The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

Three nights after that threatening call, while he was at a boycott meeting, King’s house was bombed. Fortunately, his wife and daughter and a family friend escaped harm, having moved to the back of the house when they heard something land on the porch. When told at the meeting that his house had been bombed, King calmly asked about the safety of his family and then went home to comfort them. “Strangely enough,” he said later, “I accepted the word of the bombing calmly. My religious experience a few nights before had given me the strength to face it.” When an angry crowd of blacks gathered with guns ready for revenge, King raised his hand and calmed them, saying, “We cannot solve this problem through retaliatory violence. We must meet violence with nonviolence. . . . We must love our white brothers no matter what they do to us. We must make them know that we love them.”

A few weeks later, when a reporter asked him whether he was afraid, King replied: No, I’m not. My attitude is that this is a great cause. This is a great issue we are confronted with and the consequences for my personal life are not particularly important. It is the triumph of the cause that I am concerned about, and I have always felt that ultimately along the way of life an individual must stand up and be counted and be willing to face the consequences, whatever they are. If he is filled with fear, he cannot do it. And my great prayer is always that God will save me from the paralysis of crippling fear, because I think when a person lives with the fear of the consequences for his personal life, he can never do anything in terms of lifting the whole of humanity and solving many of the social problems that we confront.[29] On the very anniversary of his vision in the kitchen—having learned about the discovery of twelve sticks of unexploded dynamite on his porch the previous night—King recalled the experience in a sermon. Although he and his family were again unhurt (having spent the night at a friend’s house), he acknowledged that the attempted murder had disturbed him profoundly. Recalling his kitchen experience, he told the congregation how God had removed his fear. “I realized that there were moments when I wanted to give up and I was afraid but You gave me a vision in the kitchen of my house and I am grateful for it.” He told his listeners that “I went to bed many nigh...

In the history of Western theology, there were various classical theories of how Jesus’ death brought redemption to humanity—none of them officially endorsed by the Christian church. King studied them in seminary.[39] But in the end King did not turn to them for answers. For him, the cross represented the depth of God’s love for suffering humanity, and an answer to the deadly cycle of violence and hatred. “The most astounding fact about Christ’s crucifixion is that it . . . [is] the supreme revelation of God’s love,” King said in a sermon called “Finding God.” “It is quite difficult to see the love of God in such a shameful tragedy,” he said. “Certainly it requires penetrating eyes to see God in such a setting.”[40]

But for King nonviolence was more than a strategy; it was the way of life defined by love for others—the only way to heal broken humanity. Hate created more hate and violence more violence. King believed that the cycle of violence and hate could be broken only with nonviolence and love, as revealed in Jesus’ rejection of violence and his acceptance of a shameful death on a cruel cross. King’s faith was defined by the mystery of divine salvation in the cross and by the belief that Jesus was the answer not only to the lynching tree but to whatever troubles black people faced.

Referencing Paul, King wrote, There are some who still find the cross a stumbling block, and others consider it foolishness, but I am more convinced than ever before that it is the power of God unto social and individual salvation. So like the Apostle Paul I can now humbly and proudly say, “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” The suffering and agonizing moments through which I have passed over the last few years have also drawn me closer to God. More than ever before I am convinced of the reality of a personal God.[43]

Then King spoke directly to the “bereaved families,” as he had done as a pastor at Dexter in Montgomery and Ebenezer in Atlanta and would also have to do again and again for freedom fighters murdered in the civil rights movement. As he searched for words of faith that would console them in their great loss, King said, I hope you find consolation from Christianity’s affirmation that death is not the end. Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance. Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads man into life eternal. Let this daring faith, this great invincible surmise, be your sustaining power during these trying days.

Just as Jesus knew he could be executed when he went to Jerusalem, King knew that threats against his life could be realized in Memphis. Like Jesus’ disciples who rejected the idea that his mission entailed his suffering and death (Mk 8:31-32), nearly everyone in King’s organization vigorously opposed his journey to Memphis, not only because of the dangers but because of the need to focus on the coming Poor People’s Campaign in Washington. But King, like Jesus, felt he had no choice: he had to go to Memphis and aid the garbage workers in their struggle for dignity, better wages, and a safer work place. He had to go because his faith demanded it.

