The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

Wells herself regarded rape as an “unspeakable outrage,” and this initially inhibited her from speaking out forcefully against lynching. Yet the Memphis lynching had nothing to do with rape. What caused it was envy of black economic success. Whites tolerated no competition from blacks in anything, not even in sports such as baseball and horse racing, but especially in politics and economics. 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 their homes and beating and lynching whoever was unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing was more detested by whites than the idea that blacks were equal to them. “You don’t act in a way to make white persons feel that you don’t know they were white,” commented an Arkansas interviewee about Jim Crow. Any word or body movement that was perceived to be insufficiently deferential, like standing upright and looking a white person in the eye, could get a black beaten or killed. Lynching was the main weapon of terror to take back the black vote and property and “to keep the race terrorized and to keep the nigger down.”[22] The Memphis lynching caused Wells to question the rape claim as the main reason for lynching. In her research, Wells discovered that rape was given as the reason in only about one-third of lynchings. In many of these cases, the cl...