The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

The struggle to survive in a white supremacist society was a full-time occupation for black people. But how to survive with one’s dignity intact—that was the challenge. Women had the additional challenge of assuring not just their own survival but also the survival of their families. Yet, they too aspired for more, for a certain “quality of life,”[46] as womanist theologian Delores Williams has insisted. Black men seemed less able to navigate the complex relationship between survival and dignity in the violent patriarchal South. Just out of slavery, they wanted to be men, just like white males—providing economic support and physical protection for women and children—but they were not permitted to do so. As a result, black men tended either toward violence, which often placed them on lynching trees, or toward passivity, which led to the loss of dignity: few other options were available.