The assertion that Jesus’ cross is the answer to the lynching tree, as young Martin heard preachers proclaim at Ebenezer and later appropriated for himself, is a stunning claim. How could Jesus’ death in Jerusalem save blacks from mob violence nearly two thousand years later in America? What did salvation mean for African Americans who had to “walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” or those forced to swing from a lynching tree? As a young Christian thinking about the ministry as a vocation, Martin King had to wrestle with the great contradictions that mob violence posed for black
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