The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

I do not write this book as the last word about the cross and the lynching tree. I write it in order to start a conversation so we can explore the many ways to heal the deep wounds lynching has inflicted upon us. The cross can heal and hurt; it can be empowering and liberating but also enslaving and oppressive. There is no one way in which the cross can be interpreted. I offer my reflections because I believe that the cross placed alongside the lynching tree can help us to see Jesus in America in a new light, and thereby empower people who claim to follow him to take a stand against white supremacy and every kind of injustice. Notes

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.

And Christian theology, for African Americans, maintained the same great challenge: to explain from the perspective of history and faith how life could be made meaningful in the face of death, how hope could remain alive in the world of Jim Crow segregation. These were the challenges that shaped black religious life in the United States.

Lynching was an extralegal punishment sanctioned by the community.

While the lynching tree symbolized white power and “black death,” the cross symbolized divine power and “black life”—God overcoming the power of sin and death.

In the mystery of God’s revelation, black Christians believed that just knowing that Jesus went through an experience of suffering in a manner similar to theirs gave them faith that God was with them, even in suffering on lynching trees, just as God was present with Jesus in suffering on the cross.

If the God of Jesus’ cross is found among the least, the crucified people of the world, then God is also found among those lynched in American history.

The resurrection of Jesus is God giving people meaning beyond history, when such violence as slavery and lynching seemed to close off any future.

“why it was that thou didst look on with calm indifference of an unconcerned spectator, when thy holy law was violated, thy divine authority despised and a portion of thine own creatures reduced to a state of mere vassalage and misery?”[52]

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 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.

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.

Niebuhr taught that love is the absolute, transcendent standard that stands in judgment over what human beings can achieve in history.

“If the divine is made relevant to the human,” Niebuhr claimed, “it must transvalue our values and enter the human at the point where man is lowly rather than proud and where he is weak rather than strong. Therefore I believe that God came in the form of a little child born to humble parents in a manger. . . .” This “life in the manger ended upon the cross . . . [and we] might end there if we really emulated it.”[12]

The Christian knows that the cross is the truth. In that standard he sees the ultimate success of what the world calls failure and failure of what the world calls success.”[16]

I remember ministers preaching about Black Simon when I was a teenager in Arkansas. 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.

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]

Although the Baldwin–Niebuhr dialogue did not reveal sharp disagreements, it did reveal different levels of passion in their responses, a gulf of emotional orientation to the racial crisis, reflected in the bombing. Baldwin, identifying with a powerless black minority, was seething with rage, ready to say anything to get white Americans to stop such violence, while Niebuhr, identifying with the powerful white majority, was calm and dispassionate in the face of what most blacks regarded as an unspeakable evil. Baldwin was relentless in his critique of white Americans for failing to live up to their own political and religious traditions about love and justice, even saying that Negroes were the only Christians and the only hope for the country.

Baldwin replied that “I don’t mean to say the white people are villains or devils or anything like that,” but what “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.”

Baldwin’s condemnation of the silence of the Birmingham white majority in the face of the killing of children was similar to the speech of 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]

In one of his last essays, entitled “The Negro Minority and Its Fate in a Self-Righteous Nation,” Niebuhr, reflecting on the 1967 summer riots and the Kerner report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, begins to sound surprisingly like Malcolm X: “For our Negro minority the American ‘Dream’ of justice has become a ‘Nightmare.’ ” He challenged the white church to be the conscience of the nation, reminding it of its responsibilities—“its sins of omission and commission.”[55]

I realize now that I should have ignored the separation of theology and ethics in the Garrett curriculum, as well as Niebuhr’s modest claim of not being a theologian. 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.

Today I teach a course on Niebuhr because of his profound reflections on human nature, the cross, and creative social theory, focusing on justice, self-interest, and power. My understanding of the cross is deeply influenced by his perspective on the cross. Thus, I have never questioned Niebuhr’s greatness as a theologian, but instead admired his intellectual brilliance and social commitment. What I questioned was his limited perspective, as a white man, on the race crisis in America. His theology and ethics needed to be informed from critical reading and dialogue with radical black perspectives.

Before Niebuhr and Bennett, Walter Rauschenbusch, the Social Gospel movement’s greatest theologian, expressed his frustration: “For years the problem of the two races seemed to me so tragic, so insoluble that I have never yet ventured to discuss it in public.”[60] The Social Gospel advocates held conferences on the status of the Negro in Mohonk, New York, in 1890 and 1891 and felt no need to invite any blacks, because, as Lyman Abbott said, “A patient is not invited to the consultation of the doctors on his case.”[61]

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.

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] The Till lynching shook me up too. I was seventeen, beginning my second year at Shorter College in North Little Rock, Arkansas, where I was the daily news reporter to the student assembly, focusing on local, state, national, and world events. I read stories to the college community about the atrocity, the trial and acquittal of the accused men. Like Lewis, I remember saying to myself, “Emmet Till could have been me!” My older brothers felt the same way, as did most young males we knew.

Like Reinhold Niebuhr, whom he studied in graduate school, King believed that the cross was the defining heart of the Christian faith. Unlike Niebuhr, his understanding of the cross was inflected by his awareness of the lynching tree, and this was a significant difference. 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]

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.

Although Martin Luther King Jr. was strongly influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr, he had a different take on love and justice because he spoke to and for powerless people whose faith, focused on the cross of Jesus, mysteriously empowered them to fight against impossible

odds. In contrast to Niebuhr, King never spoke about proximate justice or about what was practically possible to achieve.

