More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“the slave undertook the redemption of the religion that the master had profaned in his midst.”
Blacks have always wondered how whites could live comfortably with that absurdity. How could white Christians reconcile the “strange fruit” they hung on southern trees with the “strange fruit” Romans hung on the cross at Golgotha?
“In ‘Strange Fruit,’ ” writes Griffin in a deeply moving meditation, “Holiday left us a powerful legacy and enduring song of protest against racial violence—protest that has been cited by each succeeding generation of black singers
It was fitting for a Jew to write this great protest song about “burning flesh” because the burning black bodies on the American landscape prefigured the burning bodies of Jews at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
As the great theologian Howard Thurman said, “[a person] has to handle . . . suffering or be handled by it.”
The struggle to survive in a white supremacist society was a full-time occupation for black people. But how to survive with one’s dignity intact—that was the challenge.
Just out of slavery, they wanted to be men, just like white males—providing economic support and physical protection for women and children—but they were not permitted to do so. As a result, black men tended either toward violence, which often placed them on lynching trees, or toward passivity, which led to the loss of dignity: few other options were available.
Thus, whites focused on the anarchy that lynching created for whites. They hardly said an adequate word about the devastating effect of the lynching atrocity in the black community.
Lynching, she insisted, was “no superficial thing . . . it is in the blood of the nation. And the process of eliminating it will be difficult and long.”
“Don’t wait for deliverers. . . . There are no deliverers. . . . The Negro must serve notice to the world that he is ready to die for justice. . . . We are a race on this continent that can work out its own salvation.” Therefore, she urged, “Work as if all depends upon you. Pray as if all depends upon God.”
Although the civil rights movement was headed primarily by male leaders (such as Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Andy Young, and others), there never would have been a black freedom movement without the courageous work of women—such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Jo Anne Robinson, Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and many more.
Where there is hope, there is God—that divine presence that prevents despair and empowers poor people to resist.
Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free. (America never was America to me.) . . .
“The believer who has communicated with his [or her] god is not merely a man [or woman] who sees new truths of which the unbeliever is ignorant; he [or she] is a man [or woman] who is stronger. He [or she] feels within him [or her] more force, either to endure the trials of existence, or to conquer them.”
This means that the faith of the church is defined by women who, through the spirituals, hymns, and gospel songs, placed the crucified Jesus at the center of their faith. The cross sustained them—not for suffering but in their resistance to it.
How could one be black and Christian at the same time if the public identity of the Christian faith was identified with white supremacy?
Black liberation theology emerged out of black people’s struggle with nonviolence (Christianity) and self-defense (Black Power).
The gospel of Jesus is not a rational concept to be explained in a theory of salvation, but a story about God’s presence in Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed, which led to his death on the cross.
Remember those who are in prison, as though you were there in prison with them, those who are being tortured as though you yourselves were being tortured. —Hebrews 13:3
Such personal suffering challenges faith, but social suffering, which comes from human hate, challenges it even more.
God’s liberation of the poor is the primary theme of Jesus’ gospel.
The Christian gospel is God’s message of liberation in an unredeemed and tortured world.
Without concrete signs of divine presence in the lives of the poor, the gospel becomes simply an opiate; rather than liberating the powerless from humiliation and suffering, the gospel becomes a drug that helps them adjust to this world by looking for “pie in the sky.”
A symbol of death and defeat, God turned it into a sign of liberation and new life. The cross is the most empowering symbol of God’s loving solidarity with the “least of these,” the unwanted in society who suffer daily from great injustices.
“In Jesus’ cross God took up the existence of a slave and died the slave’s death on the tree of martyrdom” (Phil 2:8).
The cross,” writes Dorothy A. Lee-Pollard, “reveals where God’s kingdom is to be found—not among the powerful or even the religious, but in the midst of powerlessness, suffering and death.”
He was crucified by the same principalities and powers that lynched black people in America.
One must suppose that in order to feel comfortable in the Christian faith, whites needed theologians to interpret the gospel in a way that would not require them to acknowledge white supremacy as America’s great sin.
God became a slave in Jesus and thereby liberated slaves from being determined by their social condition.
The real scandal of the gospel is this: humanity’s salvation is revealed in the cross of the condemned criminal Jesus, and humanity’s salvation is available only through our solidarity with the crucified people in our midst.
The cross needs the lynching tree to remind Americans of the reality of suffering—to keep the cross from becoming a symbol of abstract, sentimental piety. Before the spectacle of this cross we are called to more than contemplation and adoration. We are faced with a clear challenge: as Latin American liberation theologian Jon Sobrino has put it, “to take the crucified down from the cross.”
but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. . . . It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your children to hate.
the reason for this ignorance is a knowledge of the role these people played—and play—in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know.
Whites today cannot separate themselves from the culture that lynched blacks, unless they confront their history and expose the sin of white supremacy.
If America has the courage to confront the great sin and ongoing legacy of white supremacy with repentance and reparation there is hope “beyond tragedy.”
