Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of a Black Theologian

by James H. Cone

When the Detroit rebellion, also known as the “12th Street Riot,” broke out in July of 1967, the turmoil woke me out of my academic world. I could no longer continue quietly teaching white students at Adrian College (Michigan) about Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and other European theologians when black people were dying in the streets of Detroit, Newark, and the back roads of Mississippi and Alabama. I had to do something. But I wasn't a civil rights leader, like Martin Luther King Jr., or an artist, like James Baldwin, who was spurred in his writing when he saw the searing image of a black girl, Dorothy Counts, surrounded by hateful whites as she attempted to integrate a white high school in Charlotte, North Carolina (September 1957). I was a theologian, asking: What, if anything, is theology worth in the black struggle in America?

It was one thing to say simply that Black Power is the gospel, and quite another to make a credible theological argument for linking the two. No one, not even militant Negro ministers, had even thought about joining Black Power with Jesus.

This does not seem accurate to me. The way that Cone did black theology was new but the idea of Jesus identification of suffering and in particular the suffering of black bodies against white Protestant conceptions of Jesus or theology has earlier expressions like Thurman and shown in the work of Swanson’s Doctrine and Race

Faced with the choice of embracing blackness or Christian faith, a few preachers chose blackness, left the church, and joined the Nation of Islam or some other non-Christian black religion. Blackness spoke to the soul of black being-in-the-world, and no one had articulated blackness better than Malcolm. “We are black first and everything else second,” he had declared. Martin King, meanwhile, was uncomfortable with talk of blackness; he remained a Negro all his life and only reluctantly used the word “black” when pressured by black militants. He would not talk publicly or even privately with Malcolm, and he pleaded with Carmichael to stop talking about Black Power. King saw Black Power as alienating Negroes from whites, thereby making it impossible for the two communities to work together to create an integrated society.

The real historical Jesus, whom scholars have been seeking since the eighteenth century, was not white. That much I knew. When it became clear to me that Jesus was not biologically white and that white scholars actually lied by not telling people who he really was, I stopped trusting anything they said. It was ideologically tainted. I began to trust my own black experience as a better source for knowledge about God and Jesus. The black religious experience was less ideologically tainted because blacks were powerless and could not impose their view of Jesus on anybody.

white supremacy is America's original sin and liberation is the Bible's central message. Any theology in America that fails to engage white supremacy and God's liberation of black people from that evil is not Christian theology but a theology of the Antichrist.

Theologies develop in response to questions arising out of specific intellectual, political, and religious situations. I was responding to the situation created by the black freedom movement, especially as defined by Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X—the movements for civil rights and Black Power. I felt I was representing not only black people and Lincoln but also myself. I didn't want to disappoint.

When I spoke of loving blackness and embracing Black Power, they heard hate toward white people. Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and James Baldwin confronted similar reactions. Any talk about the love and beauty of blackness seemed to arouse fear and hostility in whites.

I felt that white liberals had killed King, helped by those Negroes who thought he was moving too fast. Even though they didn't pull the trigger, they had refused to listen to King when he proclaimed God's judgment on America for failing to deal with the three great evils of our time: poverty, racism, and war. The white liberal media demonized King, accusing him of meddling in America's foreign affairs by opposing the Vietnam War and blaming him for provoking violence wherever he led a march. White liberals, however, accepted no responsibility for King's murder, and they refused to understand why Negroes were rioting and burning down their communities.

I didn't want to talk to white people about King's assassination or about the uprisings in the cities; it was too much of an emotional burden to explain

It gave me an opportunity to define Black Power as black people asserting the humanity that white supremacy denied. Oppression in any form was a denial of a people's humanity, and the oppressed must use whatever power they have to defend their humanity. Defending one's humanity against an oppressive political system was not only a human but a Christian responsibility. Indeed Jesus came to liberate the oppressed. That was the message of Black Power. Jesus and Black Power were advocating the same thing. If we didn't think Black Power was Christian it was because we had accepted an interpretation of Christianity derived from the culture of white supremacy. When theologians and churches interpret and preach the gospel in a way that ignores society's systematic denial of a people's humanity, as in slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and lynching, their gospel and theology are antithetical to the message of Jesus Christ.

Reconciliation is a white responsibility.