Martin King, living daily under the threat of death, often repeated similar words about his spiritual “mountain top” and his vision of the “promised land.” But on the night before his assassination in Memphis, he etched them into our national memory. I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats. . . . What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter to me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. . . . But I’m not concerned with that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he has allowed me to go to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. . . . I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.[48]

Love and hope, which Martin King found in Jesus’ cross and resurrection, did not erase the pain of suffering and its challenge for faith. No black Christian could escape the problem of evil that has haunted Christians throughout history. That is why the cross and redemptive suffering are not popular themes today among many Christians, especially among womanist, feminist, and other progressive theologians, who often criticize Martin King on this score.[50] Theology is always so contextual that it is difficult for young theologians today, as it was also back then, to understand King’s profound, existential, and paradoxical truth. I, too, was slow to embrace King’s view of redemptive suffering. Have not blacks, women, and poor people throughout the world suffered enough? Giving value to suffering seems to legitimize it.

Though we are not fully free and the dream not fully realized, yet, we are not what we used to be and not what we will be. The cross and the lynching tree can help us to know from where we have come and where we must go. We continue to seek an ultimate meaning that cannot be expressed in rational and historical language and that cannot be denied by white supremacy.

It takes a powerful imagination, grounded in historical experience, to uncover the great mysteries of black life. “We have been in the storm so long,” “tossed and driven,” singing and praying, weeping and wailing, trying to carve out some meaning in tragic situations. The beauty in black existence is as real as the brutality, and the beauty prevents the brutality from having the final word. Black suffering needs radical and creative voices, prophetic advocates who can tell brutal and beautiful stories of how oppressed black people survived with a measure of dignity when they were not meant to. Who are we? Why are we here? And what must we do to achieve our full humanity in a world that denies it? Those artists who accepted the challenge of answering these questions shouldered a heavy burden.

While the Senate refused to enact a federal law against lynching, black artists relentlessly exposed the political and religious hypocrisy of lynching in America. In competition with each other, both the NAACP and the Communist Party sponsored anti-lynching exhibitions in 1935 featuring drawings, paintings, and sculptures by many participating artists. Some artists, including whites, Mexicans, Japanese, as well as blacks, displayed their work in both exhibitions. Generally, non-black artists addressed a white audience and focused mostly on the brutality against black bodies and the racism of the lynchers. Black artists usually addressed the black community and thus tended to avoid white brutality and the helplessness of the black victims. They focused more on black subjectivity—the dignity of the black victims and the suffering of the black community, and they were much more likely to allude to the spiritual agency of black people through parallels with the suffering of Christ.

When artists used religious symbols, they often pointed not only to the black victim as Christ but also to the hypocrisy of the white churches. In their anti-lynching crusade, the NAACP encouraged visual artists to create images that would counter the lynching photos of lynchers and their supporters, especially in the churches.

Somewhat like his use of the concept of “double consciousness” to explain the African American search for identity, Du Bois used the paradox of faith and doubt together to explain the meaning of the black religious experience. One cannot correctly understand the black religious experience without an affirmation of deep faith informed by profound doubt. Suffering naturally gives rise to doubt. How can one believe in God in the face of such horrendous suffering as slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree? Under these circumstances, doubt is not a denial but an integral part of faith. It keeps faith from being sure of itself. But doubt does not have the final word. The final word is faith giving rise to hope. And hope is the theme of Du Bois’s brief reflection “Easter.”

However, the lynched Black Christ was not the only Christ that artists saw. They also saw a mean White Christ symbolized in white Christian lynchers, the ones who justified slavery and segregation. Walter White, national secretary of the NAACP and author of several novels and the important book Rope and Faggot, indicted Christianity for creating the fanaticism that encouraged lynching. “It is exceedingly doubtful if lynching could possibly exist under any other religion than Christianity,” he wrote. “Not only through tacit approval and acquiescence has the Christian Church indirectly given its approval to lynch-law . . . , but the evangelical Christian denominations have done much towards creation of the particular fanaticism which finds its outlet in lynching.”[33]

This liberating religious tradition is what Hughes and other black poets inherited, and it was the source for their identifying Christ as black and recrucified on the lynching trees of America. It was a kind of “commonsense” theology—a theology of the grassroots, for which one needed no seminary or university degree in religion.

That was the point made by womanist theologian Jacquelyn Grant when she used the experience of poor black women as the lens for interpreting the meaning of Jesus Christ today. “The significance of Christ is not found in his maleness, but in his humanity,” writes Grant. “This Christ, found in the experiences of black women,” “the oppressed of the oppressed,” “is a black woman.”[5] Unfortunately, the powerful image of “Christ as a Black Woman” has been left out of our spiritual and intellectual imagination, needing further theological development.

That surrogacy extended as well to lynching, as women were sometimes substituted for black men who happened to escape white mob violence. “A significant number of female lynchings were not suspected of any crime,” writes historian Patrick J. Huber. “These ‘collateral victims’ died in place of an intended male target, such as a father, son, or brother, who had eluded the grasp of a frustrated mob.”[7]

Black faith emerged out of black people’s wrestling with suffering, the struggle to make sense out of their senseless situation, as they related their own predicament to similar stories in the Bible. On the one hand, faith spoke to their suffering, making it bearable, while, on the other hand, suffering contradicted their faith, making it unbearable. That is the profound paradox inherent in black faith, the dialectic of doubt and trust in the search for meaning, as blacks “walk[ed] through the valley of the shadow of death” (Ps 23:4).

