “It would appear from this lynching that the State of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering children.”[6]
When Emmett’s body was brought back to Chicago, she insisted that the sealed casket be opened for a three-day viewing, exposing “his battered and bloated corpse” so that “everybody can see what they did to my boy.”
John Lewis, who was fifteen at the time, reacted like many black teenagers: “I was shaken to my core,” he recalled in his memoir. “He could have been me. That could have been me, beaten, tortured, dead at the bottom of a river.”[9]
While African Americans had heard about many previous lynchings, the murder of Emmett Till was an unforgettable event, a horror etched in black memory forever. He was so young; only fourteen—just a child from Chicago, not really aware of the etiquette of Jim Crow culture in Mississippi and what it could mean if he failed to observe the “ways of white folk.”
now.”[11] Suffering always poses the deepest test of faith, radically challenging its authenticity and meaning.
We do not know what really happened in Mrs. Bradley’s revelatory experience; its meaning remains locked in mystery. What we do know is that her spirit of resistance caught fire in black communities throughout the nation, justifying the claim of author Clenora Hudson-Weems that Emmett Till was “the sacrificial lamb of the civil rights movement.”[12]
As he often put it, “Freedom is not free.”
King agreed fully with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian pastor hanged in 1945 by the Nazis for resisting Hitler: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”[14]
In considering the subject of God and the problem of race in America, King reflected that God’s love created blacks and whites and other human beings for each other in community (thesis). White supremacy was the sin that separated them in America and in much of the world (antithesis). God reconciled humanity through Jesus’ cross, and thereby white supremacy could never have “the final and ultimate word” on human relationships (synthesis).
Unlike King, Niebuhr viewed agape love, as revealed in Jesus’ cross, as an unrealizable goal in history—a state of perfection which no individual
or group in society could ever fully hope to achieve.
The most we can realize is “proximate justice,” which Niebuhr defined as a balance of power between powerful collectives.
If blacks had followed Niebuhr’s theology of proximate justice, there would have been no militant civil rights movement because, practically speaking, blacks had no prospect of success against the power of white supremacy.
Martin King lived the meaning of the cross and thereby gave an even more profound interpretation of it with his life. Reinhold Niebuhr analyzed the cross in his theology, drawing upon the Son of Man in Ezekiel and the Suffering Servant
in Isaiah; and he did so more clearly and persuasively than any white American theologian in the twentieth century. But since he did not live the meaning of the cross the way he interpreted it, Niebuhr did not see the real cross bearers in his American context. The crucified people in America were black—the enslaved, segregated, and lynched black victims. That was the truth that King saw and accepted early in his ministry, and why he was prepared to give his life as he bore witness to it in the civil rights movement.
Instead of attempting to explain the saving power of the cross rationally, black Christians recognized it as a mystery, beyond human understanding or control. In remembrance of Jesus’ last week, leading to his death, blacks at Ebenezer and other black churches, celebrating the sacrament of “Holy Communion,” raised their voices to acknowledge “a fountain filled with blood,” “drawn from Immanuel’s
veins”; “blood,” they believed, “will never lose its power,” because “there is power in the blood,” and “nothing but the blood.”[19]
Redemption was an amazing experience of salvation, an eschatological promise of freedom that gave transcendent meaning to black lives that no lynching tree could take from them.
Ain’t you glad, ain’t you glad, that the blood done sign your name?
When blacks sang about the “blood,” they were wrestling not only with the blood of the crucified carpenter from Nazareth but also with the blood of raped and castrated black bodies in America—innocent, often nameless, burning and hanging bodies, images of hurt so deep that only God’s “amazing grace” could offer consolation.
Ministers often preached sermons about Jesus’ crucifixion, as if they were telling the story of black people’s tragedy and triumph in America. The symbol of the cross spoke to the lives of blacks because the likeness between the cross and the lynching tree created an eerie feeling of mystery and the supernatural. Like Jesus, blacks knew torture and abandonment, with no community or government capable or willing to protect them from crazed mobs. “Oh, way down yonder by myself,” in Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas, “and I couldn’t hear nobody pray. In the valley, on my knees, with my burden,” “O
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Black ministers preached about Jesus’ death more than any other theme because they saw in Jesus’ suffering and persecution a parallel to their own encounter with slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree.
Born in 1929 on the eve of the Great Depression, thirty years after the lynching of Sam Hose, and twenty-three years after the infamous Atlanta riot, Martin Luther King Jr. was never far from black suffering.
severely—“blood pouring out of the man’s mouth,” as he cried out in painful agony. “They pulled him right past me,” Daddy King remembered; “it was as if I hadn’t even been there watching.” Then “one of them took off his belt and wrapped it around the Negro’s neck. They lifted him up and tied the end of the belt to this tree and let him go . . . his
feet about five or six inches off the ground.”[23] Like Jesus, hanging on a cross, this nameless black victim, hanging on a Georgia tree, was left to die a shameful death—like so many other innocent blacks, completely forgotten in a nation that did not value his life.
