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“By some amazing but vastly creative spiritual insight,” theologian Howard Thurman said, “the slave undertook the redemption of the religion that the master had profaned in his midst.”[35]
Just as the old slave spiritual “Were You There?” placed black Christians at the foot of Jesus’ cross, “Strange Fruit” put them at the foot of the lynching tree. Both songs created a dark and somber mood. One was sung in church and the other in a nightclub, but both addressed the deep-down hurt that blacks felt and gave them a way to deal with it.
As the great theologian Howard Thurman said, “[a person] has to handle . . . suffering or be handled by it.”[44]
Women had the additional challenge of assuring not just their own survival but also the survival of their families. Yet, they too aspired for more, for a certain “quality of life,”[46] as womanist theologian Delores Williams has insisted. Black men seemed less able to navigate the complex relationship between survival and dignity in the violent patriarchal South. Just out of slavery, they wanted to be men, just like white males—providing economic support and physical protection for women and children—but they were not permitted to do so. As a result, black men tended either toward violence,
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In 1895, women organized nationally as the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), and made lynching their issue. They linked the lynching of black men with the rape of black women, showing the blatant hypocrisy of those who identified rape as a “crime worse than death” but were not outraged when white men raped black women.
Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Mary McLeod Bethune, Nannie Helen Burroughs
Thus, whites focused on the anarchy that lynching created for whites. They hardly said an adequate word about the devastating effect of the lynching atrocity in the black community.
“Would to God that it were,” complained the National Baptist leader Nellie Burroughs, when she rejected America’s Christian identity, “but it is the most lawless and desperately wicked nation on the globe.” Lynching, she insisted, was “no superficial thing . . . it is in the blood of the nation. And the process of eliminating it will be difficult and long.”[51]
While men talked, women walked and got things done.
Through their actions, women expressed the conviction that their nonviolent suffering could save not only the black community from white supremacy but even save America from its worst self.
After telling the country and the world (at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City) about her attempts to register and vote and the vicious beating that followed in a Mississippi jail, Fannie Lou Hamer asked the poignant question that stirred the conscience of most Americans watching her speak over live television: “Is this America?” Her power and eloquence captivated the nation. She knew that even liberal whites could not deny the truth about white supremacy in America. Yet, they did not want to hear that truth, the fact that America’s democracy is hypocrisy in the lives of
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“Faith in the Lord made it easier to have faith in the possibility of social change. . . . The Civil Rights Movement [was] a sign that God was stirring.”[63]
What a pathetic God this is, that needs to "stir" because it's slept through so many centuries of its people's suffering. Disgusting.
Maybe it's worse than pathetic. Maybe it's evil. Who needs a devil when one has a god like this? As John Stuart Mill said, "He is not a good man [or a good god?] who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject."
To say that black women “transformed America through their suffering” is not intended to valorize their suffering or suggest that God willed it. I intend only to acknowledge the great sacrifice my mother and other black women made to ensure a better future for their children and their community.
This means that the faith of the church is defined by women who, through the spirituals, hymns, and gospel songs, placed the crucified Jesus at the center of their faith. The cross sustained them—not for suffering but in their resistance to it.
No one was more courageous than Fannie Lou Hamer. She was beaten severely and shot at many times, but she faced it all, confident that God was with her and would bring her through the difficulties she encountered fighting for freedom. “I guess if I’d had a little sense, I’d been a little scared,” she said reflecting back. But “the only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.”[69]
Black Power also challenged young African American ministers to develop an understanding of the Christian gospel that would empower African Americans to affirm their black and Christian identity. How could one be black and Christian at the same time if the public identity of the Christian faith was identified with white supremacy? Black liberation theology emerged out of black people’s struggle with nonviolence (Christianity) and self-defense (Black Power).
Delores Williams,
She rejected the view common in classic texts of the Western theological tradition as well as in the preaching in African American churches that Jesus accomplished human salvation by dying in our place. According to Williams, Jesus did not come to save us through his death on the cross but rather he “came to show redemption through a perfect ministerial vision of righting relationships.”[70] She argued that if Jesus were a surrogate, then his gospel encourages black women to accept their surrogacy roles as well—suffering for others as Jesus did on the cross. But if the salvation that Jesus
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The enslaved African sang because they saw the results of the cross—triumph over the principalities and powers of death, triumph over evil in this world.
