The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

Rejecting the teaching of black and white churches that Jesus’ death on the cross saved us from sin and that we too are called by him to suffer as he did, some black scholars, especially women, reject any celebration of Jesus’ cross as a means of salvation. Theirs is a just and powerful critique of bad religion and theology, which must be reckoned with so as not to make suffering a good in itself. To that womanist challenge we turn in the next chapter.

The spiritual anguish that lynching created connected blacks with the spiritual wrestling of the prophets, of Job, and the psalmist. In the midst of “destruction and violence,” “strife and contention,” “justice . . . turned back, and righteousness . . . at a distance” (Hab 1:2-4; Isa 59:14), they too cried out to God, “How long, Lord? . . . How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?” (Ps 13:1, 2).

Black cultural critic Stanley Crouch called it “perhaps the greatest blues line of all time.”[13]

Tupac Shakur would put it in his “Black Jesuz,” “Somebody that hurt like we hurt. . . . That understands where we coming from.”[14]

For black women, however, running away was not an easy option. It was difficult for them to leave their children. They had to think about more than trying to secure their own safety. Thus, they often stayed where they were and made the most of a bad situation, trying to survive with dignity, as they wrestled, with limited resources, against the virulent expressions of racial hatred. The faith of black women gave them courage to fight, patience when they could not, and the hope that whatever they did, God would keep them “from sinking down.”

“God may not come when you want but God is right on time,” “making a way out of no way”—these were faith declarations frequently repeated in black churches in troubled times.

Yet all of their work was built on the work of one woman: Ida B. Wells.[16]

Wells was especially critical of evangelist Dwight Moody, who segregated his revivals to appease whites in the South. “Our American Christians are too busy saving the souls of white Christians from burning in hellfire to save the lives of black ones from present burning in fires kindled by white Christians.” “Christianity is to be the test,” Wells claimed, that whites failed miserably in their treatment of blacks. She was “prouder to belong to the dark race that is the most practically Christian known to history, than to the white race that in its dealings with us has for centuries shown every quality that is savage, treacherous, and unchristian.”[31]

“Strange Fruit” captures the great contradiction in southern culture and the religion that defined it. “Lynching is part of the religion of our people,”[39] one white man told another. Blacks have always wondered how whites could live comfortably with that absurdity. How could white Christians reconcile the “strange fruit” they hung on southern trees with the “strange fruit” Romans hung on the cross at Golgotha? How could they reconcile the “pastoral scene of the gallant South” with “the bulging eyes and twisted mouth,” the contrast between the “scent of magnolia sweet and

fresh” and “the sudden smell of burning flesh”? How could the white Christian community reconcile “blood on the leaves and blood at the root” with the blood on their consciences? “Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck” like “the dogs beneath the cross”[40] in Jerusalem when Jesus was crucified. “Here is a strange and bitter crop.”

Holiday’s singing and recording of “Strange Fruit” in 1939 was a cultural event that raised the political consciousness of musicians and their community—a consciousness that would hit its high-water mark with Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On?”

itself.”[43] It was fitting for a Jew to write this great protest song about “burning flesh” because the burning black bodies on the American landscape prefigured the burning bodies of Jews at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Just as the old slave spiritual “Were You There?” placed black Christians at the foot of Jesus’ cross, “Strange Fruit” put them at the foot of the lynching tree. Both songs created a dark and somber mood. One was sung in church and the other in a nightclub, but

both addressed the deep-down hurt that blacks felt and gave them a way to deal with it.

As the great theologian Howard Thurman said, “[a person] has to handle . . . suffering...

“For the art—the blues, the spirituals, the jazz, the dance—was what we had in place of freedom.”[45] Both the blues and the spirituals spoke about the tragic and the comic, sorrow and joy simultaneously.

Black men seemed less able to navigate the complex relationship between survival and dignity in the violent patriarchal South. Just out of slavery, they wanted to be men, just like white males—providing economic support and physical protection for women and children—but they were not permitted to do so. As a result, black men tended either toward violence, which often placed them on lynching trees, or toward passivity, which led to the loss of dignity: few other options were available.

Why is this?

I remember my father and mother trying to strike the right balance between survival and dignity in rural Arkansas during the 1940s and ’50s.

