The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

Even prominent religious scholars in the North, like the highly regarded Swiss-born church historian Philip Schaff of Union Theological Seminary in New York (1870-1893), believed that “The Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-American, of all modern races, possess the strongest national character and the one best fitted for universal dominion.”[12]

Theodore Roosevelt said, “the greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape—the most abominable in all the category of crimes, even worse than murder.”

Burning the black victim slowly for hours was the chief method of torture. Lynching became a white media spectacle, in which prominent newspapers, like the Atlanta Constitution, announced to the public the place, date, and time of the expected hanging and burning of black victims. Often as many as ten to twenty thousand men, women, and children attended the event. It was a family affair, a ritual celebration of white supremacy, where women and children were often given the first opportunity to torture black victims—burning black flesh and cutting off genitals, fingers, toes, and ears as souvenirs. Postcards were made from the photographs taken of black victims with white lynchers and onlookers smiling as they struck a pose for the camera. They were sold for ten to twenty-five cents to members of the crowd, who then mailed them to relatives and friends, often with a note saying something like this: “This is the barbeque we had last night.”[17]

Lynching became so prevalent that the Boston branch of the Colored National League sent a letter to President William McKinley demanding action. We have suffered, sir . . . since your accession to office . . . from the hate and violence of people claiming to be civilized, but who are not civilized, and you have seen our sufferings. . . . Yet you have at no time and on no occasion opened your lips on our behalf. . . . Is there no help in the federal arm for us, or even one word of audible pity, protest, and remonstrance? Black indeed we are, sir, but we are also men and citizens.[18]

Like others in his office, McKinley refused to condemn lynching publicly, even after the infamous Wilmington, North Carolina, race riot of 1898,

No one in America could claim that they did not know that whites were lynching blacks, nor could legal authorities claim ignorance, since lynchers made no effort to hide their identity or their deeds.

Strange . . . that the men who constitute these [mobs] can never be identified by . . . governors or the law officers, but the newspapers know all about them—can advance what they are going to do, how and when it was done, how the rope broke, how many balls entered the Negro’s body, how loud he prayed, how piteously he begged, what he said, how long he was left hanging, how many composed the mob, the number that were masked, whether they were prominent citizens or not, how the fire was built that burnt the raper, how the Negro was tied, how he was thrown into the fire, and the whole transaction; but still the fiendish work was done by a set of “unknown men.”[21]

The fear of lynching was so deep and widespread that most blacks were too scared even to talk publicly about it. When they heard of a person being lynched in their vicinity, they often ran home, pulled down shades, and turned out lights—hoping the terror moment would pass without taking the lives of their relatives and friends.

Niebuhr has a complex perspective on race—at once honest and ambivalent, radical and moderate. On the one hand, he says that “in the matter of race we are only a little better than the Nazis”; and, on the other, he is urging “sympathy for anxious [white] parents who are opposed to unsegregated schools.”

Niebuhr’s call for gradualism, patience, and prudence during the decade when Willie McGee (1951), Emmett Till (1955), M. C. “Mack” Parker (1959), and other blacks were lynched sounds like that of a southern moderate more concerned about not challenging the cultural traditions of the white South than achieving justice for black people.

Niebuhr chose to listen to southern moderates like Faulkner and Carter on race, rather than to civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr.,

When King asked him to sign a petition appealing to President Eisenhower to protect black children involved in integrating schools in the South, Niebuhr declined. Such pressure, he told his friend and Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, would do more harm than good. Niebuhr believed that white ministers from the South would be more effective.[26]

when advocates on both sides of the controversy attempted to enlist Niebuhr’s help, he apparently criticized the new pastor for his “unpedagogical methods,” which led to his dismissal. While Niebuhr was no supporter of racism, he stated, “I never envisaged a fully developed interracial church at Bethel. I do not think we are ready for that,” he wrote in a letter to the church council at Bethel. He contended that no congregation “at the present time”

he also knew that white churches were not prepared to include blacks, a minority they truly despised, and he was not prepared to deny the Christian identity of white churches on that basis.

