The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

Unlike the spirituals and the church, the blues and the juke joint did not lead to an organized political resistance against white supremacy. But one could correctly say that the spirituals and the church, with Jesus’ cross at the heart of its faith, gave birth to the black freedom movement that reached its peak in the civil rights era during the 1950s and 60s.

The spirituals were the soul of the movement, giving people courage to fight, and the church was its anchor, deepening its faith in the coming freedom for all.

The blues was an individual’s expression of a cultural defiance against white supremacy, a stubborn...

The blues prepared people to fight for justice by giving them a cultural identity that made them human and thus ready to struggle. The blues sent people traveling, roaming, looking for a woman or a man to soothe one’s aching human heart. But it was Jesus’ cross that sent people protesting ...

Simone Weil. “Christ likes for us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.”[56]

The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American theological discourse and preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching. In the “lynching era,” between 1880 to 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Yet these “Christians” did not see the irony or contradiction in their actions.

As Jesus was an innocent victim of mob hysteria and Roman imperial violence, many African Americans were innocent victims of white mobs, thirsting for blood in the name of God and in defense of segregation, white supremacy, and the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race. Both the cross and the lynching tree were symbols of terror, instruments of torture and execution, reserved primarily for slaves, criminals, and insurrectionists—the lowest of the low in society. Both Jesus and blacks were publicly humiliated, subjected to the utmost indignity and cruelty. They were stripped, in order to be deprived of dignity, then paraded, mocked and whipped, pierced, derided and spat upon, tortured for hours in the presence of jeering crowds for popular entertainment. In both cases, the purpose was to strike terror in the subject community. It was to let people know that the same thing would happen to them if they did not stay in their place.

What New Testament scholar Paula Frederickson says about crucifixion in Roman society could be substituted easily f...

Crucifixion was a Roman form of public service announcement: Do not engage in sedition as this person has, or your fate will be similar. The point of the exercise was not the death of the offender as such, but getting the attention of those watchi...

The crucifixion of Jesus by the Romans in Jerusalem and the lynching of blacks by whites in the United States are so amazingly similar that one wonders what blocks the American Christian imagination from seeing the connection.[4]

That the analogy between the cross and the lynching tree should have eluded the Christian agents of white supremacy is perhaps not surprising. But how do we understand the failure of even the most “progressive” of America’s white theologians and religious thinkers to make this connection? A case in point is Reinhold Niebuhr, widely regarded as America’s most influential theologian in the twentieth century, and possibly in American history. Among his contemporaries he was unusually attuned to social reality and the “irony” and tragedy of American history. Among white theologians he was particularly sensitive to the evils of racism and spoke and wrote on many occasions of the sufferings of African Americans. Few theologians of the twentieth century focused as much attention on the cross, one of the central themes of his work. And yet even he failed to connect the cross and its most vivid reenactment in his time.

Among theologians, Niebuhr was unusual for his wide influence in the secular political world. McGeorge Bundy called Niebuhr “probably the most influential single mind in the development of American attitudes which combined moral purpose with a sense of political reality.”[7] His “Christian realism” (as opposed to what he regarded as naïve or idealistic optimism) won the admiration of many secular intellectuals and politicians, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Hubert Humphrey, and Jimmy Carter. Even in the present time, President Barack Obama has called Niebuhr one of his favorite philosophers, and his name is invoked frequently by both liberals and conservatives, journalists and politicians, theologians and political philosophers.[8]

The best that humans can strive for is justice, which is love approximated, a balance of power among competing groups.

Unlike the advocates of the Social Gospel, who often suggested that we could through love build the Kingdom of God on earth, Niebuhr placed justice, rather than love, at the center of Christian social ethics. Since human beings are finite, Niebuhr reasoned that we can never do anything apart from our interests, especially when we act collectively. According to Niebuhr, democracy—“a method of finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems”—was the political system best adapted to the strengths and limitations of human nature. As he put it famously in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”[9]

Since Niebuhr saw justice as a balance of power between groups, whether classes, races, or nations, he saw it always in a state of flux, ...

To him this meant that we must approach what we do practically, knowing that Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our f...