There was no talk about proximate justice—that little bit of justice that whites dole out to blacks when they get ready. God’s justice called for black people to bear witness to freedom now, even unto death.

Blacks pleaded, “Jesus Keep Me near the Cross,” because “Calvary,” in a mysterious way they could not explain, was their redemption from the terror of the lynching tree.

Blacks told the story of Jesus’ Passion, as if they were at Golgotha suffering with him. “Were you there when dey crucified my Lord?” “Dey nailed him to de cross”; “dey pierced him in de side”; and “de blood came twinklin’ down.”

When blacks sang about the “blood,” they were wrestling not only with the blood of the crucified carpenter from Nazareth but also with the blood of raped and castrated black bodies in America—innocent, often nameless, burning and hanging bodies, images of hurt so deep that only God’s “amazing grace” could offer consolation.

In their spiritual wrestling, black Christians experienced the weakness and power of God’s love revealed in the cross—mysteriously saving them from loneliness and abandonment and “the unspeakable violence . . . by blood thirsty mobs.”[21] Black ministers preached about Jesus’ death more than any other theme because they saw in Jesus’ suffering and persecution a parallel to their own encounter with slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree.

In those formative years the Klan was as active as ever, striking fear with their hooded night marches and burning crosses, a powerful reminder that not all crosses were liberating and loving, even when Jesus’ name was invoked. White ministers sometimes served as mob leaders, blessing lynchings, or citing the stories of Ham and Cain to justify white supremacy as a divine right.

Interestingly, that message echoed the words of an elderly, unlettered woman, who was “affectionately called Mother Pollard.” At an earlier mass meeting where King was urging the people to continue the boycott of the buses, she had perceived his doubt and fear. He did not speak with the conviction she was accustomed to hearing. When she confronted him, King denied anything was wrong. “You can’t fool me,” she told him. “I know something is wrong. Is it that we ain’t doing things to please you? Or is it that the white folks is bothering you?” Before he could reply, she said, “I don told you we is with you all the way. . . . But even if we ain’t with you, God’s gonna take care of you.”[26]

Loving whites who hated and killed them was not easy for African Americans. Only God could empower black Christians to love hateful whites, and even God could not guarantee that they would return love for hate, nonviolence for violence. But King believed that God was the only hope for a minority to achieve justice. “Remember, if I am stopped, this movement will not stop, because God is with the movement.”[28]

Yet King had no “martyr’s complex.” “I’m tired of the threat of death,” he proclaimed in a stressful moment during the later protests in Chicago. “I want to live. I don’t want to be a martyr. And there are moments when I doubt if I am going to make it through. . . . But the important thing is not how tired I am; the important thing is to get rid of [injustice].”[33] King just wanted to follow Jesus, even if it led to his own death. He really believed what Jesus said to his disciples: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mt 16:24).

The more resistance King received from white supremacy the more he turned to his faith and talked about the cross and the demands it placed on believers. At a National Conference on Religion and Race in Chicago (1963), he challenged white religious leaders who hesitated to support the civil rights movement to take up the cross of fighting for racial justice, even though “it may mean walking through the valley of the shadow of suffering. . . . Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear.”[37]

But in the end King did not turn to them for answers. For him, the cross represented the depth of God’s love for suffering humanity, and an answer to the deadly cycle of violence and hatred. “The most astounding fact about Christ’s crucifixion is that it . . . [is] the supreme revelation of God’s love,” King said in a sermon called “Finding God.”

While King never thought he had achieved the messianic standard of love found in Jesus’ cross, he did believe that his suffering and that of African Americans and their supporters would in some mysterious way redeem America from the sin of white supremacy, and thereby make this nation a just place for all. Who can doubt that those who suffered in the black freedom movement made America a better place than before? Their suffering redeemed America from the sin of legalized segregation. And those blacks among us who lived under Jim Crow know that that was no small achievement.

Theology is always so contextual that it is difficult for young theologians today, as it was also back then, to understand King’s profound, existential, and paradoxical truth. I, too, was slow to embrace King’s view of redemptive suffering. Have not blacks, women, and poor people throughout the world suffered enough? Giving value to suffering seems to legitimize it.

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.

No one could grow up in the black community without knowing the details of Jesus’ sacrificial death at Calvary. Hawkins invoked that memory as he linked the “human sacrifice” at a lynching scene with Jesus’ crucifixion.

Mississippi, a state with the largest number of lynched victims, followed by Texas and Georgia.

Soon after Allen’s Without Sanctuary was published, the U.S. Senate issued a historic apology to the “families of more than 5,000 lynching victims across the country for its failure to enact an anti-lynching law first proposed 105 years ago.”[14] The House of Representatives passed the NAACP-initiated anti-lynching legislation several times, but it was always defeated in the Senate, whose members, especially in the South, insisted that lynching was a necessary tool to protect the purity of the white race.

“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]

Cut off from their African religious traditions, black slaves were left trying to carve out a religious meaning for their lives with white Christianity as the only resource to work with. They ignored white theology, which did not affirm their humanity, and went straight to stories in the Bible, interpreting them as stories of God siding with little people just like them. They identified God’s liberation of the poor as the central message of the Bible, and they communicated this message in their songs and sermons.

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]

Good place to do some scripture study.