The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

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. That was why Hughes, Du Bois, and other black artists were persecuted. 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. They wrote hundreds of books about Christianity, founded seminaries to train scholars and preachers, and thereby controlled nearly two thousand years of Christian tradition.

Black artists are prophetic voices whose calling requires them to speak truth to power.

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

Black cultural critic Stanley Crouch called it “perhaps the greatest blues line of all time.”

God was the one reality that whites could not control and whose presence was found in unexpected places, doing surprising things.

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

For Wells, faith in the God of Calvary was not an excuse for passivity. She rebuked those who patiently waited on God to save them from injustice.

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.

With faith in one hand and doubt in the other she contended against the evil of lynching.

“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.”

“By some amazing but vastly creative spiritual insight,” theologian Howard Thurman said, “the slave undertook the redemption of the religion that the master had profaned in his midst.”[35]

In the words of Ralph Ellison, “For the art—the blues, the spirituals, the jazz, the dance—was what we had in place of freedom.”[45]

Scholars who criticize blacks for their “otherworldly” religion should look a little deeper into the ways blacks resisted the demonic in their midst.

“The negro women of the South,” Charlotte Hawkins Brown told white women, “lay everything that happens to the members of her race at the door of the Southern white woman. . . . We all feel that you can control your men. We feel that so far as lynching is concerned that, if the white woman would take hold of the situation, that lynching would be stopped. . . .”[49]

Like Wells and other black Christians, club women viewed white Christianity as a contradiction of true Christian identity, largely because of its support of segregation and lynching. “Would to God that it were,” complained the National Baptist leader Nellie Burroughs, when she rejected America’s Christian identity, “but it is the most lawless and desperately wicked nation on the globe.” 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.”[51]

“What Must the Negro Do to be Saved?” at Bethel A.M.E. Church in Washington, DC, she said: “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.”[52]

Yes, in the sense that this was the America that blacks had experienced, but no, in the sense that we should not accept this America; we would not and could not be satisfied until justice was made a reality

Fannie Lou Hamer was quick to respond: “Don’t talk to me about atheism. If God wants to start a movement, then hooray for God.”[68]

Black liberation theology emerged out of black people’s struggle with nonviolence (Christianity) and self-defense (Black Power).

I find nothing redemptive about suffering in itself. 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. What is redemptive is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair, as revealed in the biblical and black proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection.

If the makers of the spirituals gloried in singing of the cross of Jesus, it was not because they were masochistic and enjoyed suffering. Rather, the enslaved Africans sang because they saw on the rugged wooden planks One who had endured what was their daily portion. The cross was treasured because it enthroned the One who went all the way with them and for them. The enslaved African sang because they saw the results of the cross—triumph over the principalities and powers of death, triumph over evil in this world.

“By their very suffering and privation,” she writes, “black women under chattel slavery freed the cross of Christ. Their steadfast commitment honored the cross and the One who died for all and redeemed it from Christianity’s vulgar misuse.”[71]

The resurrected Lord was the crucified Lord.

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

Belief in a good and just God was no easy matter for any black person living in the so-called Christian South.

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.

And so the transcendent and the immanent, heaven and earth, must be held together in critical, dialectical tension, each one correcting the limits of the other.

The cross, as a locus of divine revelation, is not good news for the powerful, for those who are comfortable with the way things are, or for anyone whose understanding of religion is aligned with power.

This reversal of expectations and conventional values is the unmistakable theme of the gospel.

In the person and fate of the one man Jesus of Nazareth this saving solidarity of God with [the oppressed] is given its historical and physical form.”

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.”[5] Bonhoeffer was right: “The Bible directs [us] to God’s powerlessness and suffering. Only a suffering God can help.”[6]

Every time a white mob lynched a black person, they lynched Jesus.

The lynching tree is the cross in America. When American Christians realize that they can meet Jesus only in the crucified bodies in our midst, they will encounter the real scandal of the cross.

It is even more ironic that black people embraced the Christian cross that whites used to murder them. That was truly a profound inversion of meaning.

White theologians in the past century have written thousands of books about Jesus’ cross without remarking on the analogy between the crucifixion of Jesus and the lynching of black people. 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.

Nietzsche was right: Christianity is a religion of slaves. God became a slave in Jesus and thereby liberated slaves from being determined by their social condition.

This is the faith of abused and scandalized people—the losers and the down and out. It was this faith that gave blacks the strength and courage to hope, “to keep on keeping on,” struggling against the odds, with what Paul Tillich called “the courage to be.”[7]

Though the pain of Jesus’ cross was real, there was also joy and beauty in his cross. This is the great theological paradox that makes the cross impossible to embrace unless one is standing in solidarity with those who are powerless.

people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.

Just as the Germans should never forget the Holocaust, Americans should never forget slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree.

We were made brothers and sisters by the blood of the lynching tree, the blood of sexual union, and the blood of the cross of Jesus. No gulf between blacks and whites is too great to overcome, for our beauty is more enduring than our brutality. What God joined together, no one can tear apart.