“If the divine is made relevant to the human,” Niebuhr claimed, “it must transvalue our values and enter the human at the point where man is lowly rather than proud and where he is weak rather than strong. Therefore I believe that God came in the form of a little child born to humble parents in a manger. . . .” This “life in the manger ended upon the cross . . . [and we] might end there if we really emulated it.”[12]

“Transvaluation of values,” a term derived from Nietzsche (who derided Christianity’s embrace of the weak), is the heart of Niebuhr’s perspective on the cross. He uses the phrase repeatedly in his writings. We find its meaning whenever he speaks about God’s mercy and love in relation to Jesus Christ, especially in his sermons and several of his books. For Niebuhr the revelation of God’s transcendent love hidden in Jesus’ suffering on the cross is not simply the “keystone” of the Christian faith; it is the very key to history itself.[13]

For Niebuhr, “The cross [is] an ultimate point of illumination on the character of man and God.”[14] People reject the cross because it contradicts historical values and expectations—just as Peter challenged Jesus for saying, “The Son of Man must suffer”: “Far be it from You; this shall not happen to You.” But Jesus rebuked Peter: “Get behind me, Satan!” (Mt 16:21; Mk 8:31, 33). “In the course of a few moments,” Peter went from being “the mouthpiece of God” to a “tool” of Satan, because he could not connect vicarious suffering with God’s revelation. Suffering and death were not supposed to happen to the Messiah. He was expected to triumph over evil and not be defeated by it. How could God’s revelation be found connected with the “the worst of deaths,” the “vilest death,” “a criminal’s death on the tree of shame”?[15]

Like the lynching tree in America, the cross in the time of Jesus was the most “barbaric form of execution of the utmost cruelty,” the absolute opposite of human value systems. It turned reason upside down.

The wise, the mighty, and the noble are condemned because their status in society tempts them to think too highly of their knowledge, power, and heritage. Mary’s song, the Magnificat, makes a similar point: “He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.” Jesus in the Gospels repeatedly makes the same claim: “The last shall be first and the first last.”

Or as Niebuhr put it, “The Christian faith is centered in one who was born in a manger and who died upon the cross. This is really the source of the Christian transvaluation of all values. The Christian knows that the cross is the truth. In that standard he sees the ultimate success of what the world calls failure and failure of what the world calls success.”[16]

“People without imagination,” Niebuhr said, “really have no right to write about ultimate things.”[18]

Why did Niebuhr fail to connect Jesus’ cross to the most obvious cross bearers in American society?

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.”

“The Negroes,” Niebuhr said, “will have to exercise patience and be sustained by a robust faith that history will gradually fulfill the logic of justice.” Niebuhr’s call for gradualism, patience, and prudence during the decade when Willie McGee (1951), Emmett Till (1955), M. C. “Mack” Parker (1959), and other blacks were lynched sounds like that of a southern moderate more concerned about not challenging the cultural traditions of the white South than achieving justice for black people.

“The fact that it is not very appealing to the victims of a current injustice does not make it any less the course of wisdom in overcoming historic injustices.”[25]

“It is hardly a moral act to encourage others patiently to accept injustice which he himself does not endure,” King wrote,

The will-to-survive is so strong that it transmutes easily into the will-to-power.

What made Darrow so effective was his capacity to empathize with blacks and to persuade others to do so, arguing that blacks have as much right as whites to defend themselves when their home is under attack. According to Niebuhr, Darrow “made everyone writhe as he pictured the injustices and immoralities of our present industrial system.”

“I suppose it is difficult to escape bitterness when you have eyes to see and heart to feel what others are too blind and too callous to notice.”[29]

He repeatedly writes about “our Negro minority” (not “our brothers,” as he referred to Jews), a phrase that suggests white paternalism.

“All religions have an element of ethical universalism in them,” Niebuhr wrote later in a column for the Detroit Times, which in my view exposes the hypocrisy of his inaction at Bethel. “If this element does not operate to mitigate racial antagonisms there is something the matter with the interpretation of religion. If religious idealism does not help us to live together decently with members of other races and groups, it is not producing the kind of social imagination without which religion becomes a sounding brass and a tinkling symbol.”

In the end, Christian realism was not only a source of Niebuhr’s radicalism but also of his conservatism.

White juries, judges, and lawyers kept America “safe” from the threat of the black community. Thus, the nightmare in black life continued to deepen as progressive whites like Niebuhr remained silent about lynching.