I’ll never understand this. What did the crucifixion (or resurrection, for that matter) do to triumph over anything? The world remained as fucked up as it always was and will be, human evil continued to result in human suffering and even horrific death. The only thing I see here is the hope in an afterlife that no one can know is real. What good is a mythical death and resurrection that offers only mythical redemption in a mythical world beyond this one?
Of course, this question is easy to answer if you believe in heaven. But if you don’t, like me, some huge percentage of Cone’s entire argument falls apart. Maybe not all of it, but enough that even adjacent arguments are weakened.
In Black Theology and Black Power and all the texts that followed, including this one, I begin and end my theological reflections in the social context of black people’s struggle for justice. The cross is the burden we must bear in order to attain freedom. We cannot separate the cross from the Christian gospel as found in the story of Jesus and as lived and understood in the African American Christian community.
They are crucifying again the Son of God and are holding him in contempt. —Hebrews 6:6 Remember those who are in prison, as though you were there in prison with them, those who are being tortured as though you yourselves were being tortured. —Hebrews 13:3
But Jesus won’t fail you.
I don't recall Jesus doing much other than failing me...
Life is not possible without an opening toward the transcendent; in other words, human beings cannot live in chaos. Once contact with the transcendent is lost, existence in the world ceases to be possible. . . . —Mircea Eliade.[3]
Maybe. But if chaos is what there is, it strikes me as dishonest to make anything else of it. Does living a lie help one live? Or just feel better about living?
Such personal suffering challenges faith, but social suffering, which comes from human hate, challenges it even more.
This checks out.
All of my work since that first book has involved an effort to relate the gospel and the black experience—the experience of oppression as well as the struggle to find liberation and meaning.
To live meaningfully, we must see light beyond the darkness. As Mircea Eliade put it, “Life is not possible without an opening toward the transcendent.”
Oh, it's possible. Depending on how one defines "life," I suppose.
And yet the Christian gospel is more than a transcendent reality, more than “going to heaven when I die, to shout salvation as I fly.” It is also an immanent reality—a powerful liberating presence among the poor right now in their midst, “building them up where they are torn down and propping them up on every leaning side.” The gospel is found wherever poor people struggle for justice, fighting for their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Without concrete signs of divine presence in the lives of the poor, the gospel becomes simply an opiate; rather than liberating the powerless from humiliation and suffering, the gospel becomes a drug that helps them adjust to this world by looking for “pie in the sky.”
But we cannot find liberating joy in the cross by spiritualizing it, by taking away its message of justice in the midst of powerlessness, suffering, and death. The cross, as a locus of divine revelation, is not good news for the powerful, for those who are comfortable with the way things are, or for anyone whose understanding of religion is aligned with power.
This reversal of expectations and conventional values is the unmistakable theme of the gospel. “What is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God” (Lk 16:15). “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted” (Lk 18:14). This “transvaluation of values,” as Niebuhr put it, finds its apotheosis in the cross. “In Jesus’ cross God took up the existence of a slave and died the slave’s death on the tree of martyrdom” (Phil 2:8). The cross, in Martin Hengel’s words, points to God’s loving solidarity with the “unspeakable suffering of those
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One has to have a powerful religious imagination to see redemption in the cross, to discover life in death and hope in tragedy.
I think it's fair to say that I no longer have a religious imagination. At least not one oriented to Christianity or the supernatural. The question is whether I want to re-develop one (or maybe develop one for the first time).
Because God was present with Jesus on the cross and thereby refused to let Satan and death have the last word about his meaning, God was also present at every lynching in the United States. God saw what whites did to innocent and helpless blacks and claimed their suffering as God’s own. God transformed lynched black bodies into the recrucified body of Christ. Every time a white mob lynched a black person, they lynched Jesus. The lynching tree is the cross in America. When American Christians realize that they can meet Jesus only in the crucified bodies in our midst, they will encounter the
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What are we to make of the striking similarities between the brutality in Rome and cruelty in America? What is most ironic is that the white lynchers of blacks in America were not regarded as criminals; like Jesus, blacks were the criminals and insurrectionists. The lynchers were the “good citizens” who often did not even bother to hide their identities. They claimed to be acting as citizens and Christians as they crucified blacks in the same manner as the Romans lynched Jesus.
