The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

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. The Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had said clearly in the Dred Scott Decision (1857): “[blacks] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”[14] For many whites, whether in the North or the South, that conviction was unaffected by the end of slavery. But now, without slavery to control blacks, new means had to be devised, and even a new rationale for control. This was supplied by black men’s imagined insatiable lust for white women. Because of their threat to white womanhood, black men must be carefully watched and violently kept in their place, segregated and subordinated. Sexual intercourse between black men and white women was regarded as the worst crime blacks could commit against Anglo-Saxon civilization. Even when sexual relations were consensual, “race-mixing,” mockingly called “mongrelization,” was always translated to mean rape, and it was used as the primary justification of lynching.