The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

The spirituals were the soul of the movement, giving people courage to fight, and the church was its anchor, deepening its faith in the coming freedom for all. The blues was an individual’s expression of a cultural defiance against white supremacy, a stubborn refusal to be defined by it. The blues prepared people to fight for justice by giving them a cultural identity that made them human and thus ready to struggle. The blues sent people traveling, roaming, looking for a woman or a man to soothe one’s aching human heart. But it was Jesus’ cross that sent people protesting in the streets, seeking to change the social structures of racial oppression.

“One can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of a pure regard for truth,” wrote French philosopher, activist, and mystic Simone Weil. “Christ likes for us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.”[56]

But what does the cross in the Christian scriptures and the black experience of the blues have to say about these enduring atrocities?

Since black thinkers, whether secular or religious, were influenced by white people who enslaved, segregated, and lynched them, what did their own white religious leaders say about Christians who permitted such atrocities? That is the question to which we turn.

The lynching tree—so strikingly similar to the cross on Golgotha—should have a prominent place in American images of Jesus’ death. But it does not. In fact, the lynching tree has no place in American theological reflections about Jesus’ cross or in the proclamation of Christian churches about his Passion. The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American theological discourse and preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching. In the “lynching era,” between 1880 to 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Yet these “Christians” did not see the irony or contradiction in their actions.

As Jesus was an innocent victim of mob hysteria and Roman imperial violence, many African Americans were innocent victims of white mobs, thirsting for blood in the name of God and in defense of segregation, white supremacy, and the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race. Both the cross and the lynching tree were symbols of terror, instruments of torture and execution, reserved primarily for slaves, criminals, and insurrectionists—the lowest of the low in society. Both Jesus and blacks were publicly humiliated, subjected to the utmost indignity and cruelty. They were stripped, in order to be deprived of dignity, then paraded, mocked and whipped, pierced, derided and spat upon, tortured for hours in the presence of jeering crowds for popular entertainment. In both cases, the purpose was to strike terror in the subject community. It was to let people know that the same thing would happen to them if they did not stay in their place. What New Testament scholar Paula Frederickson says about crucifixion in Roman society could be substituted easily for lynching in the United States. Crucifixion was a Roman form of public service announcement: Do not engage in sedition as this person has, or your fate will be similar. The point of the exercise was not the death of the offender as such, but getting the attention of those watching. Crucifixion first and foremost is addressed to an audience.[3] The crucifixion of Jesus by the Romans in Jerusalem and the lynching of blacks by whites in the Uni...

Best known for his realist approach in Christian social ethics, Niebuhr rejected pacifism (which he had once espoused), idealism, and perfectionism—the idea that individuals and groups could achieve the standard of love he saw revealed in Jesus’ life, teachings, and death. Niebuhr taught that love is the absolute, transcendent standard that stands in judgment over what human beings can achieve in history. Because of human finitude and humanity’s natural tendency to deny it (sin), we can never fully reach that ethical standard. The best that humans can strive for is justice, which is love approximated, a balance of power among competing groups. Unlike the advocates of the Social Gospel, who often suggested that we could through love build the Kingdom of God on earth, Niebuhr placed justice, rather than love, at the center of Christian social ethics. Since human beings are finite, Niebuhr reasoned that we can never do anything apart from our interests, especially when we act collectively. According to Niebuhr, democracy—“a method of finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems”—was the political system best adapted to the strengths and limitations of human nature. As he put it famously in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”[9]

Niebuhr takes his starting point for Christian realism as “the facts of experience,” the willingness to “take all factors . . . into account, particularly the factors of self-interest and power.”[11] This starting point has significant implications for the question of race. When one begins with the facts of experience and not, as in Karl Barth’s theology, with God’s revelation, the conversation must confront the brutal realities of racial injustice: slavery, segregation, and lynching.

“The crucified Messiah [is] the final revelation of the divine character and divine purpose.” He was rejected because people expected a Messiah “perfect in power and perfect in goodness.” But “the revelation of divine goodness in history must be powerless.” If human power in history—among races, nations, and other collectives as well as individuals—is self-interested power, then “the revelation of divine goodness in history” must be weak and not strong. “The Christ is led as the lamb to the slaughter.” Thus, God’s revelation transvalues human values, turning them upside down.

And yet, in the end, was there not a limit to Niebuhr’s imagination? For all his exquisite sensitivity to symbols, analogies, and the moral dimensions of history, was he ultimately blind to the most obvious symbolic re-enactment of the crucifixion in his own time? Niebuhr’s focus on realism (“facts of experience”) and the cross (tragedy) should have turned his gaze to the lynching tree, but he did not look there, even though lynching trees were widely scattered throughout the American landscape. Why did Niebuhr fail to connect Jesus’ cross to the most obvious cross bearers in American society?