On the one hand, Niebuhr wrote in Leaves: “if a gospel is preached without opposition it is simply not the gospel which resulted in the cross.” Yet on the other hand, he avoided controversy at Bethel, especially regarding race: “Here I have been preaching for thirteen years, and crying, ‘Woe unto you if all men speak well of you,’ and yet I leave without a serious controversy in the whole thirteen years.”[33] This indicates that he did not engage the race issue—the greatest moral problem in American history—in any practical way.

In the end, Christian realism was not only a source of Niebuhr’s radicalism but also of his conservatism.

Niebuhr wrote four books on American history but did not deal with racial issues in any substantive manner.

There is a great difference in the way Niebuhr wrote about Jews, on the one hand, and blacks and other people of color, on the other. When he wrote about Jews, he had engaged in a dialogue with them that began in Detroit and continued throughout his life, culminating in his great address, “The Relations of Christians and Jews in Western Civilization,”

The only dialogue Niebuhr is known to have had on race with a radical black intellectual was with James Baldwin,

“Racial prejudice . . . is endemic to human life. . . . Everybody hates everybody. . . . It’s about power. . . . 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.” This, of course, is a theme about which Niebuhr wrote persuasively and extensively.

Had Niebuhr initiated more interchange with radical black intellectuals like Baldwin, as he did with Jewish intellectuals, his theological perspective could have achieved a broader and deeper understanding of race in America. How otherwise can one grasp the complexity of race?

“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] 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.

The Social Gospel advocates held conferences on the status of the Negro in Mohonk, New York, in 1890 and 1891 and felt no need to invite any blacks, because, as Lyman Abbott said, “A patient is not invited to the consultation of the doctors on his case.”[61]

John E. White of Second Baptist Church asked a penetrating question but did not develop it: “Will it be considered ‘one-sided’ if I suggest that Christ was lynched by a legalized mob, and coming out of that stupendous event was a divine force and truth which will cure the lynching evil and settle all problems of evil in the world?”[62]

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.” It was as if she was pleading with God to let her son’s death count for something—to help save other black boys from Emmett’s fate. “Darling, you have not died in vain,” she said to Emmett, as she “looked at that horribly mangled monstrosity”; “your life has been sacrificed for something.” Six hundred thousand people viewed his bruised body and attended the funeral, and many millions more saw the Jet magazine photos that traveled around the world.[7] “This is not for Emmett,” Mrs. Bradley said, “because my boy can’t be helped now, but to make it safe for other boys. Unless an example is made of the lynchers of Emmett, it won’t be safe for a Negro to walk the streets anywhere in America.”[8]

Mrs. Bradley, however, was not left alone in her agony. She spoke about a strange experience, a voice that said to her: “Mamie, it was ordained from the beginning of time that Emmett Louis Till would die a violent death. You should be grateful to be the mother of a boy who died blameless like Christ. Bo Till will never be forgotten. There is a job for you to do now.”[11]

!

Later recalling this incident, King told how fear drove him from bed to the kitchen where he prayed, “out loud,” pleading, “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. . . . But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now, I’m faulting, I’m losing my courage.” Yet then, like Mrs. Bradley, King said he heard a voice: “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even to the end of the world.”[25]

“I don told you we is with you all the way. . . . But even if we ain’t with you, God’s gonna take care of you.”[26]

What enabled artists to see what Christian theologians and ministers would not? What prevented these theologians and ministers, who should have been the first to see God’s revelation in black suffering, from recognizing the obvious gospel truth? Did it require such a leap of imagination to recognize the visual and symbolic overtones between the cross and the lynching tree, both places of execution in the ancient and modern worlds?

In short, they lacked imagination of the most crucial and moral kind.

In the land of “the United States of Lyncherdom”[5] (to use Mark Twain’s provocative and apt phrase),

Walter Everette Hawkins, in his narrative poem “A Festival in Christendom” (1920),

“The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock” with a powerful christological declaration: “The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.”[10]

(I could not help wondering about the relationship between the whites who committed these lynchings and the whites I work with at Union Seminary.[11]

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.

In competition with each other, both the NAACP and the Communist Party sponsored anti-lynching exhibitions in 1935 featuring drawings, paintings, and sculptures by many participating artists.

