The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

Unlike most Christians, however, King accepted Jesus’ cross, knowing that following Jesus involved suffering and, as it did for Jesus, the possibility of an unjust death. Even as a child, King’s favorite song was “I Want to Be More Like Jesus”; and as a minister and civil rights activist, he put that song into practice by taking up the cross of black leadership until he, like Jesus, was killed trying to set people free.

some mysterious way

Not good enough.

Theologian John Macquarrie is among those who have compared King’s decision to go to Memphis with Jesus’ decision to go to Jerusalem.

Inevitable, not that God willed it. Inevitable in that any man who takes the position King did . . . if he persists in that long enough, he’ll get killed. Now. Anytime. That was the chief trouble with Jesus: He was a troublemaker. So any time you are a troublemaker and you rebel against the wrongs and injustices of society and organize against that, then what may happen is inevitable.[47]

Just as Jesus knew he could be executed when he went to Jerusalem, King knew that threats against his life could be realized in Memphis. Like Jesus’ disciples who rejected the idea that his mission entailed his suffering and death (Mk 8:31-32), nearly everyone in King’s organization vigorously opposed his journey to Memphis, not only because of the dangers but because of the need to focus on the coming Poor People’s Campaign in Washington. But King, like Jesus, felt he had no choice: he had to go to Memphis and aid the garbage workers in their struggle for dignity, better wages, and a safer work place. He had to go because his faith demanded it.

“all reality hinges on moral foundations.”

What does that mean?

Whatever we may say about the limits of King’s perspective on the cross and redemptive suffering, he did not legitimize suffering. On the contrary, he tried to end it, sacrificing his own life for the cause of others.

The South is crucifying Christ again By all the laws of ancient rote and rule: The ribald cries of “Save Yourself” and “Fool” Din in his ears, the thorns grope for his brain, And where they bite, swift springing rivers stain His gaudy, purple robe of ridicule With sullen red; and acid wine to cool His thirst is thrust at him, with lurking pain. Christ’s awful wrong is that he’s dark of hue, The sin for which no blamelessness atones; But lest the sameness of the cross should tire They kill him now with famished tongues of fire, And while he burns, good men, and women, too, Shout, battling for his black and brittle bones. —“Christ Recrucified,” Countee Cullen, 1922

Like Countee Cullen, many black poets, novelists, painters, dramatists, and other artists saw clearly what white theologians and clergy ignored and what black religious scholars and ministers merely alluded to: that in the United States, the clearest image of the crucified Christ was the figure of an innocent black victim, dangling from a lynching tree.

“People without imagination really have no right to write about ultimate things,”[3] Reinhold Niebuhr was correct to observe.

The beauty in black existence is as real as the brutality, and the beauty prevents the brutality from having the final word. Black suffering needs radical and creative voices, prophetic advocates who can tell brutal and beautiful stories of how oppressed black people survived with a measure of dignity when they were not meant to. Who are we? Why are we here? And what must we do to achieve our full humanity in a world that denies it? Those artists who accepted the challenge of answering these questions shouldered a heavy burden.

Christians, both white and black, followed a crucified savior. What could pose a more blatant contradiction to such a religion than lynching? And yet white Christians were silent in the face of this contradiction. Black poets were not silent. They spoke loud and clear.

From Henry Smith’s lynching in Paris, Texas (1893), to Emmett Till’s in Money, Mississippi (1955), and beyond, black artists and writers have made the lynching theme a dominant part of their work, and most have linked black victims with the crucified Christ as a way of finding meaning in the repeated atrocities in African American communities.

Where was God in these agonizing deaths? “Likely there ain’t no God at all,” said Jim in Cullen’s The Black Christ, for “God, if He was, kept to His skies, and left us to our enemies.” What is the meaning of a lynched victim’s cry of “Why me, Oh, Lord! What did I do to deserve this?” and Jesus’ excruciating cry of abandonment, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mk 15:34 KJV).

When visual artists painted an image of Christ on the cross and painted him black, they were also referencing Christ as a lynched victim. Simply turning him from white to black switched the visual signifiers, making him one with the body of lynched black people in America.

His faith was expressed in the conviction that evil does not have the last word and that there is a spiritual force for right that cannot be crushed or defeated.

I guess these have to be articles of faith because there's no reason, logic, or evidence that can support these assertions. And TONS of all three that refute them.

In The Souls of Black Folk and other essays, Du Bois condemned “white religion” as an “utter failure.” “A nation’s religion is its life, and as such white Christianity is a miserable failure.” He could not reconcile white Christianity with the Gospels’ portrayal of Jesus. 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 elaborated on why the white Christ was not the biblical Christ: Yet Jesus Christ was a laborer and black men are laborers; He was poor and we are poor; He was despised of his fellow men and we are despised; He was persecuted and crucified, and we are mobbed and lynched. If Jesus Christ came to America He would associate with Negroes and Italians and working people; He would eat and pray with them, and He would seldom see the interior of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.[22]

Somewhat like his use of the concept of “double consciousness” to explain the African American search for identity, Du Bois used the paradox of faith and doubt together to explain the meaning of the black religious experience. One cannot correctly understand the black religious experience without an affirmation of deep faith informed by profound doubt. Suffering naturally gives rise to doubt. How can one believe in God in the face of such horrendous suffering as slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree? Under these circumstances, doubt is not a denial but an integral part of faith. It keeps faith from being sure of itself. But doubt does not have the final word. The final word is faith giving rise to hope.

