The Cross and the Lynching Tree

“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.”

One of the primary doctrines of the Christian faith is that the wisdom of God is precisely not the wisdom of human beings. What humans consider to be foolish—God becoming human only to die a bloody death on a Roman cross—God chose as the means for universal salvation. Opposed to the typical human response to suffering and oppression, God was united in solidarity with the poor and oppressed in Jesus of Nazareth, demonstrating that the darkest moment of certain defeat was the means by which victory was achieved.

“Initially, lynching was not directed primarily against blacks nor did it always mean death to the victim. Mexicans, Indians, Chinese, and whites were lynched—a term that could apply to whipping, shooting, stabbing, as well as hanging. Lynching was an extralegal punishment sanctioned by the community.”

The author sets the historical events in context by informing his readers that lynching was an atrocity committed not just against Black people, and the term was used not just to refer to the act of hanging to the death. Lynching universally applies to any act of retaliatory violence perpetrated upon a victim outside legally sanctioned retribution. In other words, it was a violent form of community mob vigilantism.

“Lynching became a white media spectacle, in which prominent newspapers, like the Atlanta Constitution, announced to the public the place, date, and time of the expected hanging and burning of black victims.”

In attitudes reminiscent of the public executions of the French Revolution, American newspapers would publicly announce the details of lynchings they expected to occur. While obviously something that could never happen today, the author intimates that the act of lynching, while not formally or legally sanctioned, was nevertheless an accepted form of community justice that benefitted even from institutional approval. Newspapers were the most powerful form of public speech at the time, and to have lynchings publicized lent validity to their occurrence.

“How did southern rural blacks survive the terrors of this era? Self-defense and protest were out of the question, but there were other forms of resistance. For most blacks it was the blues and religion that offered the chief weapons of resistance.”

Since direct retaliation or protest was out of the question due to the consequences accompanying such action, the Black community needed to find ways to deal with their experience and engage in non-explicit protest. The author notes that music and religion were two primary ways this occurred. In blues music, sorrow and misery were set to music in such a way as to give a powerful emotional outlet to buried feelings of rage, anxiety, and grief. Religion offered a positive outlet, providing a means to maintain hope in such dark circumstances.

“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.”

The author juxtaposes the objective symbolic meanings with their subjective meanings. As he noted before, crucifixion and lynching are objectively parallel acts of stringing a victim up to a tree to cause their death. Subjectively, however, the Black community saw the two as obviously contrasting symbols. The lynching tree symbolized their annihilation at the hands of wicked and vindictive white people who used their power to violently oppress Black men and women. On the other hand, the cross was a symbol of life and hope, a symbol of the truth that God had entered the world of suffering and death and had still achieved victory and salvation for anyone who would ask for it.

“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.”

The cross was a powerful example of solidarity for suffering Black Christians. In it, they saw their reflection: an innocent victim who had been hunted down, falsely accused, brutalized, and ultimately murdered at the hands of powerful religious and political leaders. Even during oppressive darkness and doubt, they could hold on to the fact that God had not abandoned Jesus, just as they could have faith and hope that God would not abandon them in their hour of need.

“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.”

The author finds it curious that the two symbols have not been not universally present in American Christian preaching or theology. The parallel imagery is almost too obvious to miss, but nevertheless, it was an untapped source of religious imagery. While its absence from mainstream Christian preaching and teaching was possibly due to ignorance or fear, it remained a curious reality that needed to change (a primary impetus for the writing of this particular book).

“One needs a powerful imagination to see both tragedy and beauty, futility and redemption in the cross.”

Because of the ubiquitous nature of the Christian cross in popular culture—not to mention its use in religious practice—the cross is a symbol that often loses its impact. Upon reflection, however, the paradox of such a symbol is apparent: A torture device invented by the Roman Empire to execute criminals in as public and fearsome a manner as possible eventually became a symbol of transcendent and supernatural faith, hope, and love. As the author notes, a powerful imagination is needed to discern the notes of both light and darkness that are sounded when invoking the reality of the cross.