No one was more militant than Ida B. Wells. “Our country’s national crime is lynching,” she began her essay “Lynch Law in America.” “It is not the creature of the hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob. It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an ‘unwritten law’ that justifies them in putting human beings to death without complaint under oath, without trial by jury, without opportunity to make defense, and without right of appeal.”[19]

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...

Wells was the first to put her life on the line for the anti-lynching cause. “With me it is not myself nor my reputation, but the life of my people, which is at stake,” she wrote, responding to an interview by Frances Willard of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Moderation was not a virtue when “men, women, and children were scourged, hanged, shot, and burned.” “It may be unwise to express myself so strongly,” Wells wrote in her diary, expressing her outrage at the lynching of Eliza Woods of Jackson, Tennessee, “but I cannot help it and I know not if capital may not be made of it against me but I trust God.”[26]

Billie Holiday’s rendition of “Strange Fruit,” which she called “my personal protest,” was the most powerful resistance song against lynching. It has been called “a declaration of war” and “one of the songs that changed the world.” Time magazine called Billie Holiday “history’s greatest Jazz singer” and “Strange Fruit” “the best song of the century.”

The lyrics of “Strange Fruit” were written in the early 1930s by Abel Meeropol (a.k.a. Lewis Allen), a white Jewish school teacher from New York City, who later adopted the two sons of convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Upon seeing the well-known Lawrence Beitler’s photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana (1930),[37] Meeropol became so incensed that he wrote a poem to express what he felt. “It . . . haunted me for days,” he recalled later. “I wrote ‘Strange Fruit’ because I hate lynching and I hate injustice and I hate the people who perpetuate it.”[38] Meeropol said in the lyrics of “Strange Fruit” what Reinhold Niebuhr and other white theologians and religious leaders should have said if they had the heart and courage to say what Jesus’ cross means for American Christians.

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.

Initially, black women in the NACW, the churches, the NAACP, and other organizations were less militant than Ida B. Wells and even pushed her to the margins of their activities. Many were closer to Booker T. Washington, who advised accommodation instead of protest. Accordingly, black club women focused on the politics of respectability and racial uplift, with the motto “lifting as we climb.” They believed that if they presented a respectable image of black womanhood the whole race would benefit. “Only the BLACK WOMAN can say,” wrote Anna Julia Cooper, “‘when and where I enter . . . then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”[47] Yet black women soon found that such accommodation “failed to protect African Americans from the wave of violence that surged across the nation during the early twentieth century.”[48]

Like other poor blacks, Hamer had no access to sophisticated biblical studies, and thus used a familiar evangelical hymn, popular in the black churches, to make her point about our responsibility to become an agent of change. Her hermeneutics were shaped by the spirituals and the tradition of gospel hymns and her involvement in the black freedom struggle. Yet thousands of poor blacks were inspired by her reflection and followed her throughout Mississippi, many to endure jail, beatings, and even death. Where is a similar example of motivation and courage among religion and theology professors and students in our institutions of higher learning?

Yet Hamer did not embrace the cross uncritically. She was aware of its dangers. “We have always been taught,” she said, “that we had to suffer as Christ suffered. He was killed and all of his followers were persecuted. But I think in terms of what David had to do. David was a shepherd boy. He was giving service to his people. But it came a time in his life when he had to slay Goliath.”[56]

After telling the country and the world (at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City) about her attempts to register and vote and the vicious beating that followed in a Mississippi jail, Fannie Lou Hamer asked the poignant question that stirred the conscience of most Americans watching her speak over live television: “Is this America?” Her power and eloquence captivated the nation. She knew that even liberal whites could not deny the truth about white supremacy in America. Yet, they did not want to hear that truth, the fact that America’s democracy is hypocrisy in the lives of its black population. President Lyndon Johnson, a Texan, knew all too well the hard truth of Hamer’s testimony. Immediately, after seeing and hearing her speak, he called a news conference in order to get that “illiterate woman” off live television.[60]

I find nothing redemptive about suffering in itself. The gospel of Jesus is not a rational concept to be explained in a theory of salvation, but a story about God’s presence in Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed, which led to his death on the cross. What is redemptive is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair, as revealed in the biblical and black proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection.

