The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

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]

The Newark and Detroit riots in July 1967 and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968 were the events that shook me out of my theological complacency, forcing me to realize the bankruptcy of any theology in America that did not engage the religious meaning of the African American struggle for justice. 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.

In earlier reflections on the Christian faith and white supremacy, I had focused on the social evils of slavery and segregation. How could whites confess and live the Christian faith and also impose three-and-a-half centuries of slavery and segregation upon black people? Self-interest and power corrupted their understanding of the Christian gospel. How could powerless blacks endure and resist the brutality of white supremacy in nearly every aspect of their lives and still keep their sanity? I concluded that an immanent presence of a transcendent revelation, confirming for blacks that they were more than what whites said about them, gave them an inner spiritual strength to cope with anything that came their way. I wrote because words were my weapons to resist, to affirm black humanity, and to defend 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.

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.

African Americans did not doubt that their lives were filled with trouble: how could one be black in America during the lynching era and not know about the existential agony that trouble created for black people? Trouble followed them everywhere, like a shadow they could not shake. But the “Glory Hallelujah” in the last line speaks of hope that trouble would not sink them down into permanent despair—what Kierkegaard described as “not willing to be oneself” or even “a self; or lowest of all in despair at willing to be another than himself.”[41] When people do not want to be themselves, but somebody else, that is utter despair.

Blacks did not embrace the cross, however, without experiencing the profound contradictions that slavery, segregation, and lynching posed for their faith. That was why most blacks left white churches during slavery to form their own places of worship. Leaving white churches helped blacks to find their own space for free religious and political expression, but it did not remove their need to wrestle with God about the deeply felt contradictions that slavery created for faith.

What New Testament scholar Paula Frederickson says about crucifixion in Roman society could be substituted easily for lynching in the United States. 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 watching. Crucifixion first and foremost is addressed to an audience.[3]

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]

human power in history—among races, nations, and other collectives as well as individuals—is self-interested power, then “the revelation of divine goodness in history” must be weak and not strong. “The Christ is led as the lamb to the slaughter.” Thus, God’s revelation transvalues human values, turning them 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.

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

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]

Baldwin wanted to shake America out of its complacency about race. “I never believed I was happy down on the levee; I never said I was a happy, shiftless, watermelon-eating darky; the country did. And what is worse, the country believed it. And it still does. They thought I was happy in my place. I was never happy in my place.”

When Niebuhr wrote against liberalism, pacifism, communism, and the easy conscience of American churches, he expressed outrage; but when it came to black victims of white supremacy, he expressed none.[53]

What Niebuhr said about love, power, and justice helped me to understand that moral suasion alone would never convince whites to relinquish their supremacy over blacks. Only Black Power could do that, because power, as Frederick Douglass said long before Niebuhr was born, concedes nothing without struggle.

Today I teach a course on Niebuhr because of his profound reflections on human nature, the cross, and creative social theory, focusing on justice, self-interest, and power. My understanding of the cross is deeply influenced by his perspective on the cross. Thus, I have never questioned Niebuhr’s greatness as a theologian, but instead admired his intellectual brilliance and social commitment. What I questioned was his limited perspective, as a white man, on the race crisis in America. His theology and ethics needed to be informed from critical reading and dialogue with radical black perspectives.

If anything was remarkable about the Till lynching, it was not so much the callousness of the deed as the militant response it evoked. If lynching was intended to instill silence and passivity, this event had the opposite effect, inspiring blacks to rise in defiance, to cast off centuries of paralyzing fear. 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. When Emmett’s body was brought back to Chicago, she insisted that the sealed casket be opened for a three-day viewing, exposing “his battered and bloated corpse” so that “everybody can see what they did to my boy.” She exposed white brutality and black faith to the world and, significantly, expressed a parallel meaning between her son’s lynching and the crucifixion of Jesus. “Lord you gave your son to remedy a condition,” she cried out, “but who knows, but what the death of my only son might bring an end to lynching.”

Like Reinhold Niebuhr, King believed that love in society is named justice. King came to see early that “the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence was one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom.”[16] Hate and white supremacy lead to violence and alienation, while love and the cross lead to nonviolence and reconciliation.

Martin King lived the meaning of the cross and thereby gave an even more profound interpretation of it with his life. Reinhold Niebuhr analyzed the cross in his theology, drawing upon the Son of Man in Ezekiel and the Suffering Servant in Isaiah; and he did so more clearly and persuasively than any white American theologian in the twentieth century. But since he did not live the meaning of the cross the way he interpreted it, Niebuhr did not see the real cross bearers in his American context. The crucified people in America were black—the enslaved, segregated, and lynched black victims. That was the truth that King saw and accepted early in his ministry, and why he was prepared to give his life as he bore witness to it in the civil rights movement.

