The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

The contradictions between the gospel message and the reality of lynching—or more precisely, the relation between what white Christians did to blacks and what the Romans did to Jesus--was reflected in a photo that appeared in the December 1919 issue of The Crisis with the title “The Crucifixion in Omaha.” It was a photo of a burned victim, with a throng of white men observing their handiwork. The same issue of The Crisis contained Du Bois’s story “The Gospel of Mary Brown,” illustrated with a photo of a black Madonna, holding a black baby in her arms. In Du Bois’s story, obviously a retelling of Luke’s Gospel account of Jesus’ birth, Mary is black, living in a cabin by the creek, when a woman says to her ( using the words of the angel Gabriel), “Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor with God.” Then Mary reads the Magnificat from an “Old Book,” citing the exact words of Luke 1:46, 48: “My soul doth magnify the Lord. . . . For He hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden, for behold, from henceforth generations shall call me blessed. . . .” The child is called Joshua, the Hebrew name for Jesus, and “His skin was black as velvet.” “And the child grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him.” When he is twelve, his mother finds him “sitting in the midst of the deacons, both hearing them and asking them questions: Why were colored folk poor? Why were they afraid?” Joshua works on the plantation—plowing, picking and hoeing cotto...

The contradictions between the gospel message and the reality of lynching—or more precisely, the relation between what white Christians did to blacks and what the Romans did to Jesus--was reflected in a photo that appeared in the December 1919 issue of The Crisis with the title “The Crucifixion in Omaha.” It was a photo of a burned victim, with a throng of white men observing their handiwork. The same issue of The Crisis contained Du Bois’s story “The Gospel of Mary Brown,” illustrated with a photo of a black Madonna, holding a black baby in her arms. In Du Bois’s story, obviously a retelling of Luke’s Gospel account of Jesus’ birth, Mary is black, living in a cabin by the creek, when a woman says to her ( using the words of the angel Gabriel), “Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor with God.” Then Mary reads the Magnificat from an “Old Book,” citing the exact words of Luke 1: 46, 48: “My soul doth magnify the Lord. . . . For He hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden, for behold, from henceforth generations shall call me blessed. . . .” The child is called Joshua, the Hebrew name for Jesus, and “His skin was black as velvet.” “And the child grew and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him.” When he is twelve, his mother finds him “sitting in the midst of the deacons, both hearing them and asking them questions: Why were colored folk poor? Why were they afraid?” Joshua works on the plantation—plowing, picking and hoeing cotton, and driving mules. He soon learns to be a carpenter. Whites become exceedingly angry when they hear Joshua preach: “Blessed are the poor; blessed are they that mourn; blessed are the meek; blessed are the merciful; blessed are they which are persecuted. All men are brothers and God is the Father of all.” Whites complain bitterly: “He’s putting ideas into niggers’ heads.” “Behold, he stirreth up the people.” Then “they seized him and questioned him,” saying, “What do you mean by this talk about being brothers—do you mean social equality?” “What do you mean by ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’—do you mean the niggers will own our cotton land?” “What do you mean by saying God is you-all’s father—is God a nigger?” “Joshua flamed in mighty anger,” appropriating the words of Jesus and John the Baptist in the Gospels, calling the whites “hypocrites,” “serpents,” “generation of vipers” who will not “escape the damnation of hell!” Just as Jesus was taken before Pilate, so too Joshua is taken before a northern Judge, who finds no fault in him, nothing that would warrant a lynching. “Kill the nigger,” the mob shouts. “Why,” the Judge replies, “what hath he done?” “Let him be crucified,” the crowd insists. Like Pilate, “the Judge washed his hands of the whole matter, saying: ‘I am innocent of his blood.’ ” Like Jesus, Joshua “was sentenced for treason and inciting murder and insurrection . . . they stripped him, and spit upon him, and smote him on the head, and mocked, and lynched him.” Like Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, Joshua says, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” His mother cries out to God, questioning divine justice. While the questioning of God’s justice has biblical warrants, especially in the Hebrew Bible, the words Du Bois chose for Mary’s lips came directly out of the black experience of suffering. God, you ain’t fair!—You ain’t fair, God! You didn’t ought to do it—if you didn’t want him black, you didn’t have to make him black; if you didn’t want him unhappy, why did you let him think? And then you let them mock him, and hurt him, and lynch him! Why, why did you do it God? These questions, demanding God’s explanation for black suffering, sit at the nerve center of black religion in America, from the slave trade to the prison industrial complex of today. Black religion comes out of suffering, and no one has engaged the question of theodicy in the black experience more profoundly than Du Bois. Yet, he did not end Mary’s gospel on a note of despair with Joshua’s death on a lynching tree. “Mary—Mary—he is not dead: He is risen!” Joshua appears to her and repeats the orthodox Christian claim about being crucified, dead, and buried, descending into Hell, rising from the dead on the third day, ascending to Heaven and sitting at the right hand of the Father, and returning to judge “the Quick and the Dead.”