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For Du Bois, true Christianity was defined by “the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth and the Golden Rule.” The white church’s treatment of blacks was “sadly at variance with this doctrine.” “It . . . assiduously ‘preaches Christ crucified’ in prayer meeting patios, and crucifies ‘niggers’ in unrelenting daily life.”[21] Du Bois then proceeded to outline the “plain facts”:
All art is propaganda and ever must be, despite wailing of purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.
“Sometimes in order to attract attention somebody must embody the ideas in sensational forms. I meant my poem to be a protest against the domination of all stronger peoples over weaker ones.”[40] That is what Jesus’ life, teachings, and death were about—God’s protest against the exploitation of the weak by the strong.
Cut off from their African religious traditions, black slaves were left trying to carve out a religious meaning for their lives with white Christianity as the only resource to work with. They ignored white theology, which did not affirm their humanity, and went straight to stories in the Bible, interpreting them as stories of God siding with little people just like them. They identified God’s liberation of the poor as the central message of the Bible, and they communicated this message in their songs and sermons.
Rejecting the teaching of black and white churches that Jesus’ death on the cross saved us from sin and that we too are called by him to suffer as he did, some black scholars, especially women, reject any celebration of Jesus’ cross as a means of salvation.
The great majority of black women became “strange and bitter crop” because they courageously challenged white supremacy, refusing to stay in any place that denied their dignity.
The spiritual anguish that lynching created connected blacks with the spiritual wrestling of the prophets, of Job, and the psalmist.
New Testament scholar William Barclay called Jesus’ cry of abandonment “the most staggering sentence in the gospel record.”[12] Black cultural critic Stanley Crouch called it “perhaps the greatest blues line of all time.”
I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison. You give what you know and testify from actual knowledge. . . . Brave woman! you have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured. If American conscience were only half alive, if the American church and clergy were only half christianized, if American moral sensibility were not hardened by persistent infliction of outrage and crime against colored people, a scream of horror, shame and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read.
“Lynch Law in America.”
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.”
Wells was especially critical of evangelist Dwight Moody, who segregated his revivals to appease whites in the South. “Our American Christians are too busy saving the souls of white Christians from burning in hellfire to save the lives of black ones from present burning in fires kindled by white Christians.”
I could not find one sermon or theological essay, not to mention a book, opposing lynching by a prominent liberal white preacher.
When Frederick Douglass asked Wells whether she was nervous, as he was, before speaking in public, she said no. She told Douglass that he was an orator concerned about his presentation, and that was the source of his anxiety. “With me it is different,” she said. “I am only a mouthpiece through which to tell the story of lynching. . . . I do not have to embellish, it makes its own way.”
“Lynching is part of the religion of our people,”[39] one white man told another. Blacks have always wondered how whites could live comfortably with that absurdity. How could white Christians reconcile the “strange fruit” they hung on southern trees with the “strange fruit” Romans hung on the cross at Golgotha?
Just as the old slave spiritual “Were You There?” placed black Christians at the foot of Jesus’ cross, “Strange Fruit” put them at the foot of the lynching tree.
They linked the lynching of black men with the rape of black women, showing the blatant hypocrisy of those who identified rape as a “crime worse than death” but were not outraged when white men raped black women.
Therefore, she urged, “Work as if all depends upon you. Pray as if all depends upon God.”
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.
The black church has always been comprised mostly of male leadership in the pulpit and mostly women in the pew. This means that the faith of the church is defined by women who, through the spirituals, hymns, and gospel songs, placed the crucified Jesus at the center of their faith. The cross sustained them—not for suffering but in their resistance to it.
Black liberation theology emerged out of black people’s struggle with nonviolence (Christianity) and self-defense (Black Power). This was basically a struggle among black men in the movement who were Christian ministers and those who were not.
accept Delores Williams’s rejection of theories of atonement as found in the Western theological tradition and in the uncritical proclamation of the cross in many black churches. 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
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My wrestling with faith began in childhood. Belief in a good and just God was no easy matter for any black person living in the so-called Christian South. The first essay I wrote in college was, “Why Do People Suffer?” In graduate school, I deepened that reflection, and I have thought about suffering all my life, especially when my wife, the love of my life, died of breast cancer at thirty-six.
It seemed as if a transcendent voice were speaking to me through the scriptures and the medium of African American history and culture, reminding me that God’s liberation of the poor is the primary theme of Jesus’ gospel.
And yet the Christian gospel is more than a transcendent reality, more than “going to heaven when I die, to shout salvation as I fly.” It is also an immanent reality—a powerful liberating presence among the poor right now in their midst, “building them up where they are torn down and propping them up on every leaning side.” The gospel is found wherever poor people struggle for justice, fighting for their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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.”
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,” 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]
The lynching of black America is taking place in the criminal justice system where nearly one-third of black men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight are in prisons, jails, on parole, or waiting for their day in court. Nearly one-half of the more than two million people in prisons are black. That is one million black people behind bars, more than in colleges. Through private prisons and the “war against drugs,” whites have turned the brutality of their racist legal system into a profit-making venture for dying white towns and cities throughout America.
Many white Americans seemed surprised and even shocked that such torture and abuse could come from the U.S. military. But most blacks were neither surprised nor shocked. We have been the object of white America’s torture and abuse for nearly four hundred years.
The cross of Jesus and the lynching tree of black victims are not literally the same—historically or theologically.
If America has the courage to confront the great sin and ongoing legacy of white supremacy with repentance and reparation there is hope “beyond tragedy.”