Because Niebuhr identified with white moderates in the South more than with their black victims, he could not really feel their suffering as his own. When King asked him to sign a petition appealing to President Eisenhower to protect black children involved in integrating schools in the South, Niebuhr declined. Such pressure, he told his friend and Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, would do more harm than good. Niebuhr believed that white ministers from the South would be more effective.[26]

When Niebuhr thought a little more deeply about Darrow’s empathy with black suffering, however, he said, “I suppose it is difficult to escape bitterness when you have eyes to see and heart to feel what others are too blind and too callous to notice.”[29]

Niebuhr had “eyes to see” black suffering, but I believe he lacked the “heart to feel” it as his own.

Was not that lynching alone enough for Niebuhr to know that white supremacy could not be ignored in searching for economic justice, or explicating the meaning of the Christian gospel in America? Niebuhr himself preserved class solidarity at the expense of racial justice, which many liberal white-led groups were inclined to do when fighting for justice among the poor.[34]

Black literary figures like Countee Cullen and James Weldon Johnson wrote about Black Simon: That twisted tortured thing hung from a tree, Swart victim of a newer Calvary. Yea, he who helped Christ up Golgotha’s track, That Simon who did not deny, was black.

Although blacks like to think that Simon volunteered to carry Jesus’ cross, he did not; it was, as Niebuhr said, an involuntary cross. The Gospel of Mark says that “they compelled” Simon “to carry his cross” (15:21), just as some African Americans were compelled to suffer lynching when another could not be found. Niebuhr could have explored this story with theological imagination, seeing blacks as crucified like Jesus and forced like Simon to carry the crosses of slavery, segregation, and lynching. But he did not.

While spectacle lynching was on the decline in the 1950s, there were many legal lynchings as state and federal governments used the criminal justice system to intimidate, terrorize, and murder blacks. Whites could kill blacks, knowing that a jury of their peers would free them but would convict and execute any black who dared to challenge the white way of life. White juries, judges, and lawyers kept America “safe” from the threat of the black community.

Still true to an extent in 2022. Even more so if the murderers and terrorists are police.

Langston Hughes, another New Yorker and poet laureate of Black America, also articulated black dreams not realized. What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— Like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags Like a heavy load. Or does it explode?[44]

When Niebuhr wrote against liberalism, pacifism, communism, and the easy conscience of American churches, he expressed outrage; but when it came to black victims of white supremacy, he expressed none.[53]

It was not until I left seminary and began to deal with the “facts” of the black struggle for justice in society that I returned to Niebuhr, especially his Moral Man and Immoral Society. Reading Niebuhr’s reflections on power and self-interest among individuals and collectives in the context of the black liberation struggle was an intellectual revelation. “The white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so,” Niebuhr wrote. “Upon this point one may speak with a dogmatism which all history justifies.”[56] What Niebuhr said about love, power, and justice helped me to understand that moral suasion alone would never convince whites to relinquish their supremacy over blacks. Only Black Power could do that, because power, as Frederick Douglass said long before Niebuhr was born, concedes nothing without struggle.

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.

Although Niebuhr is often called a “prophet,” and he claimed that “all theology really begins with Amos,” he was no prophet on race.

More like a conflicted priest of white supremacy.

“Courage is the primary test of prophesy,” Niebuhr said. “There is no national community today in which the genuine word of God does not place the prophet in peril.”

Quincy Ewing,

Andrew Sledd,

E. T. Wellford

Niebuhr was a Christian theologian of the cross who knew all about Jesus’ solidarity with the poor and the consequences he suffered for that from the Roman Empire. If the American empire has any similarities with that of Rome, can one really understand the theological meaning of Jesus on a Roman cross without seeing him first through the image of blacks on the lynching tree? Can American Christians see the reality of Jesus’ cross without seeing it as the lynching tree? How could Niebuhr make the tragedy of the cross the central theme in his theology while ignoring the obvious tragedies of slavery, segregation, and lynching in the United States? Even confronting the death of four children in a Birmingham church and a dialogue with James Baldwin about the event, Niebuhr did not summon the language and passion to speak adequately to that event. What is missing in his language about Calvary was the racial context that defined the actual cross bearers in American society. Unless we look at the “facts of experience,” as Niebuhr’s own realism demanded, what we say about the cross remains at the level of theological abstraction, like Karl Barth’s Word of God, separated from the real crosses in our midst.

One who made the connection real was Billie Holiday, with “Strange Fruit,” her signature song about southern lynching.

Just as Martin Luther King Jr. learned much from Reinhold Niebuhr, Niebuhr could have deepened his understanding of the cross by being a student of King and the black freedom movement he led.

