The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

Hundreds of kodaks clicked all morning at the scene of the lynching. People in automobiles and carriages came from miles around to view the corpse dangling from the end of a rope. . . . Picture cards photographers installed a portable printing plant at the bridge and reaped a harvest in selling the postcard showing a photograph of the lynched Negro. Women and children were there by the score. At a number of country schools the day’s routine was delayed until boy and girl pupils could get back from viewing the lynched man. —The Crisis 10, no. 2, June 1915, on the lynching of Thomas Brooks in Fayette County, Tennessee

The cross is a paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.

Both the cross and the lynching tree represented the worst in human beings and at the same time “an unquenchable ontological thirst”[1] for life that refuses to let the worst determine our final meaning.

Lynching as primarily mob violence and torture directed against blacks began to increase after the Civil War and the end of slavery, when the 1867 Congress passed the Reconstruction Act granting black men the franchise and citizenship rights of participation in the affairs of government.

Whether in the churches, colleges, and universities, or in the political and social life of the nation, southern whites, who were not going to allow their ex-slaves to associate with them as equals, felt that if lynching were the only way to keep ex-slaves subservient, then it was necessary.

Whites acted in a superior manner for so long that it was difficult for them to even recognize their cultural and spiritual arrogance, blatant as it was to African Americans. Their law was not designed to protect blacks from lynching, especially when blacks acted as if they were socially equal to whites. Should a black in the South lift his hand or raise his voice to reprimand a white person, he would incur the full weight of the law and the mob. Even to look at white people in a manner regarded as disrespectful could get a black lynched. Whites often lynched blacks simply to remind the black community of their powerlessness.

Blind Lemon Jefferson moaned the “Hangman’s Blues,” one of a few songs that confronted directly the reality and fear of lynching. Mean ole hangman is waitin’ to tighten up that noose, Lord, I’m so scared I’m trembling in my shoes.[32]

His divine presence is the most important message about black existence.

Black people sang and preached about Jesus being with the poor—healing and feeding them. The resurrection of Jesus is God giving people meaning beyond history, when such violence as slavery and lynching seemed to close off any future.

Thus, God’s revelation transvalues human values, turning them upside down.

People reject the cross because it contradicts historical values and expectations—just as Peter challenged Jesus for saying, “The Son of Man must suffer”: “Far be it from You; this shall not happen to You.” But Jesus rebuked Peter: “Get behind me, Satan!” (Mt 16:21; Mk 8:31, 33). “In the course of a few moments,” Peter went from being “the mouthpiece of God” to a “tool” of Satan, because he could not connect vicarious suffering with God’s revelation.

Only faith can see that which cannot be derived from the logic of history or reason.

In terms almost as severe as those of Malcolm X, Niebuhr speaks about “God’s judgment on America.” He calls “racial hatred, the most vicious of all human vices,” “the dark and terrible abyss of evil in the soul of man,” a “form of original sin,” “the most persistent of all collective evils,” “more stubborn than class prejudices,” and “the gravest social evil in our nation.” “If,” he concluded, “the white man were to expiate his sins committed against the darker races, few white men would have a right to live.”[24]

Niebuhr chose to listen to southern moderates like Faulkner and Carter on race, rather than to civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., who regarded Faulkner’s counsel to “go slow, pause for a moment” as a “tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” “It is hardly a moral act to encourage others patiently to accept injustice which he himself does not endure,” King wrote, in a response influenced by Niebuhr himself. 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.

It was easy for Niebuhr to walk around in his own shoes, as a white man, and view the world from that vantage point, but it takes a whole lot of empathic effort to step into those of black people and see the world through the eyes of African Americans.

Clarence Darrow

“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]

of Bonhoeffer’s white friends wondered whether he was becoming too involved in the Negro community.[30]

Niebuhr continued, “I do not see how any church can be so completely disloyal to the gospel of love as to put up bars against members of another racial group who apply for inclusion in its fellowship.”

religious idealism

Fellowship of Socialist Christians,

pedagogical

Simon of Cyrene, the African, bearing Jesus’ cross.

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.

bourgeois

Twelve Million Black Voices (1941);

“I do mean to say is this: that the bulk of the white . . . Christian majority in this country has exhibited a really staggering level of irresponsibility and immoral washing of the hands, you know. . . . I don’t suppose that . . . all the white people in Birmingham are monstrous people. But they’re mainly silent people, you know. And that is a crime in itself.”

Rabbi Joachim Prinz (a refugee from Germany) at the March on Washington. “When I was a rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime . . . the most important thing I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problems. The most urgent and most disgraceful, the most shameful, the most tragic problem is silence.”[51]

Prophets take risks and speak out in righteous indignation against society’s treatment of the poor, even risking their lives, as we see in the martyrdom of Jesus and Martin King.

John Lewis, who was fifteen at the time, reacted like many black teenagers: “I was shaken to my core,” he recalled in his memoir. “He could have been me. That could have been me, beaten, tortured, dead at the bottom of a river.”[9]

King believed that love in society is named justice.

Though we are not fully free and the dream not fully realized, yet, we are not what we used to be and not what we will be. The cross and the lynching tree can help us to know from where we have come and where we must go. We continue to seek an ultimate meaning that cannot be expressed in rational and historical language and that cannot be denied by white supremacy. Poetry is often more helpful than prose in expressing our hope. Through poetic imagination we can see the God of Jesus revealed in the cross and the lynching tree. Those who saw this connection more clearly than others were artists, poets, and writers.

In the wake of slavery and the Civil War, there was so much ugliness in black life that one would have had to be blind not to see it. And nothing, absolutely nothing, was uglier than lynching in all of its many forms: hanging, burning, beating, dragging, and shooting—as well as torture, mutilation, and especially castration. And yet so many were blind, deaf, and dumb.

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.”

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]

I find nothing redemptive about suffering in itself. The gospel of Jesus is not a rational concept to be explained in a theory of salvation, but a story about God’s presence in Jesus’ solidarity with the oppressed, which led to his death on the cross. What is redemptive is the faith that God snatches victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair, as revealed in the biblical and black proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection. Weep no more, Marta, Weep no more, Mary, Jesus rise from de dead, Happy Morning.

If the makers of the spirituals gloried in singing of the cross of Jesus, it was not because they were masochistic and enjoyed suffering. Rather, the enslaved Africans sang because they saw on the rugged wooden planks One who had endured what was their daily portion. The cross was treasured because it enthroned the One who went all the way with them and for them. 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.

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. Bee Jenkins’s claims that “Jesus won’t fail you” was made in the heat of the struggle for civil rights in Mississippi, and such faith gave her strength and courage to fight for justice against overwhelming odds. 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.