The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

Walter Everette Hawkins, in his narrative poem “A Festival in Christendom” (1920), exposed the religious hypocrisy of whites who participated in the spectacle lynching: And so this Christian mob did turn From prayer to rob, to lynch and burn. A victim helplessly he fell To tortures truly kin to hell; With bitter irony, Hawkins draws out the parallels between Jesus’ suffering in Jerusalem and the passion of a lynched black victim in the heart of Christian America. They bound him fast and strung him high, They cut him down lest he should die Before their energy was spent In torturing to their heart’s content. They tore his flesh and broke his bones, And laughed in triumph at his groans; They chopped his fingers, clipped his ears And passed them round as souvenirs. No one could grow up in the black community without knowing the details of Jesus’ sacrificial death at Calvary. Hawkins invoked that memory as he linked the “human sacrifice” at a lynching scene with Jesus’ crucifixion. They bored hot irons in his side And reveled in their zeal and pride; They cut his quivering flesh away And danced and sang as Christians may; Then from his side they tore his heart And watched its quivering fibres dart. And then upon his mangled frame They piled the wood, the oil and flame. . . And they raised a Sabbath song, The echo sounded wild and strong, A benediction to the skies That crowned the human sacrifice.[8]