The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

While the lynching tree symbolized white power and “black death,” the cross symbolized divine power and “black life”—God overcoming the power of sin and death.

The resurrection of Jesus is God giving people meaning beyond history, when such violence as slavery and lynching seemed to close off any future.

“Does the Bible condemn slavery without any regard to circumstances, or not?” roars Reverend J. W. C. Pennington in 1845. “I, for one, desire to know. My repentance, my faith, my hope, my love, my perseverance all, all, I conceal it not, I repeat it, all turn upon this point. If I am deceived here—if the word of God does sanction slavery, I want another book, another repentance, another faith, and another hope.”[51]

Bishop Payne of the A.M.E. Church was so troubled that he questioned God’s existence: Sometimes it seems as though some wild beast had plunged his fangs into my heart, and was squeezing out its life-blood. Then I began to question the existence of God, and to say: “If he does exist, is he just? If so, why does he suffer one race to oppress and enslave another, to rob them by unrighteous enactments of rights, which they hold most dear and sacred? . . . Is there no God?”[53]

It's interesting that the doubt of God seen today yet a century ago was replicated due to our actions.

The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American theological discourse and preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching. In the “lynching era,” between 1880 to 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Yet these “Christians” did not see the irony or contradiction in their actions.

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

He cited the distinguished novelist William Faulkner and Hodding Carter, a Mississippi journalist “with a long record of fairness on the race issue,” in defense of gradualism, patience, and prudence, so as not to push the southern white people “off balance,” even though he realized that blacks were understandably smarting under such a long history of injustice: “We can hardly blame Negroes for being impatient with the counsel for patience, in view of their age-long suffering under the white man’s arrogance.” Yet, Niebuhr continued in the same essay, “The fact that it is not very appealing to the victims of a current injustice does not make it any less the course of wisdom in overcoming historic injustices.”[25]

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]

During the first trial, with Clarence Darrow as the lead defense attorney, the jury could not reach a decision. But, in a second trial that involved only the shooter, Darrow was able to convince the jury to put themselves in Henry Sweet’s shoes, and they brought back a “not guilty” verdict, which surprised many blacks and whites. What made Darrow so effective was his capacity to empathize with blacks and to persuade others to do so, arguing that blacks have as much right as whites to defend themselves when their home is under attack. According to Niebuhr, Darrow “made everyone writhe as he pictured the injustices and immoralities of our present industrial system.”

awesome example of a defense lawyer

In contrast to Niebuhr and other professors at Union Seminary, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, during his year of study at Union (1930-1931), showed an existential interest in blacks, befriending a black student named Franklin Fisher, attending and teaching Bible study and Sunday School, and even preaching at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.

discussion on bonhoeffer on race

The Delta Farm was a collection of poor white and black farmers laboring together “to throw off the tenant farming system.”

As Niebuhr boarded a train to depart Mississippi, he stated, “a newspaper falls in my hands with an account of a public hanging of two Negro boys, sixteen and eighteen years old.” Was not that lynching alone enough for Niebuhr to know that white supremacy could not be ignored in searching for economic justice, or explicating the meaning of the Christian gospel in America? Niebuhr himself preserved class solidarity at the expense of racial justice, which many liberal white-led groups were inclined to do when fighting for justice among the poor.[34]

Niebuhr often read poetry. “Religion is poetry,” he wrote in his diary. “The truth in the poetry is vivified by adequate poetic symbols and is therefore more convincing than the poor prose with which the average preacher must attempt to grasp the ineffable.”[41]

Before Malcolm, the famous anti-lynching poem “If We Must Die” exploded from Jamaican writer Claude McKay during the “Red Summer” of 1919. It was later recited by Winston Churchill, one of Niebuhr’s heroes, in a speech against the Nazis, and it was found on the body of an American soldier killed in action in 1944. McKay, however, was speaking to blacks who were being lynched by whites in northern riots. If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While around us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back![42]

As the moderator, Kilgore started the dialogue by asking Baldwin, “Does the missing face of Christ on the stained glass window, which survived the bombing . . . suggest to you a meaning of the Birmingham tragedy?” At first Baldwin responded with irony: “The absence of the face is something of an achievement, since we have been victimized so long by an alabaster Christ.” Then he turned serious, and suggested that “it sums up the crisis we’re living through. If Christ has no face, then perhaps it is time that we, who in one way or another, invented and are responsible for our deities, give him a new face . . . and make . . . the whole hope of Christian love a reality. And as far as I can tell,” he continued, “it’s never been a reality in the 2000 years since his assassination.” Niebuhr agreed with Baldwin that the missing face of Christ represented a deep moral crisis, “the failure of the church” to “give the Christian message the real content . . . the real face of Christ.” But he was careful to emphasize that, in contrast to Baldwin’s accent on love, groups don’t love. “The Negro doesn’t love the white man collectively or the white man the Negro collectively,” Niebuhr said. We, therefore, must see that “love is the motive, but justice is the instrument.” Both agreed that “the white church has failed,” and that “the Negro church has really realized itself in this crisis.” Niebuhr proclaimed that “Martin Luther King is one of the great Americans of our day.”

