The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

by Jemar Tisby

“Both Jesus and blacks were ‘strange fruit,’ ” he wrote. “Theologically speaking, Jesus was the ‘first lynchee,’ who foreshadowed all the lynched black bodies on American soil.”41 Cone goes on to explain, “The cross helped me to deal with the brutal legacy of the lynching tree, and the lynching tree helped me to understand the tragic meaning of the cross.”42 Cone showed that black people could better understand Christ’s suffering by recalling their own sorrow as it related to the lynching tree. At the same time, the cross provided comfort because black people could know for certain that in his life and death, Christ identified with the oppressed. The decades after the Civil War proved that racism never goes away, it just adapts. Although the Union had won the military victory, the ideology of the Confederate South battled on. Attorney Bryan Stevenson put it this way: “The North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war.”43 Some white Christians used their faith to support the fiction of the Lost Cause narrative and notions of a romanticized white Protestant South. Others bent Christianity to support the Ku Klux Klan and its racial terrorism designed to reinforce white power.