Similarly, in Du Bois’s prayer, he struggles to make sense out of divine silence in the face of the indiscriminate slaughter in Atlanta. “O Silent God,” Du Bois prays, Listen to us, Thy children: our faces dark with doubt are made a mockery in Thy Sanctuary. . . . Bewildered we are and passion-tossed, mad with the madness of a mobbed and mocked and murdered people; straining at the armposts of Thy throne, we raise our shackled hands and charge Thee, God, by the bones of our stolen fathers, by the tears of our dead mothers, by the very blood of Thy crucified Christ: What meaneth this? This is the question that suffering black people of faith cannot escape.

It is one thing to think about the cross as a theological concept or as a magical talisman of salvation and quite another to connect Calvary with the lynching tree in the American experience.

However, the lynched Black Christ was not the only Christ that artists saw. They also saw a mean White Christ symbolized in white Christian lynchers, the ones who justified slavery and segregation.

Walter White, national secretary of the NAACP and author of several novels and the important book Rope and Faggot, indicted Christianity for creating the fanaticism that encouraged lynching. “It is exceedingly doubtful if lynching could possibly exist under any other religion than Christianity,” he wrote. “Not only through tacit approval and acquiescence has the Christian Church indirectly given its approval to lynch-law . . . , but the evangelical Christian denominations have done much towards creation of the particular fanaticism which finds its outlet in lynching.”[33]

God could not be, if He deemed right, The grief that ever met our sight.[34]

Artists recognized that no real reconciliation could occur between blacks and whites without telling the painful and redeeming truths about their life together.

Unlike preachers and theologians, artists and writers were not bound by the inherited, static religious tradition of white supremacists. Black artists were defined by their creative resistance against an oppressive status quo. They were free to say anything that gave black people liberating visions of their humanity.

During the Harlem Renaissance, Du Bois put the matter plainly and bluntly, even though many of the younger artists disagreed with him. 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.[37]

That is what Jesus’ life, teachings, and death were about—God’s protest against the exploitation of the weak by the strong.

It was not easy for blacks to find a language to talk about Christianity publicly because the Jesus they embraced was also, at least in name, embraced by whites who lynched black people. Indeed, it was white slaveholders, segregationists, and lynchers who defined the content of the Christian gospel.

Black artists are prophetic voices whose calling requires them to speak truth to power. Their expressions are not controlled by the institutions of the church. More than anyone, artists demonstrate our understanding of the need to represent the beauty and the terror of our people’s experience.

Unlike the black literary tradition, the black church tradition has not been careful in making a distinction between the two Christs, even though such a distinction is implied in their language and life. The White Christ gave blacks slavery, segregation, and lynching and told them to turn the other cheek and to look for their reward in heaven. Be patient, they were told, and your suffering will be rewarded, for it is the source of your spiritual redemption. 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. Theirs is a just and powerful critique of bad religion and theology, which must be reckoned with so as not to make suffering a good in itself. To that womanist challenge we turn in the next chapter.

Turner’s wife, Mary, who was eight months pregnant, protested vehemently and vowed to seek justice for her husband’s lynching. The sheriff, in turn, arrested her and then gave her up to the mob. In the presence of a crowd that included women and children, Mary Turner was “stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death.”[2]

Oh! This is what they mean by "pro-life."

Jacquelyn Grant

Unfortunately, the powerful image of “Christ as a Black Woman” has been left out of our spiritual and intellectual imagination, needing further theological development.

Delores Williams

Crystal Nicole Feimster

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.”[13]

Black faith emerged out of black people’s wrestling with suffering, the struggle to make sense out of their senseless situation, as they related their own predicament to similar stories in the Bible. On the one hand, faith spoke to their suffering, making it bearable, while, on the other hand, suffering contradicted their faith, making it unbearable.

Ida B. Wells.[16]

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.[18]

Nothing was more detested by whites than the idea that blacks were equal to them. “You don’t act in a way to make white persons feel that you don’t know they were white,” commented an Arkansas interviewee about Jim Crow.

Faith and doubt were bound together, with each a check against the other—doubt preventing faith from being too sure of itself and faith keeping doubt from going down into the pit of despair. With faith in one hand and doubt in the other she contended against the evil of lynching.

Like most blacks of her time, Wells dismissed white Christianity as hypocrisy. “Why is mob murder permitted by a Christian nation?” she asked. White Christianity was not genuine because it either openly supported slavery, segregation, and lynching as the will of God or it was silent about these evils. “The nation cannot profess Christianity,” Wells said in an essay, “which makes the golden rule its foundation stone, and continue to deny equal opportunity for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to the black race.”[30]

“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.”

Black people did not need to go to seminary and study theology to know that white Christianity was fraudulent. As a teenager in the South where whites treated blacks with contempt, I and other blacks knew that the Christian identity of whites was not a true expression of what it meant to follow Jesus.

White conservative Christianity’s blatant endorsement of lynching as a part of its religion, and white liberal Christians’ silence about lynching placed both of them outside of Christian identity.

There was no way a community could support or ignore lynching in America, while still representing in word and deed the one who was lynched by Rome.

A similar point could be said about other black women activists. Lynching was so blatantly wrong that they did not need theological imagination to show it to be so. All contended that true Christianity focused on the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” White Christianity did not even come close to fulfilling that principle. “Are these people Christians who made these laws which are robbing us of our inheritance and reducing us to slavery?” a character asked in Frances Harper’s novel Iola Leroy. “If this is Christianity I hate it and despise it. Would the most cruel heathen do worse?”[34]