The Cross and the Lynching Tree

by James H. Cone

“Our country’s national crime is lynching,” she began her essay “Lynch Law in America.” “It is not the creature of the hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob. It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an ‘unwritten law’ that justifies them in putting human beings to death without complaint under oath, without trial by jury, without opportunity to make defense, and without right of appeal.”[19]

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] She therefore challenged white liberal Christians to speak out against lynching or be condemned by their silence. “During all the years . . . in which men, women, and children were being scourged, hanged, shot and burned,” Wells said of Frances Willard and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, “the WCTU had no word, either pity or protest; its great heart, which concerns itself about humanity the world over, was, toward our cause, pulseless as a stone.”

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. For Ida B. Wells, Christian identity had to be validated by opposing mob violence against a powerless people, and no amount of theological sophistry could convince her otherwise.

The lyrics of “Strange Fruit” were written in the early 1930s by Abel Meeropol (a.k.a. Lewis Allen), a white Jewish school teacher from New York City, who later adopted the two sons of convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Upon seeing the well-known Lawrence Beitler’s photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana (1930),[37] Meeropol became so incensed that he wrote a poem to express what he felt.

Where there is hope, there is God—that divine presence that prevents despair and empowers poor people to resist. Nowhere were hope and resistance more abundant than among women.

My wrestling with faith began in childhood. Belief in a good and just God was no easy matter for any black person living in the so-called Christian South. The first essay I wrote in college was, “Why Do People Suffer?” In graduate school, I deepened that reflection, and I have thought about suffering all my life, especially when my wife, the love of my life, died of breast cancer at thirty-six.

And so the transcendent and the immanent, heaven and earth, must be held together in critical, dialectical tension, each one correcting the limits of the other. The gospel is in the world, but it is not of the world; that is, it can be seen in the black freedom movement, but it is much more than what we see in our struggles for justice. God’s word is paradoxical, or, as the old untutored black preacher used to say, “inscrutable,” a mystery that one can neither control nor fully understand. It is here and not here, revealed and hidden at the same time. “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior” (Isa 45:15).

Nowhere is that paradox, that “inscrutability,” more evident than in the cross. A symbol of death and defeat, God turned it into a sign of liberation and new life. The cross is the most empowering symbol of God’s loving solidarity with the “least of these,” the unwanted in society who suffer daily from great injustices. Christians must face the cross as the terrible tragedy it was and discover in it, through faith and repentance, the liberating joy of eternal salvation.

One has to have a powerful religious imagination to see redemption in the cross, to discover life in death and hope in tragedy. What kind of salvation is that? No human language can fully describe what salvation through the cross means. Salvation through the cross is a mystery and can only be apprehended through faith, repentance, and humility.

Theologically speaking, Jesus was the “first lynchee,” who foreshadowed all the lynched black bodies on American soil. He was crucified by the same principalities and powers that lynched black people in America. 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.

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.

Nietzsche was right: Christianity is a religion of slaves. God became a slave in Jesus and thereby liberated slaves from being determined by their social condition.

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.

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 brutality of their racist legal system into a profit-making venture for dying white towns and cities throughout America.

Just as the Germans should never forget the Holocaust, Americans should never forget slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree. As a nation, we are in danger of forgetting our ugly lynching past. As Fitzhugh Brundage reminds us, “Perhaps nothing about the history of mob violence in the United States is more surprising than how quickly an understanding of the full horror of lynching has receded from the nation’s collective memory.”[16]

We are bound together in America by faith and tragedy. All the hatred we have expressed toward one another cannot destroy the profound mutual love and solidarity that flow deeply between us—a love that empowered blacks to open their arms to receive the many whites who were also empowered by the same love to risk their lives in the black struggle for freedom.

No gulf between blacks and whites is too great to overcome, for our beauty is more enduring than our brutality. What God joined together, no one can tear apart.