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“People without imagination really have no right to write about ultimate things,”[3] Reinhold Niebuhr was correct to observe.
In short, they lacked imagination of the most crucial and moral kind.
Only artists and writers wrestled with the deep religious meaning of the “strange fruit” that littered the American landscape. In the land of “the United States of Lyncherdom”[5] (to use Mark Twain’s provocative and apt phrase), a land whose religious discourse was defined by the one who was “put . . . to death by hanging him on a tree” (Acts 10:39), black writers, novelists, visual artists, and poets, like Countee Cullen of the Harlem Renaissance, with their feet grounded in the “tragic beauty” of the black experience, saw the liberating power of the “Black Christ” for suffering black people.
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To say that Christ “was but the first leaf in a line of trees on which a man should swing” suggested that Christ, poetically and religiously, was symbolically the first lynchee—the one who “bought my redemption on a cross” and “shape[d] my profit by His loss.”
Christians, both white and black, followed a crucified savior. What could pose a more blatant contradiction to such a religion than lynching? And yet white Christians were silent in the face of this contradiction. Black poets were not silent. They spoke loud and clear.
Walter Everette Hawkins, in his narrative poem “A Festival in Christendom” (1920), exposed the religious hypocrisy of whites who participated in the spectacle lynching: And so this Christian mob did turn From prayer to rob, to lynch and burn. A victim helplessly he fell To tortures truly kin to hell; With bitter irony, Hawkins draws out the parallels between Jesus’ suffering in Jerusalem and the passion of a lynched black victim in the heart of Christian America. They bound him fast and strung him high, They cut him down lest he should die Before their energy was spent In torturing to their
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The House of Representatives passed the NAACP-initiated anti-lynching legislation several times, but it was always defeated in the Senate, whose members, especially in the South, insisted that lynching was a necessary tool to protect the purity of the white race.
The other was called “By Parties Unknown” (1935), which showed a lynched black man dumped on the doorsteps of a black church with a rope around his neck, flowers growing where the rope touches the ground, suggesting some form of new life and a possible redemption.
When visual artists painted an image of Christ on the cross and painted him black, they were also referencing Christ as a lynched victim. Simply turning him from white to black switched the visual signifiers, making him one with the body of lynched black people in America.
In The Souls of Black Folk and other essays, Du Bois condemned “white religion” as an “utter failure.” “A nation’s religion is its life, and as such white Christianity is a miserable failure.” He could not reconcile white Christianity with the Gospels’ portrayal of Jesus.
Yet Jesus Christ was a laborer and black men are laborers; He was poor and we are poor; He was despised of his fellow men and we are despised; He was persecuted and crucified, and we are mobbed and lynched. If Jesus Christ came to America He would associate with Negroes and Italians and working people; He would eat and pray with them, and He would seldom see the interior of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.[22]
“The Gospel of Mary Brown,” illustrated with a photo of a black Madonna, holding a black baby in her arms. In Du Bois’s story, obviously a retelling of Luke’s Gospel account of Jesus’ birth, Mary is black, living in a cabin by the creek, when a woman says to her ( using the words of the angel Gabriel), “Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor with God.” Then Mary reads the Magnificat from an “Old Book,” citing the exact words of Luke 1:46, 48: “My soul doth magnify the Lord. . . . For He hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden, for behold, from henceforth generations shall call me
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God, you ain’t fair!—You ain’t fair, God! You didn’t ought to do it—if you didn’t want him black, you didn’t have to make him black; if you didn’t want him unhappy, why did you let him think? And then you let them mock him, and hurt him, and lynch him! Why, why did you do it God?
“O Silent God,” Du Bois prays, Listen to us, Thy children: our faces dark with doubt are made a mockery in Thy Sanctuary. . . . Bewildered we are and passion-tossed, mad with the madness of a mobbed and mocked and murdered people; straining at the armposts of Thy throne, we raise our shackled hands and charge Thee, God, by the bones of our stolen fathers, by the tears of our dead mothers, by the very blood of Thy crucified Christ: What meaneth this?
This is the question that suffering black people of faith cannot escape. “Surely Thou, too, art not white, O Lord, a pale, bloodless, heartless thing!”
In the sweetgum dark. Unbucked that one then and him squealing bloody Jesus as we cut it off.
Then we beat them, he said, beat them till our arms was tired and the big old chains messy and red. O Jesus burning on the lily cross.
Christ, it was better than hunting bear which don’t know why you want him dead.[29]
A Fatted calf, a priestly fire; The sacrificial knife, a dire Foreboding of a bloody thing. It plunges deep, death takes its prize; And smoke ascends toward the skies: Burnt offering. A lonely tree, a surging crowd With clubs and stones and voices loud; A black man as a calf they bring. Upon a newer Cross he dies, And smoke ascends toward the skies: Burnt offering.[30]
His Spirit in smoke ascended to high heaven. His father, by the cruelest way of pain, Had bidden him to his bosom once again; The awful sin remained still unforgiven.
All night a bright and solitary star (Perchance the one that ever guided him, Yet gave him up at last to Fate’s wild whim) Hung pitifully o’er the swinging char. Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view The ghastly body swaying in the sun: The women thronged to look, but never a one Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue: And little lads, lynchers that were to be, Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.[31]
Laurel: Name sweet like the breath of peace Blood and blood Hatred there White robes and Black robes And a burning Burning cross cross in Laurel cross in Jackson cross in Chicago And a Cross in front of the City Hall In: New York City
Lord Burning cross Lord Burning man Lord Murder cross
My mother told me about Lynchings My mother told me about The dark nights and dirt roads and torch lights and lynch robes sorrow night and a sorrow night The faces of men Laughing white Faces of men Dead in the night sorrow night and a sorrow night.[32]
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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During the Harlem Renaissance, Du Bois put the matter plainly and bluntly, even though many of the younger artists disagreed with him. All art is propaganda and ever must be, despite wailing of purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.[37]
Asked by two white student editors of Contempo to write a poem about the nine Scottsboro Boys, who were falsely accused but convicted of rape of two white prostitutes on a train, Hughes wrote “Christ in Alabama,” which was published on the occasion of his scheduled appearance at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. In this poem he identified Christ with an illegitimate black offspring of a white man and a black woman. Christ is a nigger, Beaten and black— Oh, bare your back. Mary is His mother, Mammy of the South, Silence your mouth. God is His father— White Master above Grant Him
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The poem angered many whites at the university and in the community. “Nothing but a corrupt, distorted brain could produce such sordid literature,” said one white man. A politician angrily said: “It’s bad enough to call Christ a bastard but to call Him a nigger—that’s too much.”[38]
Oh, tragic and bitter river Where the lynch boys hung, The gall of your bitter water Coats my tongue. The Blood of your river For me gives back no stars. I’m tired of the bitter river! Tired of the bars![39]
Good-morning, Revolution: You’re the very best friend I ever had. We gonna pal around together from now on. . . .[41] While poems embracing revolution were well received in Russia, they were not in the United States, especially by evangelical Christians and patriotic citizens. However, it was his poem “Goodbye Christ” that particularly disturbed Christians and their sympathizers. Listen, Christ, You did alright in your day, I reckon— But that day’s gone now. They ghosted you up a swell story, too, Called it Bible— But it’s dead now. The popes and the preachers’ve Made too much money from it.
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Artists force us to see things we do not want to look at because they make us uncomfortable with ourselves and the world we have created.
Black artists are prophetic voices whose calling requires them to speak truth to power.
A colored woman accused of poisoning a white one was taken from the county jail and stripped naked and hung up in the county courthouse yard and her body riddled with bullets and left exposed to view! O my God! Can such a thing be and no justice for it?[1] —Ida B. Wells
Southern trees bear strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black body swinging in the Southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar tree —“Strange Fruit,” Abel Meeropol (a.k.a. Lewis Allen)
When a mob in Valdosta, Georgia, in 1918 failed to find Sidney Johnson, accused of murdering his boss, Hampton Smith, they decided to lynch another black man, Haynes Turner, who was known to dislike Smith. Turner’s wife, Mary, who was eight months pregnant, protested vehemently and vowed to seek justice for her husband’s lynching. The sheriff, in turn, arrested her and then gave her up to the mob. In the presence of a crowd that included women and children, Mary Turner was “stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a
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That surrogacy extended as well to lynching, as women were sometimes substituted for black men who happened to escape white mob violence. “A significant number of female lynchings were not suspected of any crime,” writes historian Patrick J. Huber. “These ‘collateral victims’ died in place of an intended male target, such as a father, son, or brother, who had eluded the grasp of a frustrated mob.”[7]
7] But as Crystal Nicole Feimster has noted in her important study “Ladies and Lynching,” “The evidence . . . reveals that less than 10 black women were lynched solely for their connection or relationship with black men.”[8] The great majority of black women became “strange and bitter crop” because they courageously challenged white supremacy, refusing to stay in any place that denied their dignity.
In the physical and spiritual struggle for survival and dignity, some atrocities were “more bitter than death,”[9] and many women, like Addie Hunton of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), placed rape in that category—especially sexual violation in one’s home by white Christian men who regarded black women as whores incapable of being violated.[10]
Blacks identified with the way biblical characters wrestled with faith’s contradictions and incongruities.
New Testament scholar William Barclay called Jesus’ cry of abandonment “the most staggering sentence in the gospel record.”[12] Black cultural critic Stanley Crouch called it “perhaps the greatest blues line of all time.”[13]
Every day seem like murder here, Every day seem like murder here, I’m gonna leave tomorrow, I know you don’t want me here.[15]
God was the one reality that whites could not control and whose presence was found in unexpected places, doing surprising things.
Many great crusaders rose up in resistance to lynching. Frederick Douglass was among the earliest. Others joined the struggle: T. Thomas Fortune, publisher of the New York Age and founder of the Afro-American League; W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Walter White of the NAACP; sociologist Monroe Work of Tuskegee Institute; and Mary Church Terrell and Anna Julia Cooper of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Yet all of their work was built on the work of one woman: Ida B. Wells.[16]