Later recalling this incident, King told how fear drove him from bed to the kitchen where he prayed, “out loud,” pleading, “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. . . . But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now, I’m faulting, I’m losing my courage.” Yet then,
like Mrs. Bradley, King said he heard a voice: “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even to the end of the world.”[25] Interestingly, that message echoed the words of an elderly, unlettered woman, who was “affectionately called Mother Pollard.” At an earlier mass meeting where King was urging the people to continue the boycott of the buses, she had perceived his doubt and fear. He did not speak with the conviction she was accustomed to hearing. When she confronted him, King denied anything was wrong. “You can’t fool
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eschatological promise Martin Luther King Jr. never forgot. It was the same promise he would later hear in his kitchen—words also found in a popular hymn, “Never Alone,” which he cited often to renew his spirit when threats against his life overcame him.[27]
As King saw it, the most powerful religious authority for black Christians was Jesus Christ, and Jesus’ teachings on love and nonviolence became his primary focus: “Jesus still cries out in words that echo across the centuries: ‘Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; pray for them that despitefully use you.’ This is what we must live by.”
“Remember, if I am stopped, this movement will not stop, because God is with the movement.”[28]
And my great prayer is always that God will save me from the paralysis of crippling fear, because I think when a person lives with the fear of the consequences for his personal life, he can never do anything in terms of lifting the whole of humanity and solving many of the social problems that we confront.[29]
“To redeem the soul of America” was the motto of SCLC, which meant creating the American Dream and the Beloved Community. The cross protected King from the paralyzing fear of death, giving him the courage to fight for racial justice, no matter the cost. With the cross at the center of his faith, he could even love the people he knew were trying to kill him, following Jesus’ example on the cross, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34).
In the history of Western theology, there were various classical theories of how Jesus’ death brought redemption to humanity—none of
them officially endorsed by the Christian church.
answer to the deadly cycle of violence and hatred. “The most astounding fact about Christ’s crucifixion is that it . . . [is] the supreme revelation of God’s love,”
But for King nonviolence was more than a strategy; it was the way of life defined by love for others—the only way to heal broken humanity. Hate created more hate and violence more violence. King believed that the cycle of violence and hate could be broken only with nonviolence and love, as revealed in Jesus’ rejection of violence and his acceptance of a shameful death on a cruel cross. King’s faith was defined by the mystery of divine salvation in the cross and by the belief that Jesus was the answer not only to the lynching tree but to whatever troubles black people faced.
His view of the cross was shaped by his reading of the Bible through the black religious experience, and his “personal suffering” in his fight for justice. “My personal trials have . . . taught me the value of unmerited suffering.”
“Love,” he often said, “is the most durable power” in the world. It could conquer evil, even white supremacy.
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.
“At times life is hard, as hard as crucible steel,” King told them. It has its bleak and painful moments. Like the ever-flowing waters of a river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. Like the ever-changing cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of the summers and the piercing chills of its winters. But through it all, God walks with us. Never forget that God is able to lift you from fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace.[44]
There is no sufficient answer to the challenge of persistent and deep suffering without a deep spiritual wrestling with life and death in the “midnight of human existence, as human beings search for the eternal message of hope . . . that dawn will come.”[45]
Theologian John Macquarrie is among those who have compared King’s decision to go to Memphis with Jesus’ decision to go to Jerusalem. His analogy is a telling one. Seeking to explain “the voluntary element in the death of Jesus,” Macquarrie wrote, There is an example in recent history which appears to me to provide an illuminating parallel. In the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King went to the city of Memphis to help resolve a bitter labour dispute with racial overtones. He did not go to Memphis to die, but in the hope he could help change people’s minds there. As we all know, he was
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long as he continued to speak and work for his cause. In the case of Jesus, something similar must have been true.[46]
But on the night before his assassination in Memphis, he etched them into our national memory. I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats. . . . What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter to me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. . . . But I’m not concerned with that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he has allowed me to go to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised
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“I still have a dream, because, you know, you can’t give up on life. If you lose hope, somehow you lose that vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you to go on in spite of all.”[49]
No black Christian could escape the problem of evil that has haunted Christians throughout history. That is why the cross and redemptive suffering are not popular themes today among many Christians, especially among womanist, feminist, and other progressive theologians, who often criticize Martin King on this score.[50] Theology is always so contextual that it is difficult for young theologians today, as it was also back then, to understand King’s profound, existential, and paradoxical truth. I, too, was slow to embrace King’s view of redemptive suffering. Have not blacks, women, and poor
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the clearest image of the crucified Christ was the figure of an innocent black victim, dangling from a lynching tree.
What enabled artists to see what Christian theologians and ministers would not? What prevented these theologians and ministers, who should have been the first to see God’s revelation in black suffering, from recognizing the obvious gospel truth? Did it require such a leap of imagination to recognize the visual and symbolic overtones between the cross and the lynching tree, both places of execution in the ancient and modern worlds?
The chronicler of the doctrine of discovery in Spain figured it out. See Jennings, The Christian Imagination, Theology and the Origins of Race