The stranger meets a black convict in the woods and gives him cupped hands of water, “bathe[s] his hot head, and gently [takes] the chains and irons from his feet.” “Why, you are a nigger, too,” the convict says.

In The Souls of Black Folk and other essays, Du Bois condemned “white religion” as an “utter failure.”

“It . . . assiduously ‘preaches Christ crucified’ in prayer meeting patios, and crucifies ‘niggers’ in unrelenting daily life.”[21]

“Christmas in Georgia,” which depicts a black man, held up with the silhouette image of Christ, while an angry mob of white men hoist the victim with a rope.

December 1919 issue of The Crisis with the title “The Crucifixion in Omaha.” It was a photo of a burned victim, with a throng of white men observing their handiwork.

“The Gospel of Mary Brown,” illustrated with a photo of a black Madonna, holding a black baby in her arms.

In Du Bois’s story, obviously a retelling of Luke’s Gospel account of Jesus’ birth, Mary is black, living in a cabin by the creek, when a woman says to her ( using the words of the angel Gabriel), “Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor with God.”

Whites become exceedingly angry when they hear Joshua preach: “Blessed are the poor; blessed are they that mourn; blessed are the meek; blessed are the merciful; blessed are they which are persecuted. All men are brothers and God is the Father of all.” Whites complain bitterly: “He’s putting ideas into niggers’ heads.” “Behold, he stirreth up the people.” Then “they seized him and questioned him,” saying, “What do you mean by this talk about being brothers—do you mean social equality?” “What do you mean by ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’—do you mean the niggers will own our cotton land?” “What do you mean by saying God is you-all’s father—is God a nigger?” “Joshua flamed in mighty anger,” appropriating the words of Jesus and John the Baptist in the Gospels, calling the whites “hypocrites,” “serpents,” “generation of vipers” who will not “escape the damnation of hell!” Just as Jesus was taken before Pilate, so too Joshua is taken before a northern Judge, who finds no fault in him, nothing that would warrant a lynching. “Kill the nigger,” the mob shouts. “Why,” the Judge replies, “what hath he done?” “Let him be crucified,” the crowd insists. Like Pilate, “the Judge washed his hands of the whole matter, saying: ‘I am innocent of his blood.’ ” Like Jesus, Joshua “was sentenced for treason and inciting murder and insurrection . . . they stripped him, and spit upon him, and smote him on the head, and mocked, and lynched him.” Like Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, Joshua says, “Father...

Walter White, national secretary of the NAACP and author of several novels and the important book Rope and Faggot, indicted Christianity for creating the fanaticism that encouraged lynching. “It is exceedingly doubtful if lynching could possibly exist under any other religion than Christianity,” he wrote. “Not only through tacit approval and acquiescence has the Christian Church indirectly given its approval to lynch-law . . . , but the evangelical Christian denominations have done much towards creation of the particular fanaticism which finds its outlet in lynching.”[33]

“It’s bad enough to call Christ a bastard but to call Him a nigger—that’s too much.”[38]

Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro in the South, with an introduction by Herbert Aptheker (New York: Citadel, 1970; orig., 1907),

When a mob in Valdosta, Georgia, in 1918 failed to find Sidney Johnson, accused of murdering his boss, Hampton Smith, they decided to lynch another black man, Haynes Turner, who was known to dislike Smith. Turner’s wife, Mary, who was eight months pregnant, protested vehemently and vowed to seek justice for her husband’s lynching. The sheriff, in turn, arrested her and then gave her up to the mob. In the presence of a crowd that included women and children, Mary Turner was “stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death.”[2]

Yet all of their work was built on the work of one woman: Ida B. Wells.[16]

Frederick Douglass, whom Wells called “Old Man Eloquent,” acknowledged her leadership in a letter of 1892 about her “paper on the lynch abomination.” “There has been no word equal to it in convincing power,” he wrote. I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison. You give what you know and testify from actual knowledge. . . . Brave woman! you have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured. If American conscience were only half alive, if the American church and clergy were only half christianized, if American moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read.[18]