Nowhere is that paradox, that “inscrutability,” more evident than in the cross. A symbol of death and defeat, God turned it into a sign of liberation and new life. The cross is the most empowering symbol of God’s loving solidarity with the “least of these,” the unwanted in society who suffer daily from great injustices. Christians must face the cross as the terrible tragedy it was and discover in it, through faith and repentance, the liberating joy of eternal salvation. But we cannot find liberating joy in the cross by spiritualizing it, by taking away its message of justice in the midst of powerlessness, suffering, and death. The cross, as a locus of divine revelation, is not good news for the powerful, for those who are comfortable with the way things are, or for anyone whose understanding of religion is aligned with power. The religious authorities of Jesus’ time were threatened by his teachings about the reign of God’s justice and love, and the state authorities executed him as an insurrectionist—one who “perverts the nation” and “stirs up the people” (Lk 23:2, 5). Even Jesus’ disciples misunderstood his teachings “that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected,” “mocked and flogged and crucified” (Mk 8:31; Mt 20:19). They slept through his agony in the Garden (Mk 14:32), and deserted him when he was arrested, tortured, and crucified. One disciple betrayed him and another denied him, because a suffering Messiah was not the one they expected. “We had ...

The cross, in Martin Hengel’s words, points to God’s loving solidarity with the “unspeakable suffering of those who are tortured,” and “put to death by human cruelty. . . . In the person and fate of the one man Jesus of Nazareth this saving solidarity of God with [the oppressed] is given its historical and physical form.”[4] The cross,” writes Dorothy A. Lee-Pollard, “reveals where God’s kingdom is to be found—not among the powerful or even the religious, but in the midst of powerlessness, suffering and death.”[5] Bonhoeffer was right: “The Bible directs [us] to God’s powerlessness and suffering. Only a suffering God can help.”[6]

And yet another type of imagination is necessary—the imagination to relate the message of the cross to one’s own social reality, to see that “They are crucifying again the Son of God” (Heb 6:6). Both Jesus and blacks were “strange fruit.” Theologically speaking, Jesus was the “first lynchee,” who foreshadowed all the lynched black bodies on American soil. He was crucified by the same principalities and powers that lynched black people in America. Because God was present with Jesus on the cross and thereby refused to let Satan and death have the last word about his meaning, God was also present at every lynching in the United States. God saw what whites did to innocent and helpless blacks and claimed their suffering as God’s own. God transformed lynched black bodies into the recrucified body of Christ. Every time a white mob lynched a black person, they lynched Jesus. The lynching tree is the cross in America. When American Christians realize that they can meet Jesus only in the crucified bodies in our midst, they will encounter the real scandal of the cross.

White theologians in the past century have written thousands of books about Jesus’ cross without remarking on the analogy between the crucifixion of Jesus and the lynching of black people. One must suppose that in order to feel comfortable in the Christian faith, whites needed theologians to interpret the gospel in a way that would not require them to acknowledge white supremacy as America’s great sin.

The real scandal of the gospel is this: humanity’s salvation is revealed in the cross of the condemned criminal Jesus, and humanity’s salvation is available only through our solidarity with the crucified people in our midst. Faith that emerged out of the scandal of the cross is not a faith of intellectuals or elites of any sort. This is the faith of abused and scandalized people—the losers and the down and out. It was this faith that gave blacks the strength and courage to hope, “to keep on keeping on,” struggling against the odds, with what Paul Tillich called “the courage to be.”[7]

Can the cross redeem the lynching tree? Can the lynching tree liberate the cross and make it real in American history? Those are the questions I have tried to answer. As I see it, the lynching tree frees the cross from the false pieties of well-meaning Christians. When we see the crucifixion as a first-century lynching, we are confronted by the re-enactment of Christ’s suffering in the blood-soaked history of African Americans. Thus, the lynching tree reveals the true religious meaning of the cross for American Christians today. The cross needs the lynching tree to remind Americans of the reality of suffering—to keep the cross from becoming a symbol of abstract, sentimental piety. Before the spectacle of this cross we are called to more than contemplation and adoration. We are faced with a clear challenge: as Latin American liberation theologian Jon Sobrino has put it, “to take the crucified down from the cross.”[10] Yet the lynching tree also needs the cross, without which it becomes simply an abomination. It is the cross that points in the direction of hope, the confidence that there is a dimension to life beyond the reach of the oppressor. “Do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more” (Lk 12:4).

Just as the Germans should never forget the Holocaust, Americans should never forget slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree. As a nation, we are in danger of forgetting our ugly lynching past. As Fitzhugh Brundage reminds us, “Perhaps nothing about the history of mob violence in the United States is more surprising than how quickly an understanding of the full horror of lynching has receded from the nation’s collective memory.”[16] Because Emmett Till was remembered, the civil rights movement was born. When we remember, we give voice to the victims.