The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

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.”

could not find one sermon or theological essay, not to mention a book, opposing lynching by a prominent liberal white preacher.[32]

Holiday’s singing and recording of “Strange Fruit” in 1939 was a cultural event that raised the political consciousness of musicians and their community—a consciousness that would hit its high-water mark with Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On?” “When Holiday recorded it,” the drummer Max Roach said, “it was more than revolutionary.” Meeropol said Holiday “gave a startling, most dramatic and effective interpretation . . . which could jolt an audience out of its complacency anywhere. . . . Billie Holiday’s styling of the song was incomparable and filled with bitterness and the shocking quality I had hoped the song would have.” Lady’s pianist Mal Waldron said, “It’s like rubbing people’s noses in their own shit,” which Billie did with contempt and defiance.

When Maya Angelou’s twelve-year-old son, Guy, once interrupted her singing to ask, “What’s a pastoral scene, Miss Holiday?” “her face became cruel” and “her voice was scornful.” “It means when the crackers are killing the niggers.” Holiday said with a “thrust of rage,” repelling the boy and stunning her. “It means when they take a little nigger like you and snatch off his nuts and shove them down his goddam throat. That’s what it means.”

Mary Dora Jones, at the risk of her life and threats to burn down her home, took in seven blacks and four whites during the Freedom Summer of 1964 in Marks, Mississippi. “Some of the black folks got the news that they were gonna burn it down,” she reflected. “My neighbors was afraid of gettin’ killed. People standin’ behind buildin’s, peepin’ out behind the buildin’s, to see what’s goin’ on. So I just told ’em, ‘Dyin’ is all right. Ain’t but one thing ’bout dyin’. That’s make sho’ you right, cause you gon’ die anyway.’ . . . If they burnt it down, it was just a house burn down. . .

in the end I am in closer agreement with other womanist theologians like Shawn Copeland, associate professor of theology at Boston College, JoAnne Terrell, associate professor of ethics and theology at Chicago Theological Seminary, and Jacquelyn Grant, professor of theology at the Interdenominational Theological Center (Atlanta, Georgia), who view the cross as central to the Christian faith, especially in African American communities.

is revealing that Harry Emerson Fosdick, the well-known liberal pastor of Riverside Church in New York, spoke out vigorously against fundamentalism during the 1920s but was nearly silent on lynching.

The more I believed in God, the harder it became to sustain any faith.

When I heard and read about the physical and mental abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, I thought about lynching. The Roman Empire that killed Jesus at Calvary was similar to the American Empire that lynched blacks in the United States and also created the atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many white Americans seemed surprised and even shocked that such torture and abuse could come from the U.S. military. But most blacks were neither surprised nor shocked.