The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

However, Baldwin had no intention of engaging in a theoretical discussion about socialism and communism or Marx and Lenin. “What is called the racial issue never is a racial issue as it turns out anyway . . . [but] simply the fact that I, visibly, am the descendant of slaves, and a source of cheap labor,” which “Americans used ‘pathological rationalizations’ to defend themselves.”

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.

If white Protestant churches failed to be a beacon of leadership in America’s racial crisis, part of the responsibility for the failure was due to the way its leading religious spokespersons ignored race in their interpretation of the Christian faith.

I read Niebuhr; but I focused my study primarily on Karl Barth because I was interested in systematic theology, not ethics.

“There is no national community today in which the genuine word of God does not place the prophet in peril.”

White theologians do not normally turn to the black experience to learn about theology. But if the lynching tree is America’s cross and if the cross is the heart of the Christian gospel, perhaps Martin Luther King Jr., who endeavored to “take up his cross, and follow [Jesus]” (Mark 8:34) as did no other theologian in American history, has something to teach America about Jesus’ cross.

To a remarkable extent, the Till lynching would provide the spark that lit the fire of resistance in the Negro masses, inspiring them, as King said, to “rock the nation” and to demand their “freedom now.”

“It would appear from this lynching that the State of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering children.”

The signal of this change was marked by the actions of Mamie Till Bradley, Emmett’s mother, who refused to allow this heinous act, like so many similar cases, to remain in the shadows or to fade from public memory.

As in the resurrection of the Crucified One, God could transmute defeat into triumph, ugliness into beauty, despair into hope, the cross into the resurrection. And so, like Paul, Mrs. Bradley was “afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed but not unto despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor 4:8-9).

Emmett Till was “the sacrificial lamb of the civil rights movement.”

Only three months after the Till lynching, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, and a “New Negro” was born.

But for poor southern blacks, who had little formal education in philosophy or political philosophy, it was religion that offered the only resource—and the language—to fight against segregation and lynching.

King agreed fully with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian pastor hanged in 1945 by the Nazis for resisting Hitler: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

Hate and white supremacy lead to violence and alienation, while love and the cross lead to nonviolence and reconciliation.

How could Jesus’ death in Jerusalem save blacks from mob violence nearly two thousand years later in America? What did salvation mean for African Americans who had to “walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” or those forced to swing from a lynching tree?

a powerful reminder that not all crosses were liberating and loving, even when Jesus’ name was invoked.

When an angry crowd of blacks gathered with guns ready for revenge, King raised his hand and calmed them, saying, “We cannot solve this problem through retaliatory violence. We must meet violence with nonviolence. . . . We must love our white brothers no matter what they do to us. We must make them know that we love them.”

we do not know what we truly believe or what our theology is worth until “our highest hopes are turned into shambles of despair” or “we are victims of some tragic injustice and some terrible exploitation.”

Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear.”

King had to bear the cross of black leadership as he struggled against white supremacy—trying to keep hope alive in the midst of burning cities in America and Vietnam.

What King had to tell was the truth about war, racism, and poverty. “It may hurt me,” he said. “But when I took up the cross I recognized its meaning. . . . It is not something that you wear. The cross is something that you bear and ultimately that you die on.”

There are some who still find the cross a stumbling block, and others consider it foolishness, but I am more convinced than ever before that it is the power of God unto social and individual salvation. So like the Apostle Paul I can now humbly and proudly say, “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” The suffering and agonizing moments through which I have passed over the last few years have also drawn me closer to God. More than ever before I am convinced of the reality of a personal God.

So in spite of the darkness of this hour we must not despair. We must not become bitter; nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence. We must not lose faith in our white brothers. Somehow we must believe that the most misguided of them can learn to respect the dignity and worth of human personality.

For King, Jesus never promised that his disciples would not suffer. Quite the opposite: suffering is the inevitable fate of those who stand up to the forces of hatred.

Their suffering redeemed America from the sin of legalized segregation.