It is even more ironic that black people embraced the Christian cross that whites used to murder them. That was truly a profound inversion of meaning.
One must suppose that in order to feel comfortable in the Christian faith, whites needed theologians to interpret the gospel in a way that would not require them to acknowledge white supremacy as America’s great sin.
Reinhold Niebuhr could write and preach about the cross with profound theological imagination and say nothing of how the violence of white supremacy invalidated the faith of white churches. It takes a lot of theological blindness to do that, especially since the vigilantes were white Christians who claimed to worship the Jew lynched in Jerusalem.
To understand what the cross means in America, we need to take a look at the lynching tree in this nation’s history—that “strange and bitter crop” that Billie Holiday would not let us forget.
The real scandal of the gospel is this: humanity’s salvation is revealed in the cross of the condemned criminal Jesus, and humanity’s salvation is available only through our solidarity with the crucified people in our midst.
The cross and the lynching tree interpret each other.
was similar to the lynched victim Sam Hose’s awful scream as he drew his last breath, “Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus.”[9]
Or to George Floyd calling out to his mother.
Can the cross redeem the lynching tree? Can the lynching tree liberate the cross and make it real in American history?
As I see it, the lynching tree frees the cross from the false pieties of well-meaning Christians. When we see the crucifixion as a first-century lynching, we are confronted by the re-enactment of Christ’s suffering in the blood-soaked history of African Americans. Thus, the lynching tree reveals the true religious meaning of the cross for American Christians today. The cross needs the lynching tree to remind Americans of the reality of suffering—to keep the cross from becoming a symbol of abstract, sentimental piety. Before the spectacle of this cross we are called to more than contemplation
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Yet the lynching tree also needs the cross, without which it becomes simply an abomination. It is the cross that points in the direction of hope, the confidence that there is a dimension to life beyond the reach of the oppressor. “Do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more”
This country should be proud of them, too, but, alas, not many people in this country even know of their existence. And the reason for this ignorance is a knowledge of the role these people played—and play—in American life would reveal more about America to Americans than Americans wish to know.
True and true and true. Seemingly true forever. How can the U.S. ever permit the story of black suffering at the hands of white people and of black survival and the black struggle to make America live up to its own dream self to be told in all its fullness? This story can never be embraced as THE story until the U.S. is no longer the U.S. it is now.
The church’s most vexing problem today is how to define itself by the gospel of Jesus’ cross. Where is the gospel of Jesus’ cross revealed today? The lynching of black America is taking place in the criminal justice system where nearly one-third of black men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight are in prisons, jails, on parole, or waiting for their day in court. Nearly one-half of the more than two million people in prisons are black. That is one million black people behind bars, more than in colleges. Through private prisons and the “war against drugs,” whites have turned the
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You could basically tack The Trayvon Generation or any one of dozens of books to the end of this one to answer his question. Of courses, Michelle Alexander's book is a perfect choice as well. But something that talks about this new age of lynching—not new lynching but newly visible, video lynching...
Nothing is more racist in America’s criminal justice system than its administration of the death penalty. America is the only industrialized country in the West where the death penalty is still legal. Most countries regard it as both immoral and barbaric. But not in America. The death penalty is primarily reserved, though not exclusively, for people of color, and white supremacy shows no signs of changing it. That is why the term “legal lynching”[14] is still relevant today. One can lynch a person without a rope or tree.
When I heard and read about the physical and mental abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, I thought about lynching.
People who have never been lynched by another group usually find it difficult to understand why blacks want whites to remember lynching atrocities. Why bring that up? Is it not best forgotten? Absolutely not! What happened to the hate that created the violence that lynched black people? Did it disappear?
Unless we confront these questions today, hate and silence will continue to define our way of life in America. For “if racial healing is ever to come to our society, it will mean remembering and retelling our story of racial injustice and honoring the voices and the actions of those who stood against it.”[15]
Because Emmett Till was remembered, the civil rights movement was born. When we remember, we give voice to the victims. Many white religious leaders, scholars, and churches have done everything they can to forget the vigilante violence unleashed on African Americans. But other white and black scholars, especially historians and writers, are helping us to remember. Whites today cannot separate themselves from the culture that lynched blacks, unless they confront their history and expose the sin of white supremacy.