White theologians do not normally turn to the black experience to learn about theology. But if the lynching tree is America’s cross and if the cross is the heart of the Christian gospel, perhaps Martin Luther King Jr., who endeavored to “take up his cross, and follow [Jesus]” (Mark 8:34) as did no other theologian in American history, has something to teach America about Jesus’ cross.

If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live. —Martin Luther King Jr.

She exposed white brutality and black faith to the world and, significantly, expressed a parallel meaning between her son’s lynching and the crucifixion of Jesus. “Lord you gave your son to remedy a condition,” she cried out, “but who knows, but what the death of my only son might bring an end to lynching.”

What was it that cast out black people’s fear of death and sent them flowing into the streets—defying mob violence? Many reasons certainly, not all of them stemming from Christian faith. Secular activists like Robert Moses, James Forman, and Stokely Carmichael drew inspiration from other sources, like Albert Camus’ The Rebel and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. With Camus, they said, “Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.”[13] But 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.

King agreed fully with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian pastor hanged in 1945 by the Nazis for resisting Hitler: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”[14]

While the cross symbolized God’s supreme love for human life, the lynching tree was the most terrifying symbol of hate in America. King held these symbols together in a Hegelian dialectic, a contradiction of thesis and antithesis, yielding to a creative synthesis.[15]

In considering the subject of God and the problem of race in America, King reflected that God’s love created blacks and whites and other human beings for each other in community (thesis). White supremacy was the sin that separated them in America and in much of the world (antithesis). God reconciled humanity through Jesus’ cross, and thereby white supremacy could never have “the final and ultimate word” on human relationships (synthesis).

Hate and white supremacy lead to violence and alienation, while love and the cross lead to nonviolence and reconciliation.

Unlike King, Niebuhr viewed agape love, as revealed in Jesus’ cross, as an unrealizable goal in history—a state of perfection which no individual or group in society could ever fully hope to achieve. For Niebuhr, Jesus’ cross was an absolute transcendent standard that stands in judgment over any human achievement.

Is it moderate, pessimistic, both? Something else?

If blacks had followed Niebuhr’s theology of proximate justice, there would have been no militant civil rights movement because, practically speaking, blacks had no prospect of success against the power of white supremacy.

This gets very tricky for me. I agree with the criticism of Niebuhr, I think, but I wonder how Cone responds to Afropessimism because they see the lynching tree just fine (do they see the cross?) and still believe, I think, that the U.S. cannot be rid of white supremacy and still be the U.S. Yet, not all who believe that choose passivity or resignation. They struggle, like Sisyphus, without hope of victory. What if that's what the story of Jesus was really about? Um, I've never thought of that before.

In contrast to Niebuhr, King never spoke about proximate justice or about what was practically possible to achieve. That would have killed the revolutionary spirit in the African American community. Instead, King focused on and often achieved what Niebuhr said was impossible. “What do you want?” King would call out before a demonstration. “Freedom!” the demonstrators would shout back, ready to face angry white mobs and policemen. “When do you want it?” King would ask, his voice reaching a crescendo. “Now!” was the resounding response, as the protestors would begin walking and singing together, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.”

That was why Fred Shuttlesworth, the movement’s most courageous freedom fighter, said, “You have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live.”

The crucified people in America were black—the enslaved, segregated, and lynched black victims. That was the truth that King saw and accepted early in his ministry, and why he was prepared to give his life as he bore witness to it in the civil rights movement.

Instead of attempting to explain the saving power of the cross rationally, black Christians recognized it as a mystery, beyond human understanding or control.

Ministers often preached sermons about Jesus’ crucifixion, as if they were telling the story of black people’s tragedy and triumph in America.

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 life and Christian identity.

Openly to fight white supremacy in the deep South during the 1950s and ’60s was unthinkably perilous. Even at a distance of more than fifty years, we can still sense the fear. When King agreed to act as the most visible leader in the civil rights movement, he recognized what was at stake. In taking up the cross of black leadership, he was nearly overwhelmed with fear. This fear reached a climax on a particular night, January 27, 1956, in the early weeks of the Montgomery bus boycott, when he received a midnight telephone call threatening to blow up his house if he did not leave Montgomery in three days. Later he told how that call created a “spiritual midnight,” as he thought about what could happen to him, his wife, and newly born baby girl.

If I had to die tomorrow morning I will die happy because I’ve been to the mountain top and I’ve seen the promised land and it’s going to be here in Montgomery.[30]

What King had to tell was the truth about war, racism, and poverty. “It may hurt me,” he said. “But when I took up the cross I recognized its meaning. . . . It is not something that you wear. The cross is something that you bear and ultimately that you die on.”[38]

He knew he was going to be killed, but this did not stop him from fighting for justice.