They appealed to the white public, especially women, to join with the black community in opposition against mob violence. “The negro women of the South,” Charlotte Hawkins Brown told white women, “lay everything that happens to the members of her race at the door of the Southern white woman. . . . We all feel that you can control your men. We feel that so far as lynching is concerned that, if the white woman would take hold of the situation, that lynching would be stopped.

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]

While men talked, women walked and got things done.

Fannie Lou Hamer, Jo Anne Robinson, Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and many more. “Women were the spine of our movement,” Andy Young said. “It was women going door to door, speaking with their neighbors, meeting in voter-registration together, organizing through their churches, that gave the vital momentum and energy

to the movement, that made it a mass movement.”[53] That was why Nellie Burroughs said, “The men ought to get down on their knees to Negro women,” who “made possible all we have around us—church, home, school, business,”[54] and most importantly the civil rights movement.

The civil rights movement was also a women’s movement. Women started it (“If Rosa Parks had not sat down, Martin Luther King Jr. would not have stood up”), sustained it through difficult times, and made religion its central focus through song—giving hope that “we shall overcome,” because, as the great Ella Baker said, “we who believe in freedom shall not rest until it comes.”

When Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi sharecropper who became a great civil rights heroine, sought to inspire blacks to risk their lives for justice in Mississippi, she turned to the cross and embellished it with her religious imagination. She told blacks who were too afraid to fight for their rights: “When Simon Cyrene was helping Christ to bear his cross up the hill, [Simon] said: ‘Must Jesus bear the cross alone and all the world go free? No, there’s a cross for everyone and there’s a cross for me. This consecrated cross I’ll bear, till death shall set me free. And then go home a crown to wear, for there’s a crown for me.’ ”[55] Like other poor blacks, Hamer had no access to sophisticated biblical studies, and thus used a familiar evangelical hymn, popular in the black churches, to make her point about our responsibility to become an agent of change. Her hermeneutics were shaped by the spirituals and the tradition of gospel hymns and her involvement in the black freedom struggle. Yet thousands of poor blacks were inspired by her reflection and followed her throughout Mississippi, many to endure jail, beatings, and even death. Where is a similar example of motivation and courage among religion and theology professors and students in our institutions of higher learning? Yet Hamer did not embrace the cross uncritically. She was aware of its dangers. “We have always been taught,” she said, “that we had to suffer as Christ suffered. He was killed and all of his followers were...

Yet, they did not want to hear that truth, the fact that America’s democracy is hypocrisy in the lives of its black population.

Emile Durkheim’s interpretation of religion provides an important insight into its meaning for black women: “The believer who has communicated with his [or her] god is not merely a man [or woman] who sees new truths of which the unbeliever is ignorant; he [or she] is a man [or woman] who is stronger. He [or she] feels within him [or her] more force, either to endure the trials of existence, or to conquer them.”[64]

better future for their children and their community. Like Jesus, black women (as well as men) sacrificed their lives for others, especially their children, as in the case of Laura Nelson, who was lynched for defending her fourteen-year-old son, accused of stealing meat.[65]

pew. This means that the faith of the church is defined by women who, through the spirituals, hymns, and gospel songs, placed the crucified Jesus at the center of their faith. The cross sustained them—not for suffering but in their resistance to it.

Black liberation theology emerged out of black people’s struggle with nonviolence (Christianity) and self-defense (Black Power). This was basically a struggle among black men in the movement who were Christian ministers and those who were not. To the young black men nonviolence seemed weak and passive, while they yearned to be strong and active. To speak of nonviolence in a Christian context was to speak of Jesus’ cross, which meant suffering without fighting back violently.

If the makers of the spirituals gloried in singing of the cross of Jesus, it was not because they were masochistic and enjoyed suffering. Rather, the enslaved Africans sang because they saw on the rugged wooden planks One who had endured what was their daily portion. The cross was treasured because it enthroned the One who went all the way with

them and for them. The enslaved African sang because they saw the results of the cross—triumph over the principalities and powers of death, triumph over evil in this world. In concluding her reflection on the cross and suffering, Copeland states that the slaves liberated the cross from its abuse by whites. “By their very suffering and privation,” she writes, “black women under chattel slavery freed the cross of Christ. Their steadfast commitment honored the cross and the One who died for all and redeemed it from Christianity’s vulgar misuse.”[71]

must bear in order to attain freedom. We cannot separate the cross from the Christian gospel as found in the story of Jesus and as lived and understood in the African American Christian community. The resurrected Lord was the crucified Lord. Whatever we think about the meaning of the cross for black women should arise out of their experience of fighting for justice, especially as seen in their collective lives and struggles in the civil rights movement. God’s salvation is a liberating event in the lives of all who are struggling for survival and dignity in a world bent on denying their humanity. Oh Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you moan, Oh Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you moan, Pharaoh’s army got drownded, Oh Mary, don’t you weep. Notes

To live meaningfully, we must see light beyond the darkness. As Mircea Eliade put it, “Life is not possible without an opening toward the transcendent.”

