The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

They put him to death by hanging him on a tree. —Acts 10:39

The cross and the lynching tree are separated by nearly 2,000 years. One is the universal symbol of Christian faith; the other is the quintessential symbol of black oppression in America. Though both are symbols of death, one represents a message of hope and salvation, while the other signifies the negation of that message by white supremacy.

What is at stake is the credibility and promise of the Christian gospel and the hope that we may heal the wounds of racial violence that continue to divide our churches and our society.

“the crucified peoples of history.”

Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a “recrucified” black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.

How could any theologian explain the meaning of Christian identity in America and fail to engage white supremacy, its primary negation?

even in the black community the public meaning of Christianity was white.

Self-interest and power corrupted their understanding of the Christian gospel.

The cross helped me to deal with the brutal legacy of the lynching tree, and the lynching tree helped me to understand the tragic meaning of the cross.

The cross is a paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.

That God could “make a way out of no way” in Jesus’ cross was truly absurd to the intellect, yet profoundly real in the souls of black folk. Enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized on the power of the cross. Christ crucified manifested God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life—that

Lynching was an extralegal punishment sanctioned by the community.

Lynching as primarily mob violence and torture directed against blacks began to increase after the Civil War and the end of slavery,

Although white southerners lost the Civil War, they did not lose the cultural war—the struggle to define America as a white nation and blacks as a subordinate race unfit for governing and therefore incapable of political and social equality.

Lynching was the white community’s way of forcibly reminding blacks of their inferiority and powerlessness.

somebodiness,

They came to know, as the black historian Lerone Bennett wrote, “at the deepest level . . . what it was like to be crucified. . . . And more: that there were some things in this world that are worth being crucified for.”[42]

Just as Jesus did not deserve to suffer, they knew they did not deserve it; yet faith was the one thing white people could not control or take away.

“Jesus Keep Me near the Cross,” “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone?” and other white Protestant evangelical hymns did not sound or feel the same when blacks and whites sang them because their life experiences were so different.

If the God of Jesus’ cross is found among the least, the crucified people of the world, then God is also found among those lynched in American history.

The cross places God in the midst of crucified people, in the midst of people who are hung, shot, burned, and tortured.

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 in the streets, seeking to change the social structures of racial oppression.

“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] We know from

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.

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 friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.[10]

“The crucified Messiah [is] the final revelation of the divine character and divine purpose.”

“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]

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

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

We, therefore, must see that “love is the motive, but justice is the instrument.”

“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]

I don’t care whether Senator Eastland [of Mississippi] or Barry Goldwater [of Arizona] likes me. . . . I do care that they have the power to keep me out of a home, out of a job, and to put my child on a needle. . . . I don’t care what they think or what they feel; I care about their power.”

“The white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so,” Niebuhr wrote. “Upon this point one may speak with a dogmatism which all history justifies.”[56]

Jack Miles makes a revealing comment: “The crucifix is a violently obscene icon. To recover its visceral power, children of the twenty-first century must imagine a lynching, the body of the victim swollen and distorted, his head hanging askew above a broken neck, while the bystanders smile their twisted smiles” (pp. 3-4). This is an excellent statement, as far as it goes. Like most white scholars, Miles failed to mention that lynched victims in America were mostly black, especially the ones who were tortured. To leave out the racial aspect of lynching misses the point completely.

“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.”

Suffering always poses the deepest test of faith, radically challenging its authenticity and meaning.

love in society is named justice.

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

my great prayer is always that God will save me from the paralysis of crippling fear, because I think when a person lives with the fear of the consequences for his personal life, he can never do anything in terms of lifting the whole of humanity and solving many of the social problems that we confront.

“If physical death is the price I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from the permanent death of the spirit, then nothing could be more redemptive.”

the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear.”

King believed that the cycle of violence and hate could be broken only with nonviolence and love, as revealed in Jesus’ rejection of violence and his acceptance of a shameful death on a cruel cross.

“People without imagination really have no right to write about ultimate things,”[3] Reinhold Niebuhr

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.

An apology, although important and welcomed by many blacks, is not justice.

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.”

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.

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!”

no real reconciliation could occur between blacks and whites without telling the painful and redeeming truths about their life together.

“Sometimes in order to attract attention somebody must embody the ideas in sensational forms. 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.