“How can I, a white [person] become black?” was the most frequent question whites asked me. “Being black in America has very little to do with skin color,” I wrote. “To be black means that your heart, your soul, your mind, and your body are where the dispossessed are.”6 To become black is like what Jesus told Nicodemus, that he must be “born again,” that is, “born of water and Spirit” (John 3), the Black Spirit of liberation. Black religion scholars would push back hard on this theological claim. Among my fiercest critics, and at the same time a devoted friend, was Gayraud Wilmore, author of the important text Black Religion and Black Radicalism (1973). But I held firm to my claim, despite his objections, because I was speaking primarily symbolically, while Wilmore was speaking primarily historically. History significantly informs what theologians say, but it's not the final arbiter in theological matters. The Word of God, Jesus the Christ, as revealed in scripture and black experience, is the final judge. I didn't see how anyone could be a Christian and not understand that.

“White supremacy,” I said, “is the Antichrist in America because it has killed and crippled tens of millions of black bodies and minds in the modern world. It has also committed genocide against the indigenous people of this land. If that isn't demonic, I don't know what is. White supremacy is America's original sin. It is found in every aspect of American life, especially churches, seminaries, and theology.”

When I had shared my book and my earlier essay on “Christianity and Black Power” with my former doctoral advisor, Philip S. Watson, he had written me an angry letter: “All you have done is try to justify black people killing me and other whites,” he said—an absurd statement to which I could not respond. I wasn't advocating violence against white people. I was exposing and declaring my fierce opposition to white violence against black people. I was trying to speak the same truth that sent Jesus to the cross. I couldn't back away from the truth I saw in Jesus's life and death. I was prepared to discuss its theological merits, but I couldn't compromise it or allow it to be twisted into “black racism,” as Watson and other white theologians tried to label it.

wrote Black Theology and Black Power as an attack on racism in white churches and an attack on self-loathing in black churches. I was not interested in making an academic point about theology; rather, I was issuing a manifesto against whiteness and for blackness in an effort to liberate Christians from white supremacy.

I soon discovered that most white theologians couldn't talk about theology and race in a way that showed a real knowledge and respect for black people. They seemed interested only in seeing whether I knew enough about European theology to join their conversation.

Theology is not philosophy; it is not primarily rational language and thus cannot answer the question of theodicy, which philosophers have wrestled with for centuries. Theology is symbolic language, language about the imagination, which seeks to comprehend what is beyond comprehension. Theology is not antirational but it is nonrational, transcending the world of rational discourse and pointing to a realm of reality that can only be grasped by means of the imagination. That was why Reinhold Niebuhr said, “One should not talk about ultimate reality without imagination,”9 and why the poet Wallace Stevens said, “God and the imagination are one.”10 Black liberation theology strives to open a world in which black people's dignity is recognized.

I wasn't writing for rational reasons based on library research; I was writing out of my experience, speaking for the dignity of black people in a white supremacist world. I was on a mission to transform self-loathing Negro Christians into black-loving revolutionary disciples of the Black Christ.

Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, Nobody knows my sorrow, Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, Glory Hallelujah! As I heard it, the “trouble” is white folks, and the “Hallelujah” is a faith expression that white folks don't have the last word about life's ultimate meaning.

My critics were the best thing that ever happened to me as a theologian, even though I didn't think so at the time. Accepting criticism is a hard but necessary lesson to learn. Critics made me think deeper and clearer, never letting me take myself for granted. They kept me on my toes, kept the fire burning over nearly fifty years. Thank God for critics! The worst thing is to be ignored or to have said nothing worth responding to. Silence kills thought and imagination. I received all kinds of criticism, some worthless and others a blessing. I had to decide what was important and what wasn't.

The cross is a paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world's value system, proclaiming 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. Secular intellectuals find this idea absurd, but it is profoundly real in the spiritual life of black folk.

Reading white theology, I thought of the words of the African artist Chinua Achebe: “just another piece of deodorized dog shit.” Reflecting on the European idea of “art for art's sake,” he had noted: “Literature is not a luxury for us. It is a life and death affair because we are fashioning a new [humanity].”17 That's what black theology was for me, and I embraced Baldwin as my theological mentor.

In my television dialogue with Bill Moyers I told him flat-out that I would rather be a part of the culture that resisted lynching than the one that lynched. I would rather be the one who suffered wrong than the one who did wrong. The one who suffered wrong is stronger than the one who did wrong. Jesus was stronger than his crucifiers. Blacks are stronger than whites. Black religion is more creative and meaningful and true than white religion.