The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

Niebuhr wrote four books on American history but did not deal with racial issues in any substantive manner. When he sent a manuscript of The Irony of American History to his historian friend Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Schlesinger called Niebuhr’s attention to the glaring omission of the Negro: One irony deserving comment somewhere perhaps is the relationship between our democratic and equalitarian pretensions and our treatment of the Negro. This remains, John Quincy Adams called it in 1820, “the great and foul stain upon the North American Union”; and I think you might consider mentioning it.[46] But Niebuhr did not mention it, finding it apparently not a substantial concern. This was a serious failure by an American religious leader often called this nation’s greatest theologian. How could anyone be a great theologian and not engage America’s greatest moral issue? Unfortunately, white theologians, then and since, have typically ignored the problem of race, or written and spoken about it without urgency, not regarding it as critical for theology or ethics. Niebuhr, by contrast, did acknowledge that “we have failed catastrophically only on one point—our relations to the Negro race.” But what about the native people in this land? He claimed that North America was a “virgin continent when the Anglo-Saxons came, with a few Indians in a primitive state of culture.”[47] He wrote about Arabs of Palestine and people of color in the Third World in a similar manner, offering moral just...

Niebuhr wrote four books on American history but did not deal with racial issues in any substantive manner. When he sent a manuscript of The Irony of American History to his historian friend Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Schlesinger called Niebuhr’s attention to the glaring omission of the Negro: One irony deserving comment somewhere perhaps is the relationship between our democratic and equalitarian pretensions and our treatment of the Negro. This remains, John Quincy Adams called it in 1820, “the great and foul stain upon the North American Union”; and I think you might consider mentioning it.[ 46] But Niebuhr did not mention it, finding it apparently not a substantial concern. This was a serious failure by an American religious leader often called this nation’s greatest theologian. How could anyone be a great theologian and not engage America’s greatest moral issue? Unfortunately, white theologians, then and since, have typically ignored the problem of race, or written and spoken about it without urgency, not regarding it as critical for theology or ethics. Niebuhr, by contrast, did acknowledge that “we have failed catastrophically only on one point—our relations to the Negro race.” But what about the native people in this land? He claimed that North America was a “virgin continent when the Anglo-Saxons came, with a few Indians in a primitive state of culture.”[ 47] He wrote about Arabs of Palestine and people of color in the Third World in a similar manner, offering moral justification for colonialism. Niebuhr even justified U.S. imperialism, referring to America as being elected by God: “Only those who have no sense of the profundities of history would deny that various nations and classes, various social groups and races are at various times placed in such a position that a special measure of the divine mission in history falls upon them. In that sense God has chosen us in this fateful period of world history.”[ 48]