On the one hand, “Courage is the primary test of prophesy,” Niebuhr said. “There is no national community today in which the genuine word of God does not place the prophet in peril.” But, on the other hand, Niebuhr acknowledged his prophetic limits in Leaves, especially appropriate regarding his views on race: “I am a coward myself . . . and find it tremendously difficult to run counter to general opinion.”[58]

Before Niebuhr and Bennett, Walter Rauschenbusch, the Social Gospel movement’s greatest theologian, expressed his frustration: “For years the problem of the two races seemed to me so tragic, so insoluble that I have never yet ventured to discuss it in public.”[60] 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]

One who made the connection real was Billie Holiday, with “Strange Fruit,” her signature song about southern lynching. When she sang that song, in the words of Elijah Wood, “You feel as if you’re at the foot of the tree.”

Just as Martin Luther King Jr. learned much from Reinhold Niebuhr, Niebuhr could have deepened his understanding of the cross by being a student of King and the black freedom movement he led. King could have opened Niebuhr’s eyes to see the lynching tree as Jesus’ cross in America. White theologians do not normally turn to the black experience to learn about theology. But if the lynching tree is America’s cross and if the cross is the heart of the Christian gospel, perhaps Martin Luther King Jr., who endeavored to “take up his cross, and follow [Jesus]” (Mark 8:34) as did no other theologian in American history, has something to teach America about Jesus’ cross.

See Reinhold Niebuhr’s letter “To the Church Council, Bethel Church, Detroit,” January 22, 1930; a copy was generously given to me by the Niebuhr scholar Professor Ronald Stone, Niebuhr’s last teaching assistant; it is also found in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC; see also Detroit Times, August 8, 1931; and Niebuhr, Leaves, p. 222.

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, whom he studied in graduate school, King believed that the cross was the defining heart of the Christian faith. Unlike Niebuhr, his understanding of the cross was inflected by his awareness of the lynching tree, and this was a significant difference. While the cross symbolized God’s supreme love for human life, the lynching tree was the most terrifying symbol of hate in America.

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.

There was, however, an important difference between Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King Jr. that partly accounts for why King became a martyr in the civil rights movement while Niebuhr remained safely confined in his office at Union Seminary teaching Christian social ethics, never risking his life in the fight for justice. Unlike King, Niebuhr viewed agape love, as revealed in Jesus’ cross, as an unrealizable goal in history—a state of perfection which no individual or group in society could ever fully hope to achieve. For Niebuhr, Jesus’ cross was an absolute transcendent standard that stands in judgment over any human achievement. The most we can realize is “proximate justice,” which Niebuhr defined as a balance of power between powerful collectives. But what about groups without power? Niebuhr did not have much to say to African Americans, a 10-percent minority, except to recommend nonviolence, which he believed might advance the cause of civil rights, while never winning full justice.[17] Niebuhr’s moderate view was not one to empower a powerless group to risk their lives for freedom. That might have been why he did not talk to militant black groups or black nationalists in Harlem. He had very little to say to them.

Niebuhr believed that laws that violated the mores and customs of the southern white majority would not be obeyed; if such laws were enforced, the result would be anarchy. On that basis, he was practical and cautious in his support of the integration of schools in the South and praised the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision, which made segregation legal, and perhaps that is why he was silent about the Till lynching at a time when his powerful theological voice was desperately needed.

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 a child, Martin King heard his father and other ministers preach about Jesus’ death and his power to save not only from personal sins but also from “the hatred, the violence, the vitriolic and vituperative words of the mobs, . . . aided and abetted by the law and law enforcement officers.”[20]

In their spiritual wrestling, black Christians experienced the weakness and power of God’s love revealed in the cross—mysteriously saving them from loneliness and abandonment and “the unspeakable violence . . . by blood thirsty mobs.”[21] Black ministers preached about Jesus’ death more than any other theme because they saw in Jesus’ suffering and persecution a parallel to their own encounter with slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree.