When Jesus said “deny thyself and follow me,” the message translated to white Americans was “deny their theological whiteness.”48 A church “true to their Lord” would “so identify with oppressed blacks that they would, in the eyes of the system, cease to be white.”49 Hilliard’s casting of Jesus as black drew on a long African American tradition that associated black suffering with the sufferings of Christ, that linked the Roman cross to the American lynching tree.
