However, the lynched Black Christ was not the only Christ that artists saw. They also saw a mean White Christ symbolized in white Christian lynchers, the ones who justified slavery and segregation. Walter White, national secretary of the NAACP and author of several novels and the important book Rope and Faggot, indicted Christianity for creating the fanaticism that encouraged lynching. “It is exceedingly doubtful if lynching could possibly exist under any other religion than Christianity,” he wrote. “Not only through tacit approval and acquiescence has the Christian Church indirectly given its
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