The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

But as with the evils of chattel slavery and Jim Crow segregation, blacks and whites and other Americans who want to understand the true meaning of the American experience need to remember lynching. To forget this atrocity leaves us with a fraudulent perspective of this society and of the meaning of the Christian gospel for this nation.

The cross has been transformed into a harmless, non-offensive ornament that Christians wear around their necks. Rather than reminding us of the “cost of discipleship,” it has become a form of “cheap grace,”[3] an easy way to salvation that doesn’t force us to confront the power of Christ’s message and mission.

In writing this book, my primary concern is to give voice to black victims, to let them and their families and communities speak to us, exploring the question: how did ordinary blacks, like my mother and father, survive the lynching atrocity and still keep together their families, their communities, and not lose their sanity? How could they live meaningful lives, knowing that they could be lynched for any small violation of what Richard Wright called “the ethics of living Jim Crow”?[4]

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.

Christ crucified manifested God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life—that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately, in God’s eschatological future, they would not be defeated by the “troubles of this world,” no matter how great and painful their suffering. Believing this paradox, this absurd claim of faith, was only possible through God’s “amazing grace” and the gift of faith, grounded in humility and repentance. There was no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others. The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.

In that era, the lynching tree joined the cross as the most emotionally charged symbols in the African American community—symbols that represented both death and the promise of redemption, judgment and the offer of mercy, suffering and the power of hope. Both the cross and the lynching tree represented the worst in human beings and at the same time “an unquenchable ontological thirst”[1] for life that refuses to let the worst determine our final meaning.

Initially, lynching was not directed primarily against blacks nor did it always mean death to the victim. Mexicans, Indians, Chinese, and whites were lynched—a term that could apply to whipping, shooting, stabbing, as well as hanging. Lynching was an extralegal punishment sanctioned by the community.

During the Reconstruction era, the South was divided into military districts, which provided blacks some protection from mob violence, so that the Klan had to do its violent work against blacks and their white northern sympathizers in secret, at night, wearing hoods to hide its members’ identity. When KKK members were tried in courts, they could usually count on their neighbors and friends to find them “not guilty,” since all-white male juries almost never found white men guilty of lynching a black man.

The Birth of a Nation (1915), first seen at the White House and praised enthusiastically by President Woodrow Wilson. Whites, especially in the South, loved Birth and regarded seeing it as a “religious experience.” It “rendered lynching an efficient and honorable act of justice” and served to help reunite the North and South as a white Christian nation, at the expense of African Americans.

Assured of no federal interference, southern whites were now free to take back the South, to redeem it from what they called “Negro domination,” through mob violence—excluding blacks from politics, arresting them for vagrancy, forcing them to work as sharecroppers who never got out of debt, and creating a rigid segregated society in which being black was a badge of shame with no meaningful future. A black person could be lynched for any perceived insult to whites.

The Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had said clearly in the Dred Scott Decision (1857): “[blacks] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”[14] For many whites, whether in the North or the South, that conviction was unaffected by the end of slavery.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it would have been difficult to find white persons who would openly object to the right of white men to protect white women from sexual union with black men by means of lynching.

Even presidents refused to oppose lynching publicly, and some even supported it. As 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.”

By the 1890s, lynching fever gripped the South, spreading like cholera, as white communities made blacks their primary target, and torture their focus. 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]

Like others in his office, McKinley refused to condemn lynching publicly, even after the infamous Wilmington, North Carolina, race riot of 1898, during which eleven blacks were killed and thousands were driven from the city in order to prevent them from participating in politics.[19]

For most blacks it was the blues and religion that offered the chief weapons of resistance. At the juke joints on Friday and Saturday nights and at churches on Sunday mornings and evening week nights blacks affirmed their humanity and fought back against dehumanization. Both black religion and the blues offered sources of hope that there was more to life than what one encountered daily in the white man’s world.