“If We Must Die” exploded from Jamaican writer Claude McKay during the “Red Summer” of 1919. It was later recited by Winston Churchill, one of Niebuhr’s heroes, in a speech against the Nazis, and it was found on the body of an American soldier killed in action in 1944. McKay, however, was speaking to blacks who were being lynched by whites in northern riots.

If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While around us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back![42]

Langston Hughes, another New Yorker and poet laureate of Black America, also articulated black dreams not realized.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— Like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags Like a heavy load. Or does it explode?[44]

Niebuhr wrote four books on American history but did not deal with racial issues in any substantive manner. When he sent a manuscript of The Irony of American History to his historian friend Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Schlesinger called Niebuhr’s attention to the glaring omission of the Negro:

One irony deserving comment somewhere perhaps is the relationship between our democratic and equalitarian pretensions and our treatment of the Negro. This remains, John Quincy Adams called it in 1820, “the great and foul stain upon the North American Union”; and I think you might consider mentioning it.[46]

Niebuhr, by contrast, did acknowledge that “we have failed catastrophically only on one point—our relations to the Negro race.” But what about the native people in this land? He claimed that North America was a “virgin continent when the Anglo-Saxons came, with a few Indians in a primitive state of culture.”[47] He wrote about Arabs of Palestine and people of color in the Third World in a similar manner, offering moral justification for colonialism. Niebuhr even justified U.S. imperialism, referring to America as being elected by God: “Only those who have no sense of the profundities of history would deny that various nations and classes, various social groups and races are at various times placed in such a position that a special measure of the divine mission in history falls upon them. In that sense God has chosen us in this fateful period of world history.”[48]

As the moderator, Kilgore started the dialogue by asking Baldwin, “Does the missing face of Christ on the stained glass window, which survived the bombing . . . suggest to you a meaning of the Birmingham tragedy?” At first Baldwin responded with irony: “The absence of the face is something of an achievement, since we have been victimized so long by an alabaster Christ.” Then he turned serious, and suggested that “it sums up the crisis we’re living through. If Christ has no face, then perhaps it is time that we, who in one way or another, invented and are responsible for our deities, give him a new face . . . and make . . . the whole hope of Christian love a reality. And as far as I can tell,” he continued, “it’s never been a reality in the 2000 years since his assassination.”

Baldwin, identifying with a powerless black minority, was seething with rage, ready to say anything to get white Americans to stop such violence, while Niebuhr, identifying with the powerful white majority, was calm and dispassionate in the face of what most blacks regarded as an unspeakable evil.

Baldwin was relentless in his critique of white Americans for failing to live up to their own political and religious traditions about love and justice, even saying that Negroes were the only Christians and the only hope for the country. The only people in this country at the moment who believe either in Christianity or in the country are the most despised minority in it. . . . It is ironical . . . the people who were slaves here, the most beaten and despised people here . . . should be at this moment . . . the only hope this country has. It doesn’t have any other. None of the descendants of Europe seem to be able to do, or have taken it on themselves to do, what Negroes are now trying to do. And this is not a chauvinistic or racial outlook. It probably has something to do with the nature of life itself. It forces you, in any extremity, any extreme, to discover what you really live by, whereas most Americans have been for so long, so safe and so sleepy, that they don’t any longer have any real sense of what they live by. I think they really think it may be Coca-Cola.

Baldwin replied that “I don’t mean to say the white people are villains or devils or anything like that,” but what “I do mean to say is this: that the bulk of the white . . . Christian majority in this country has exhibited a really staggering level of irresponsibility and immoral washing of the hands, you know. . . . I don’t suppose that . . . all the white people in Birmingham are monstrous people. But they’re mainly silent people, you know. And that is a crime in itself.”

Baldwin’s condemnation of the silence of the Birmingham white majority in the face of the killing of children was similar to the speech of Rabbi Joachim Prinz (a refugee from Germany) at the March on Washington. “When I was a rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime . . . the most important thing I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problems. The most urgent and most disgraceful, the most shameful, the most tragic problem is silence.”[51]

Despite all Niebuhr’s writing and speaking about racism, he expressed no “madness in his soul,” no prophetic outrage against lynching. Even when confronted with the tragedy of the Birmingham bombing, he showed no anger. What Niebuhr said about liberalism could be applied to his own perspective on racism: Liberalism, he said,

“lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”

This suggests why it is so hard for whites and blacks to talk about white supremacy; even among progressive intellectuals like Niebuhr, there is too little empathy regarding black suffering in the white community.