The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

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.

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.

Just as I could not separate Martin from Malcolm, neither could I separate my Christian identity from my blackness.

How could whites confess and live the Christian faith and also impose three-and-a-half centuries of slavery and segregation upon black people?

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 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.

The sufferings of black people during slavery are too deep for words. That suffering did not end with emancipation.

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.

Mexicans, Indians, Chinese, and whites were lynched—a term that could apply to whipping, shooting, stabbing, as well as hanging. Lynching was an extralegal punishment sanctioned by the community.

Slaveholders whipped and raped slaves, violating them in any way they thought necessary, but they did not lynch them, except in the case of those who threatened the slave system itself, such as Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and other insurrectionists.

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.

“Their blackness alone,” writes historian Joel Williamson in his influential text The Crucible of Race, “was license enough to line them up against walls, to menace them with guns, to search them roughly, beat them, and rob them of every vestige of dignity.”[10]

Lynching was the white community’s way of forcibly reminding blacks of their inferiority and powerlessness. To be black meant that whites could do anything to you and your people, and that neither you nor anyone else could do anything about it.

Wherever blacks were present in significant numbers, the threat of being lynched was always real.

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.

If the blues offered an affirmation of humanity, religion offered a way for black people to find hope.

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.

No matter what trouble they encountered, they kept on believing and hoping that “a change is gonna come.” They did not transcend “hard living” but faced it head-on, refusing to be silent in the midst of adversity.

They shouted, danced, clapped their hands and stomped their feet as they bore witness to the power of Jesus’ cross which had given them an identity far more meaningful than the harm that white supremacy could do them.

The cross places God in the midst of crucified people, in the midst of people who are hung, shot, burned, and tortured.

As Jesus was an innocent victim of mob hysteria and Roman imperial violence, many African Americans were innocent victims of white mobs, thirsting for blood in the name of God and in defense of segregation, white supremacy, and the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race.

The best that humans can strive for is justice, which is love approximated, a balance of power among competing groups.

“Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”[9]

“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]

groups are notoriously selfish and have limited capacity to step outside of their interests and see the world from another group’s standpoint.

While spectacle lynching was on the decline in the 1950s, there were many legal lynchings as state and federal governments used the criminal justice system to intimidate, terrorize, and murder blacks.

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.

Ministers often preached sermons about Jesus’ crucifixion, as if they were telling the story of black people’s tragedy and triumph in America.

Yet both white theologians such as Niebuhr and black preachers throughout African American history either did not see the parallels between the cross and the lynching tree or else they were too fearful of the dire consequences—loss of social status, work, and possibly life—to make the connection.

An apology, although important and welcomed by many blacks, is not justice.

These questions, demanding God’s explanation for black suffering, sit at the nerve center of black religion in America, from the slave trade to the prison industrial complex of today.

One cannot correctly understand the black religious experience without an affirmation of deep faith informed by profound doubt.

That is what Jesus’ life, teachings, and death were about—God’s protest against the exploitation of the weak by the strong.

Artists force us to see things we do not want to look at because they make us uncomfortable with ourselves and the world we have created.

Faith and doubt were bound together, with each a check against the other—doubt preventing faith from being too sure of itself and faith keeping doubt from going down into the pit of despair.

White supremacy tears faith to pieces and turns the heart away from God.