“The blues,” as Ralph Ellison put it, “is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.”[26]

Hope in black possibility, in the dream of a new world, had to be carved out of wretched conditions, out of a world where the possibility of violent death was always imminent. African Americans knew what it meant to “make the best of a bad situation”—to live “under a kind of sentence of death,” “not know[ing] when [their] time will come, it may never come, but it may also be any time.”[28]

Abdul JanMohamed speaks about black subjectivity as “the death-bound-subject”—“the subject who is formed, from infancy on, by the imminent and ubiquitous threat of death.”[30]

“I had never in my life been abused by whites,” wrote Richard Wright in Black Boy, as he reflected back on his boyhood in Mississippi, “but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings.”[31]

If the blues offered an affirmation of humanity, religion offered a way for black people to find hope. “Our churches are where we dip our tired bodies in cool springs of hope,” wrote Richard Wright in Twelve Million Voices, “where we retain our wholeness and humanity despite the blows of death. . . .”[36]

African Americans did not doubt that their lives were filled with trouble: how could one be black in America during the lynching era and not know about the existential agony that trouble created for black people? Trouble followed them everywhere, like a shadow they could not shake. But the “Glory Hallelujah” in the last line speaks of hope that trouble would not sink them down into permanent despair—what Kierkegaard described as “not willing to be oneself” or even “a self; or lowest of all in despair at willing to be another than himself.”[41] When people do not want to be themselves, but somebody else, that is utter despair.

The spirituals, gospel songs, and hymns focused on how Jesus achieved salvation for the least through his solidarity with them even unto death. There were more songs, sermons, prayers, and testimonies about the cross than any other theme. The cross was the foundation on which their faith was built. In the mystery of God’s revelation, black Christians believed that just knowing that Jesus went through an experience of suffering in a manner similar to theirs gave them faith that God was with them, even in suffering on lynching trees, just as God was present with Jesus in suffering on the cross.

The more black people struggled against white supremacy, the more they found in the cross the spiritual power to resist the violence they so often suffered. 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. “In our collective outpourings of song and prayer, the fluid emotions of others make us feel the strength in ourselves. . . .”[43]

But the cross speaks to oppressed people in ways that Jesus’ life, teachings, and even his resurrection do not.

Unlike the spirituals and the church, the blues and the juke joint did not lead to an organized political resistance against white supremacy. But one could correctly say that the spirituals and the church, with Jesus’ cross at the heart of its faith, gave birth to the black freedom movement that reached its peak in the civil rights era during the 1950s and 60s. The spirituals were the soul of the movement, giving people courage to fight, and the church was its anchor, deepening its faith in the coming freedom for all. The blues was an individual’s expression of a cultural defiance against white supremacy, a stubborn refusal to be defined by it. The blues prepared people to fight for justice by giving them a cultural identity that made them human and thus ready to struggle. 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.

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.

What New Testament scholar Paula Frederickson says about crucifixion in Roman society could be substituted easily for lynching in the United States. 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.[3]

Best known for his realist approach in Christian social ethics, Niebuhr rejected pacifism (which he had once espoused), idealism, and perfectionism—the idea that individuals and groups could achieve the standard of love he saw revealed in Jesus’ life, teachings, and death. Niebuhr taught that love is the absolute, transcendent standard that stands in judgment over what human beings can achieve in history. Because of human finitude and humanity’s natural tendency to deny it (sin), we can never fully reach that ethical standard. The best that humans can strive for is justice, which is love approximated, a balance of power among competing groups. Unlike the advocates of the Social Gospel, who often suggested that we could through love build the Kingdom of God on earth, Niebuhr placed justice, rather than love, at the center of Christian social ethics.

“Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”[9]

Niebuhr’s realist approach to Christian ethics was deeply connected to the cross, which he identified as the heart of the Christian gospel. “If the divine is made relevant to the human,” Niebuhr claimed, “it must transvalue our values and enter the human at the point where man is lowly rather than proud and where he is weak rather than strong. Therefore I believe that God came in the form of a little child born to humble parents in a manger. . . .” This “life in the manger ended upon the cross . . . [and we] might end there if we really emulated it.”[12]

“The crucified Messiah [is] the final revelation of the divine character and divine purpose.” He was rejected because people expected a Messiah “perfect in power and perfect in goodness.” But “the revelation of divine goodness in history must be powerless.” If human power in history—among races, nations, and other collectives as well as individuals—is self-interested power, then “the revelation of divine goodness in history” must be weak and not strong.

in Beyond Tragedy, Niebuhr turns to Paul to express what it meant to see the world from a transcendent, divine point of view. For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to naught things that are: That no flesh shall glory in his presence. (1 Cor 1:26-29)

“The cross is the truth” because God is hidden there in Jesus’ sacrificial, vicarious suffering. Only faith can see that which cannot be derived from the logic of history or reason. “Faith is able to sense and appropriate an ultimate truth too deep for human reason.”[17] This faith is defined by humility and repentance.

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.” But, Niebuhr continued, “The tremendous effect of his powerful address was partially offset by the bitterness with which he spoke. . . .” When Niebuhr thought a little more deeply about Darrow’s empathy with black suffering, however, he said, “I suppose it is difficult to escape bitterness when you have eyes to see and heart to feel what others are too blind and too callous to notice.”[29]

In the end, Christian realism was not only a source of Niebuhr’s radicalism but also of his conservatism. This is especially true of the struggles of the oppressed in the black community for racial justice; for even during his most radical period (1930s), when lynching resurged with a vengeance, he was, at most, a moderate on racial justice. Rather than challenging racial prejudice, he believed it must “slowly erode.” Although he did not believe that African Americans could achieve proximate justice without the help of liberal whites, he did not choose to be among those to support actively and passionately the black struggle for justice.[37]

While spectacle lynching was on the decline in the 1950s, there were many legal lynchings as state and federal governments used the criminal justice system to intimidate, terrorize, and murder blacks. Whites could kill blacks, knowing that a jury of their peers would free them but would convict and execute any black who dared to challenge the white way of life. White juries, judges, and lawyers kept America “safe” from the threat of the black community. Thus, the nightmare in black life continued to deepen as progressive whites like Niebuhr remained silent about lynching.

“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.

What most whites call “integration” (or in the language of today, diversity) is often merely “tokenism.” There is very little justice in any educational institution where black presence is less than 20 percent of the faculty, students, and board members. There is no justice without power; and there is no power with one, two, or three tokens.

John Lewis, who was fifteen at the time, reacted like many black teenagers: “I was shaken to my core,” he recalled in his memoir. “He could have been me. That could have been me, beaten, tortured, dead at the bottom of a river.”[9] The Till lynching shook me up too. I was seventeen, beginning my second year at Shorter College in North Little Rock, Arkansas, where I was the daily news reporter to the student assembly, focusing on local, state, national, and world events. I read stories to the college community about the atrocity, the trial and acquittal of the accused men. Like Lewis, I remember saying to myself, “Emmet Till could have been me!” My older brothers felt the same way, as did most young males we knew.

Although blacks followed the trial closely, they knew that the two white men directly responsible for the shameful act, J.W. Milan and Roy Bryant, would never see a day in jail, even though they admitted in court to the federal crime of kidnapping. (They were acquitted by an all-white jury after an hour of deliberation.) Crimes against blacks seldom led to conviction; instead, the perpetrators were often rewarded for putting “niggers” in their place. And when white men were convicted, which was rare, the punishment was usually just a slap on the wrist. One Mississippi court awarded the family of a lynched victim just one dollar for their loss.

In considering the subject of God and the problem of race in America, King reflected that God’s love created blacks and whites and other human beings for each other in community (thesis). White supremacy was the sin that separated them in America and in much of the world (antithesis). God reconciled humanity through Jesus’ cross, and thereby white supremacy could never have “the final and ultimate word” on human relationships (synthesis). God’s reconciling love in the cross empowered human beings to love one another—bearing witness with “our whole being in the struggle against evil, whatever the cost.” Thus, blacks and whites together were free to create the American Dream in society and the Beloved Community in our religious life.