That was the chief trouble with Jesus: He was a troublemaker. So any time you are a troublemaker and you rebel against the wrongs and injustices of society and organize against that, then what may happen is inevitable.

The beauty in black existence is as real as the brutality, and the beauty prevents the brutality from having the final word.

How Calvary in Palestine, Extending down to me and mine, Was but the first leaf in a line Of trees on which a Man should swing World without end, in suffering For all men’s healing, let me sing.

“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.

They bored hot irons in his side And reveled in their zeal and pride; They cut his quivering flesh away And danced and sang as Christians may; Then from his side they tore his heart And watched its quivering fibres dart. And then upon his mangled frame They piled the wood, the oil and flame. . . And they raised a Sabbath song, The echo sounded wild and strong, A benediction to the skies That crowned the human sacrifice.

I wondered how many viewers pondered the theological and relational meanings of the white supremacy that put blacks on trees in America and the religious hatred and political fear that put Jesus on a Roman cross in first-century Palestine?

“Lynch him! Lynch him!” O savage cry, Why should you echo, “Crucify!”

Soon after Allen’s Without Sanctuary was published, the U.S. Senate issued a historic apology to the “families of more than 5,000 lynching victims across the country for its failure to enact an anti-lynching law first proposed 105 years ago.”[14] 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. It is always “better late than never” to correct past injustices. But as the British statesman William Ewart Gladstone once observed, “Justice delayed is justice denied.” That truth is confirmed by the legacy that lynching has bequeathed us. An apology, although important and welcomed by many blacks, is not justice.

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.

One cannot correctly understand the black religious experience without an affirmation of deep faith informed by profound doubt.

doubt is not a denial but an integral part of faith. It keeps faith from being sure of itself. But doubt does not have the final word. The final word is faith giving rise to hope.

I meant my poem to be a protest against the domination of all stronger peoples over weaker ones.”[40] That is what Jesus’ life, teachings, and death were about—God’s protest against the exploitation of the weak by the strong.

White supremacists defined lynched victims as “black beast rapists,” as savages and criminals deserving torture and death. But artists, writers, and other prophetic figures saw African American culture as something sacred and empowering.

Indeed, it was white slaveholders, segregationists, and lynchers who defined the content of the Christian gospel.

“The significance of Christ is not found in his maleness, but in his humanity,”

Like Jesus, who prayed to his Father to “let this cup pass from me” (Mt 26:39), blacks also prayed to God to take away the bitter cups of slavery, segregation, and lynching. Just as Jesus cried from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” many lynched victims made similar outbursts of despair to God before they took their last breath, hoping for divine intervention that did not come.

For black women, however, running away was not an easy option. It was difficult for them to leave their children. They had to think about more than trying to secure their own safety.

Whites frequently blamed any or all blacks for what one did, accusing them of harboring “nigger criminals,” and they would take out their frustrations on the whole black community, as they did in Atlanta in 1906—burning their homes and beating and lynching whoever was unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Faith and doubt were bound together, with each a check against the other—doubt preventing faith from being too sure of itself and faith keeping doubt from going down into the pit of despair.

“The nation cannot profess Christianity,” Wells said in an essay, “which makes the golden rule its foundation stone, and continue to deny equal opportunity for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to the black race.”[30] She therefore challenged white liberal Christians to speak out against lynching or be condemned by their silence.

Wells was especially critical of evangelist Dwight Moody, who segregated his revivals to appease whites in the South. “Our American Christians are too busy saving the souls of white Christians from burning in hellfire to save the lives of black ones from present burning in fires kindled by white Christians.” “Christianity is to be the test,”

the Christian identity of whites was not a true expression of what it meant to follow Jesus. Nothing their theologians and preachers could say would convince us otherwise. We wondered how whites could live with their hypocrisy—such a blatant contradiction of the man from Nazareth.

“Are these people Christians who made these laws which are robbing us of our inheritance and reducing us to slavery?”