The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

Niebuhr has a complex perspective on race—at once honest and ambivalent, radical and moderate. On the one hand, he says that “in the matter of race we are only a little better than the Nazis”; and, on the other, he is urging “sympathy for anxious [white] parents who are opposed to unsegregated schools.” In terms almost as severe as those of Malcolm X, Niebuhr speaks about “God’s judgment on America.” He calls “racial hatred, the most vicious of all human vices,” “the dark and terrible abyss of evil in the soul of man,” a “form of original sin,” “the most persistent of all collective evils,” “more stubborn than class prejudices,” and “the gravest social evil in our 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] But, unlike Malcolm, Niebuhr also says that the founding fathers, despite being slaveholders, “were virtuous and honorable men, and certainly no villains.”