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]

In contrast to Niebuhr, King never spoke about proximate justice or about what was practically possible to achieve. That would have killed the revolutionary spirit in the African American community. Instead, King focused on and often achieved what Niebuhr said was impossible. “What do you want?” King would call out before a demonstration. “Freedom!” the demonstrators would shout back, ready to face angry white mobs and policemen. “When do you want it?” King would ask, his voice reaching a crescendo. “Now!” was the resounding response, as the protestors would begin walking and singing together, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.”

There was no talk about proximate justice—that little bit of justice that whites dole out to blacks when they get ready. God’s justice called for black people to bear witness to freedom now, even unto death. That was why Fred Shuttlesworth, the movement’s most courageous freedom fighter, said, “You have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live.” This justice language was defined by a love of freedom derived directly from Jesus’ cross, and it led more than forty martyrs to their deaths in the civil rights movement.

Martin King lived the meaning of the cross and thereby gave an even more profound interpretation of it with his life. 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.

Since most ministers had little or no formal training in academic theology, they spoke from their hearts, appealing to their life experience, biblical stories, and the Spirit of God that empowered them to struggle for dignity and freedom. They proclaimed what they felt in song and sermon and let the truth of their proclamation bear witness to God’s redemptive presence in their resistance to oppression. Their sense of redemption through Jesus’ cross was not a propositional belief or a doctrine derived from the study of theology. Redemption was an amazing experience of salvation, an eschatological promise of freedom that gave transcendent meaning to black lives that no lynching tree could take from them.

When blacks sang about the “blood,” they were wrestling not only with the blood of the crucified carpenter from Nazareth but also with the blood of raped and castrated black bodies in America—innocent, often nameless, burning and hanging bodies, images of hurt so deep that only God’s “amazing grace” could offer consolation.

Martin King first encountered lynching in conversations with his parents. His father, “Daddy King,” would later, in his autobiography, describe his first childhood glimpse of Judge Lynch, an event so terrifying that “I thought I was going to pass out.” A group of disgruntled white men, complaining about “niggers” taking their jobs, had decided to take their frustrations out on a black man who worked with them at the mill. Hearing their conversation, as he walked near them from work, the black man knew his life was in grave danger, but it was too late to retreat or to pass unnoticed. He just smiled as he walked briskly, hoping to make it home without incident. But this was not to be. “What the hell are you laughin’ at, nigger?” one man shouted. “I ain’ laughin’, suh, honest I ain’t. . . . Jus’ on ma way home is all. . . .” He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was no exit. He was a scapegoat like Jesus. “Nigger come struttin’ down the road like he thinks he’s up North someplace. Pocket full of money. Laughin’ at white folks.” It was payday and they tried to take his money. “This money fo’ my chil’ren now,” the black man screamed, fighting back. “I cain’ let you have that.” They proceeded to kick and beat him severely—“blood pouring out of the man’s mouth,” as he cried out in painful agony. “They pulled him right past me,” Daddy King remembered; “it was as if I hadn’t even been there watching.” Then “one of them took off his belt and wrapped it around the Negro’...

Openly to fight white supremacy in the deep South during the 1950s and ’60s was unthinkably perilous. Even at a distance of more than fifty years, we can still sense the fear. When King agreed to act as the most visible leader in the civil rights movement, he recognized what was at stake. In taking up the cross of black leadership, he was nearly overwhelmed with fear. This fear reached a climax on a particular night, January 27, 1956, in the early weeks of the Montgomery bus boycott, when he received a midnight telephone call threatening to blow up his house if he did not leave Montgomery in three days. Later he told how that call created a “spiritual midnight,” as he thought about what could happen to him, his wife, and newly born baby girl. 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]