The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

The cross and the lynching tree are separated by nearly 2,000 years. One is the universal symbol of Christian faith; the other is the quintessential symbol of black oppression in America.

Though both are symbols of death, one represents a message of hope and salvation, while the other signifies the negation of that message by white supremacy. Despite the obvious similarities between Jesus’ death on a cross and the death of thousands of black men and women strung up to die on a lamppost or tree, relatively few people, apart from black poets, novelists, and other reality-seeing artists, have explored the symbolic connections. Yet, I believe this is a challenge we must face. What is at stake is the credibility and promise of the Christian gospel and the hope that we may heal the wounds of racial violence that continue to divide our churches and our society.

In its heyday, the lynching of black Americans was no secret. It was a public spectacle, often announced in advance in newspapers and over radios, attracting crowds of up to twenty thousand people. An unspeakable crime, it i...

The cross has been transformed into a harmless, non-offensive ornament that Christians wear around their necks. Rather than reminding us of the “cost of discipleship,” it has become a form of “cheap grace,”[3] an easy way to salvation that doesn’t force us to confront the power of Christ’s message and mission.

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.

White people were virtually free to do anything to blacks with impunity. The violent crosses of the Ku Klux Klan were a familiar reality, and white racists preached a dehumanizing segregated gospel in the name of Jesus’ cross every Sunday.

If I have anything to say to the Christian community in America and around the world, it is rooted in the tragic and hopeful reality that sustains and empowers black people to resist the forces that seem designed to destroy every ounce of dignity in their souls and bodies.

how to reconcile the gospel message of liberation with the reality of black oppression.

Through the black religious experience I caught a vision of my possibility, entered the Christian ministry in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, made my way to college and seminary, and received a Ph.D. in theology at Garrett Biblical Institute (now Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary) and Northwestern University in 1965.

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. Silence on both white supremacy and the black struggle against racial segregation made me angry with a fiery rage that had to find expression.

How could any theologian explain the meaning of Christian identity in America and fail to engage white supremacy, its primary negation?

In my next work, Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (1991), I returned explicitly to the two figures whose influence had combined implicitly to shape the theme and style of black liberation theology. Most people rejected one and embraced the other—seeing Martin and Malcolm as rivals, nemeses, representing oppositional categories of Christian and black, integration and separation, nonviolence and violence, love and hate. I embraced them both because I saw them advocating different methods that corrected and complemented each other, as they worked for the same goal—the liberation of black people from white supremacy.

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 paradox of a crucified savior lies at the heart of the Christian story. That paradox was particularly evident in the first century when crucifixion was recognized as the particular form of execution reserved by the Roman Empire for insurrectionists and rebels. It was a public spectacle accompanied by torture and shame—one of the most humiliating and painful deaths ever devised by human beings. That Jesus died this way required special explanation. It made no rational or even spiritual sense to say that hope came out of “a place called Golgotha . . . a place of the skull.” For the Jews of Jesus’ time the punishment of crucifixion held special opprobrium, given their belief that “anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse” (Deut 21:23). Thus, St. Paul said that the “word of the cross is foolishness” to the intellect and a stumbling block to established religion.

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.

There was no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others.

The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.

Initially, lynching was not directed primarily against blacks nor did it always mean death to the victim. 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. Many scholars date its origin in Virginia during the Revolutionary War when Charles Lynch or William Lynch (both were called the original “Judge Lynch”), with the support of the community, punished Tory sympathizers.

The white South’s perspective on the Reconstruction was told in Thomas Dixon’s enormously popular novel The Leopard’s Spots (1902), which sold over one million copies. It was followed by The Clansman (1905). Both novels portrayed the Klan as redeemers of the South. D. W. Griffith transformed Dixon’s novels into that cinematic masterpiece of racist propaganda The Birth of a Nation (1915), first seen at the White House and praised enthusiastically by President Woodrow Wilson. Whites, especially in the South, loved Birth and regarded seeing it as a “religious experience.”

It “rendered lynching an efficient and honorable act of justice” and served to help reunite the North and South as a white Christian nation, at the expense of African Americans.

Following Reconstruction and the removal of federal troops from the South (1877), the black dream of freedom turned into a nightmare “worse than slavery,”[5] initiating what black historian Rayford Logan called the “nadir”[6] in black history and what journalist Douglas A. Blackmon appropriately called “slavery by another name.”[7]

Assured of no federal interference, southern whites were now free to take back the South, to redeem it from what they called “Negro domination,” through mob violence—excluding blacks from politics, arresting them for vagrancy, forcing them to work as sharecroppers who never got out of debt, and creating a rigid segregated society in which being black was a badge of shame with no meaningful future.

A firm advocate of white supremacy and even lynching in cases of rape, Bishop Atticus G. Haygood of the Methodist Church complained in 1893 that “Now-a-days, it seems the killing of Negroes is not so extraordinary an occurrence as to need explanation; it has become so common that it no longer surprises. We read such things as we read of fires that burn a cabin or a town.”[9]

Although white southerners lost the Civil War, they did not lose the cultural war—the struggle to define America as a white nation and blacks as a subordinate race unfit for governing and therefore incapable of political and social equality.

In the white imagination, the image of black men was transformed from docile slaves and harmless “Sambos,” to menacing “black beast rapists,” the most serious threat to the virtue of white women and the sanctity of the white home. The image of black women was changed from nurturing “Negro mammies” to salacious Jezebels, nearly as corrupting to white civilization as black men.

The claim that whites had the right to control the black population through lynching and other extralegal forms of mob violence was grounded in the religious belief that America is a white nation called by God to ...

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.

It was the moral and Christian responsibility of white men to protect the purity of their race by any means necessary.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it would have been difficult to find white persons who would openly object to the right of white men to protect white women fro...

Theodore Roosevelt said, “the greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape—the most abominable in all the category of crimes, even worse than murder.”

By the 1890s, lynching fever gripped the South, spreading like cholera, as white communities made blacks their primary target, and torture their focus. Burning the black victim slowly for hours was the chief method of torture. Lynching became a white media spectacle, in which prominent newspapers, like the Atlanta Constitution, announced to the public the place, date, and time of the expected hanging and burning of black victims. Often as many as ten to twenty thousand men, women, and children attended the event. It was a family affair, a ritual celebration of white supremacy, where women and children were often given the first opportunity to torture black victims—burning black flesh and cutting off genitals, fingers, toes, and ears as souvenirs. Postcards were made from the photographs taken of black victims with white lynchers and onlookers smiling as they struck a pose for the camera. They were sold for ten to twenty-five cents to members of the crowd, who then mailed them to relatives and friends, often with a note saying something like this: “This is the barbeque we had last night.”[17]

Spectacle lynchings attracted people from nearby cities and towns. They could not have happened without widespread knowledge and the explicit sanction of local and state authorities and with tacit approval from the federal government, members of the white media, churches, and universities.

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.

“It is only when we are within the walls of our churches that we can wholly be ourselves,” Wright correctly said, “that we keep alive a sense of our personalities in relation to the total world in which we live, that we maintain a quiet and constant communion with all that is deepest in us.”[38] At church black people sang of having “been in the storm so long,” “tossed and driv’n,” “ ’buked an’ scorned,” and “talked about sho’s you born,” “sometimes up,” “sometimes down,” and “sometimes almost level to the groun’. ” “Our going to church on Sunday is like placing our ear to another’s chest to hear the unquenchable murmur of the human heart.”[39] African Americans sang of having traveled a “lonesome journey,” through slavery and segregation, often tired, hungry and homeless, “rambling and running,” not knowing where to “roam”—not knowing where to “make my getaway” to find a safe place, free of the “noise of the bloodhounds on my trail.” Blacks have been “tore down,” “broken-hearted,” “troubled in de mind,” “way down yonder” where “I couldn’t hear nobody pray,” in a valley so deep and dark where death is like “a hammer ringin’ on a coffin,” “a pale horse an’ rider,” “a chariot swingin’ low,” and “a train blowin’ at the station.” Blacks have tasted “sorrow’s kitchen”—that “burden of woe” that compelled them to sing a haunting, mournful sound:

Sometimes I feel like a motherless chile, Sometimes I feel like a motherless chile, Sometimes I feel like a motherless chile, A long ways from home.

Dread and powerlessness in the face of the ever-present threat of death on the lynching tree impelled blacks to cry out from the depth of their spiritual being: Oh, Lord, Oh, My Lord! Oh, My Good Lord! Keep me f’om sinkin’ down! To sink down was to give up on life and embrace hopelessness, like the words of an old bluesman: “Been down so long, down don’t bother me.” It was to go way down into a pit of despair, of nothingness, what Søren Kierkegaard called “sickness unto death,” a “sickness in the self”—the loss of hope that life could have meaning in a world full of trouble. The story of Job is the classic expression of utter despair in the face of life’s great contradictions: Why is light given to the one in misery, and life to the bitter in soul, Who long for death, but it does not come, and dig for it more than for hidden treasures; Who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they find the grave? (Job 3:20-22)

Unlike Kierkegaard and Job, however, blacks often refused to go down into that “loathsome void,” that “torment of despair,” where one “struggles with death but cannot die.”[40]

In the mystery of God’s revelation, black Christians believed that just knowing that Jesus went through an experience of suffering in a manner similar to theirs gave them faith that God was with them, even in suffering on lynching trees, just as God was present with Jesus in suffering on the cross.

Poor little Jesus boy, made him be born in a manger. World treated him so mean, Treats me mean too . . . Dey whipped Him up an’ dey whipped Him down, Dey whipped dat man all ovah town. Look-a how they done muh Lawd. I was there when they nailed him to the cross, Oh! How it makes me sadder, sadder, When I think how they nailed him to the cross. I was there when they took him down . . . Oh! How it makes my spirit tremble, When I recalls how they took him down.

To keep hope alive was not easy for African Americans, facing state-endorsed terrorism nearly everywhere in America. Trouble followed them wherever they went—in the morning, at night, and all day long—keeping them awake and stalking them in nightmares, like a wild beast, waiting to attack its prey.

Although church people, like the blues people, could not escape trouble, they sang “trouble don’t last always.” The final word about black life is not death on a lynching tree but redemption in the cross—a miraculously transformed life found in the God of the gallows. This faith empowered blacks to wrestle with trouble as Jacob wrestled with his divine opponent till daybreak, refusing to let go until he was “blessed” with meaning and purpose. “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince has thou power with God and with men, and hath prevailed” (Gen 32:28 KJV). The spirituals “Wrestling Jacob,” “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” and “Wake Up, Jacob” are black people expressing their solidarity with Jacob and his struggle for a new identity. Their identification with Jacob stretches back deep into slavery. In his book Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869), Thomas Wentworth Higginson, called “Wrestling Jacob” “one of the wildest and most striking” of the spirituals he heard during the Civil War. O wrestlin’ Jacob, Jacob, day ’s a-breakin’; I will not let thee go! O wrestlin’ Jacob, Jacob, day ’s a-breakin’; He will not let me go! O, I hold my brudder wid a tremblin’ hand; I would not let him go! I hold my sister wid a tremblin’ hand; I would not let her go! O, Jacob do hang from a tremblin’ limb, He would not let him go! O, Jacob do hang from a tremblin’ limb; De Lord will bless my soul. O, wrestlin’ Jacob, Jacob . . . .[44]

W. E. B. Du Bois called black faith “a pythian madness” and “a demoniac possession”—“sprung from the African forests,” “mad with supernatural joy.”[46] One has to be a little mad, kind of crazy, to find salvation in the cross, victory in defeat, and life in death. This is why the meaning of the cross is intensely debated today, especially by secular and religious intellectuals who reject the absurd idea that a shameful, despicable death could “reveal” anything.

Black Christians could agree: they sang more songs and preached more sermons about the cross than any other aspect of Jesus’ ministry. To be sure, Jesus’ life and teachings are important for the black church community to understand his meaning, especially seeing him in complete solidarity with the oppressed. The classic expression of this aspect of Jesus’ ministry is found in the Gospel of Luke. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” Jesus said at the beginning of his ministry in a Nazareth synagogue, as he read from “the scroll of the prophet Isaiah,” “because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free” (4:18).

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

Faith achieved its authenticity only by questioning God, asking, as the Reverend Nathaniel Paul did, “why it was that thou didst look on with calm indifference of an unconcerned spectator, when thy holy law was violated, thy divine authority despised and a portion of thine own creatures reduced to a state of mere vassalage and misery?”[52]

Bishop Payne of the A.M.E. Church was so troubled that he questioned God’s existence: Sometimes it seems as though some wild beast had plunged his fangs into my heart, and was squeezing out its life-blood. Then I began to question the existence of God, and to say: “If he does exist, is he just? If so, why does he suffer one race to oppress and enslave another, to rob them by unrighteous enactments of rights, which they hold most dear and sacred? . . . Is there no God?”[53]

“De courts er dis land is not for niggers,” a black man from South Carolina reflected cynically. “It seems to me that when it comes to trouble, de law an’ a nigger is de white man’s sport, an’ justice is a stranger in them precincts, an’ mercy is unknown. An’ de Bible say we must pray for we enemy. Drop down on you’ knee, brothers, an’ pray to God for all de crackers, an’ judges, an’ de courts, an’ solicitors, sheriffs, an’ police in de land.”[54]

Whether one was lynched on a tree or in court, the results were the same.

Throughout the twentieth century, African Americans continued to struggle to reconcile their faith in God’s justice and love with the persistence of black suffering. Writer James Baldwin spoke for many: “If [God’s] love was so great, and if He loved all His children, why were we, the blacks, cast down so far?”[55] No one knows the answer to that question.