As he would later note, 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.” What sustained him was the sense of God’s love, which gave him “the interior resources to bear the burdens and tribulations of life,” “come what may.”[31]

While King never thought he had achieved the messianic standard of love found in Jesus’ cross, he did believe that his suffering and that of African Americans and their supporters would in some mysterious way redeem America from the sin of white supremacy, and thereby make this nation a just place for all. Who can doubt that those who suffered in the black freedom movement made America a better place than before? Their suffering redeemed America from the sin of legalized segregation. And those blacks among us who lived under Jim Crow know that that was no small achievement.

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. For Du Bois, true Christianity was defined by “the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth and the Golden Rule.” The white church’s treatment of blacks was “sadly at variance with this doctrine.” “It . . . assiduously ‘preaches Christ crucified’ in prayer meeting patios, and crucifies ‘niggers’ in unrelenting daily life.”[21] Du Bois then proceeded to outline the “plain facts”:

One cannot be defined by this experience and not struggle with religious contradictions. “Why did God make me an outcast and stranger in mine own house?”[24] It is a question that runs throughout African American history.

artists, writers, and other prophetic figures saw African American culture as something sacred and empowering. It was not easy for blacks to find a language to talk about Christianity publicly because the Jesus they embraced was also, at least in name, embraced by whites who lynched black people. Indeed, it was white slaveholders, segregationists, and lynchers who defined the content of the Christian gospel. They wrote hundreds of books about Christianity, founded seminaries to train scholars and preachers, and thereby controlled nearly two thousand years of Christian tradition. Cut off from their African religious traditions, black slaves were left trying to carve out a religious meaning for their lives with white Christianity as the only resource to work with. They ignored white theology, which did not affirm their humanity, and went straight to stories in the Bible, interpreting them as stories of God siding with little people just like them. They identified God’s liberation of the poor as the central message of the Bible, and they communicated this message in their songs and sermons.

Black artists are prophetic voices whose calling requires them to speak truth to power. Their expressions are not controlled by the institutions of the church. More than anyone, artists demonstrate our understanding of the need to represent the beauty and the terror of our people’s experience.

“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] 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.

Lynching was the main weapon of terror to take back the black vote and property and “to keep the race terrorized and to keep the nigger down.”[22] The Memphis lynching caused Wells to question the rape claim as the main reason for lynching. In her research, Wells discovered that rape was given as the reason in only about one-third of lynchings. In many of these cases, the claims referred to consensual sexual acts, while in others, the claims were often false.

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,” Wells claimed, that whites failed miserably in their treatment of blacks. She was “prouder to belong to the dark race that is the most practically Christian known to history, than to the white race that in its dealings with us has for centuries shown every quality that is savage, treacherous, and unchristian.”[31]

We cannot separate the cross from the Christian gospel as found in the story of Jesus and as lived and understood in the African American Christian community. The resurrected Lord was the crucified Lord. Whatever we think about the meaning of the cross for black women should arise out of their experience of fighting for justice, especially as seen in their collective lives and struggles in the civil rights movement. God’s salvation is a liberating event in the lives of all who are struggling for survival and dignity in a world bent on denying their humanity. Oh Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you moan, Oh Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you moan, Pharaoh’s army got drownded, Oh Mary, don’t you weep.

In 2005 the U.S. Senate formally apologized for its failure ever to have passed an anti-lynching bill. Did the apology get rid of the hate? What happened to the indifference among white liberal religious leaders that fostered silence in the face of the lynching industry? Where is that indifference today? Did the hate and indifference vanish so that we no longer have to be concerned about them? What happened to the denial of whites who claimed that they did not even know about lynching, even though many blacks were lynched during their adult years? Unless we confront these questions today, hate and silence will continue to define our way of life in America. For “if racial healing is ever to come to our society, it will mean remembering and retelling our story of racial injustice and honoring the voices and the actions of those who stood against it.”[15]

The cross of Jesus and the lynching tree of black victims are not literally the same—historically or theologically. Yet these two symbols or images are closely linked to Jesus’ spiritual meaning for black and white life together in what historian Robert Handy has called “Christian America.”[17] Blacks and whites are bound together in Christ by their brutal and beautiful encounter in this land. Neither blacks nor whites can be understood fully without reference to the other because of their common religious heritage as well as their joint relationship to the lynching experience. What happened to blacks also happened to whites. When whites lynched blacks, they were literally and symbolically lynching themselves—their sons, daughters, cousins, mothers and fathers, and a host of other relatives. Whites may be bad brothers and sisters, murderers of their own black kin, but they are still our sisters and brothers. We are bound together in America by faith and tragedy. All the hatred we have expressed toward one another cannot destroy the profound mutual love and solidarity that flow deeply between us—a love that empowered blacks to open their arms to receive the many whites who were also empowered by the same love to risk their lives in the black struggle for freedom. No two people in America have had more violent and loving encounters than black and white people. We were made brothers and sisters by the blood of the lynching tree, the blood of sexual union, and the blood of the...