The Christian gospel is God’s message of liberation in an unredeemed and tortured world. As such, it is a transcendent reality that lifts our spirits to a world far removed from the suffering of this one. It is an eschatological vision, an experience of transfiguration, such as Jesus experienced at his Baptism (Mk 1:9-11) or on Mt. Tabor (Mk 9:2-8), just before he set out on the road to Jerusalem, the road that led to Calvary. Paul had such a vision—“a light from heaven”—as he traveled the road to Damascus (Acts 9:3). Malcolm X, while in prison, had a vision of God, and so too did Martin King hear God speaking to him in his kitchen at a moment of crisis during the Montgomery bus boycott. For all four, the revelatory moment in their lives helped to prepare them to face their deaths, sustained by the conviction that this was not the end but the beginning of a new life of meaning. To paraphrase Eliade, once contact with the transcendent is found, a new existence in the world becomes possible.

And so the transcendent and the immanent, heaven and earth, must be held together in critical, dialectical tension, each one correcting the limits of the other. The gospel is in the world, but it is not of the world; that is, it can be seen in the black freedom movement, but it is much more than what we see in our struggles

for justice. God’s word is paradoxical, or, as the old untutored black preacher used to say, “inscrutable,” a mystery that one can neither control nor fully understand. It is here and not here, revealed and hidden at the same time. “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior” (Isa 45:15).

The cross is the most empowering symbol of God’s loving solidarity with the “least of these,” the unwanted in society who suffer daily from great injustices. Christians must face the cross as the terrible tragedy it was and discover in it, through faith and repentance, the liberating joy of eternal salvation.

The cross, as a locus of divine revelation, is not good news for the powerful, for those who are comfortable with the way things are, or for anyone whose understanding of religion is aligned with power.

The cross,” writes Dorothy A. Lee-Pollard, “reveals where God’s kingdom is to be found—not among the powerful or even the religious, but

in the midst of powerlessness, suffering and death.”[5] Bonhoeffer was right: “The Bible directs [us] to God’s powerlessness and suffering. Only a suffering God can help.”[6]

The cross is an “opening to the transcendent” for the poor who have nowhere else to turn—that transcendence of the spirit that no one can take away, no matter what they do. Salvation is broken spirits being healed, voiceless people speaking out, and black people empowered to love their own blackness.

Every time a white mob lynched a black person, they lynched Jesus.

The lynchers were the “good citizens” who often did not even bother to hide their identities.

White theologians in the past century have written thousands of books about Jesus’ cross without remarking on the analogy between the crucifixion of Jesus and the lynching of black people.

Whether we speak of Jonathan Edwards, Walter Rauschenbusch, or Reinhold Niebuhr as America’s greatest theologian, none of them made the rejection of white supremacy central to their understanding of the gospel. Reinhold Niebuhr could write and preach about the cross with profound theological imagination and say nothing of how the violence of white supremacy invalidated the faith of white churches. It takes a lot of theological blindness to do that, especially since the vigilantes were white Christians who claimed to worship the Jew lynched in Jerusalem.

of the salvation achieved through “God on the Cross.” Nietzsche was right: Christianity is a religion of slaves. God became a slave in Jesus and thereby liberated slaves from being determined by their social condition.

The cross and the lynching tree interpret each other.

test of the scandal of the cross and the lynching tree. “Jesus did not die a gentle death like Socrates, with his cup of hemlock. . . . Rather, he died like a [lynched black victim] or a common [black] criminal in torment, on the tree of shame.”[8]

As I see it, the lynching tree frees the cross from the false pieties of well-meaning Christians. When we see the crucifixion as a first-century lynching, we are confronted by the re-enactment of Christ’s suffering in the blood-soaked history of African Americans.