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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 helped me to deal with the brutal legacy of the lynching tree, and the lynching tree helped me to understand the tragic meaning of the cross.
blacks did not let lynching completely squeeze the joy out of their lives. There was always a lot of excitement and joy at the juke joints, a people swinging with sexual passion on Friday and Saturday nights because then they could express themselves fully, let themselves go with no thought of tomorrow and the white man’s dehumanizing disregard of their humanity. They could have fun, get angry, talk dirty and loud to and about each other, and sometimes even get violent—knowing that the limits of proper behavior were what they set among themselves.
When an adult black male is treated like a child in a patriarchal society—with whites calling him “boy,” “uncle,” and “nigger”—proclaiming oneself a “man” is a bold and necessary affirmation of black resistance.
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] On Sunday morning at church, black Christians spoke back in song, sermon, and prayer against the “faceless, merciless, apocalyptic vengefulness of the massed white mob,”[37] to show that trouble and sorrow would not determine our final meaning. African Americans embraced the story of Jesus,
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he speaks of “the ‘terrible beauty’ of the cross,” [21] an artful phrase that highlights the paradox of the cross—its power and futility. One needs a powerful imagination to see both tragedy and beauty, futility and redemption in the cross.
It was easy for Niebuhr to walk around in his own shoes, as a white man, and view the world from that vantage point, but it takes a whole lot of empathic effort to step into those of black people and see the world through the eyes of African Americans.
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.
for poor southern blacks, who had little formal education in philosophy or political philosophy, it was religion that offered the only resource—and the language—to fight against segregation and lynching.
Hate and white supremacy lead to violence and alienation, while love and the cross lead to nonviolence and reconciliation.
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.
An apology, although important and welcomed by many blacks, is not justice.
Unlike preachers and theologians, artists and writers were not bound by the inherited, static religious tradition of white supremacists. Black artists were defined by their creative resistance against an oppressive status quo. They were free to say anything that gave black people liberating visions of their humanity.
It was not easy for blacks to find a language to talk about Christianity publicly because the Jesus they embraced was also, at least in name, embraced by whites who lynched black people. Indeed, it was white slaveholders, segregationists, and lynchers who defined the content of the Christian gospel. They wrote hundreds of books about Christianity, founded seminaries to train scholars and preachers, and thereby controlled nearly two thousand years of Christian tradition.
Black people did not need to go to seminary and study theology to know that white Christianity was fraudulent.
Where there is hope, there is God—that divine presence that prevents despair and empowers poor people to resist.
Black women’s faith empowered them to transform America, not just for black people but for all Americans, including white men. They redeemed America through nonviolent suffering, which they, along with Martin Luther King Jr. and others, identified with Jesus’ invitation: “If any want to become my followers let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mk 8:34).
We cannot separate the cross from the Christian gospel as found in the story of Jesus and as lived and understood in the African American Christian community. The resurrected Lord was the crucified Lord.
You can’t trust white people; they will fail you. You can’t trust black people, they will fail you. Even mother, father, brother or sister may fail you. But Jesus won’t fail you. You can trust Jesus. He’s my all.
Without concrete signs of divine presence in the lives of the poor, the gospel becomes simply an opiate; rather than liberating the powerless from humiliation and suffering, the gospel becomes a drug that helps them adjust to this world by looking for “pie in the sky.”
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 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.
People who have never been lynched by another group usually find it difficult to understand why blacks want whites to remember lynching atrocities. Why bring that up? Is it not best forgotten? Absolutely not! What happened to the hate that created the violence that lynched black people? Did it disappear?
Just as the Germans should never forget the Holocaust, Americans should never forget slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree.