“Niebuhr knew that denying membership to persons merely on the basis of race was also a denial of the church’s Christian identity. Yet he also knew that white churches were not prepared to include blacks, a minority they truly despised, and he was not prepared to deny the Christian identity of white churches on that basis.”

The author criticizes Niebuhr’s gradual approach, which delayed justice on practical grounds. While Cone doesn’t think that Niebuhr’s assessment of the cultural realities is incorrect, he criticizes his unwillingness to change his outlook and theology, even in the face of opposition and outrage, to something that was ultimately right and just.

“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.”

The author has a highly nuanced appreciation for Niebuhr, acknowledging his genius while also noting his faults and shortcomings. The author appreciated Niebuhr’s work and thought so much that he taught a course based on his writings. At the same time, the author could see where Niebuhr failed to achieve a wholly integrated vision of human flourishing and Christian love due to the limitations of his perspective as a white man in 20th-century America. Niebuhr’s experience simply didn’t account for the suffering Black men and women endured throughout America’s history.

“If anything was remarkable about the Till lynching, it was not so much the callousness of the deed as the militant response it evoked. If lynching was intended to instill silence and passivity, this event had the opposite effect, inspiring blacks to rise in defiance, to cast off centuries of paralyzing fear.”

The author points to the lynching of Emmet Till in 1955 as the turning point in American history for the general response to lynching across the board. While previous decades of atrocities had been met largely with silent anger, this was the final straw, resulting in mass unified protests and outrage at the event. From this point on, the civil rights movement would gain steam and result in the passing of the Civil Rights Act less than a decade later.

“Suffering always poses the deepest test of faith, radically challenging its authenticity and meaning. No rational explanation can soothe the pain of an aching heart and troubled mind. In the face of the lynching death of an innocent child, black Christians could only reach into the depth of their religious imagination for a transcendent meaning that could take them through despair to a hope ‘beyond tragedy.’”

The suffering of the innocent has long been acknowledged as one of the most difficult challenges to believing in God or a moral universe. While faith can stand strong amid pain and suffering, it doesn’t mean that a rational answer exists for the problem of evil. The only way the suffering community could handle something as tragic as the death of an innocent child was to rely on the mental fortitude provided by faith in the cross of Jesus, believing it held a deeper and more ultimate meaning for all those who found solidarity in such a reality.

“It is one thing to teach theology (like Niebuhr, Barth, Tillich, and most theologians) in the safe environs of a classroom and quite another to live one’s theology in a situation that entails the risk of one’s life.”

The author points out a very obvious dichotomy between those who study and teach theology and the requirements that faith demands and those who actually have to live that reality and act upon it. It’s one thing to say that an enemy should be loved; it’s another to believe it. What makes the difference, however, is when it’s a duty that needs to be practiced and lived out in the real world. The danger with a purely academic approach to faith is that it can become detached from the lived experience of the community and, therefore, subject to blind spots and experiential gaps.

“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 contrast to any possible theme of the Christian life that could be emphasized—forgiveness of sins, eternal life, etc.—preachers in Black churches emphasized the passion and death of Christ on the cross because it is what spoke most emphatically to them. Jesus’ death became the most natural thing to focus on because it matched their own experience of innocent suffering.

“What enabled artists to see what Christian theologians and ministers would not? What prevented these theologians and ministers, who should have been the first to see God’s revelation in black suffering, from recognizing the obvious gospel truth? Did it require such a leap of imagination to recognize the visual and symbolic overtones between the cross and the lynching tree, both places of execution in the ancient and modern worlds?”

The author reflects further on the tragedy of Christian preaching that ignored parallels between the cross and the lynching tree. When a symbol becomes as ubiquitous as to become part of the background, it begins to lose its power; this is what Cone believes to have happened with the cross. For Christians, the cross was such an ordinary part of their experience and imagination, they often failed to see it for what it really was: a device of torture, humiliation, and death—precisely what the lynching tree represented in 19th- and 20th-century America.

“Artists recognized that no real reconciliation could occur between blacks and whites without telling the painful and redeeming truths about their life together.”

The church communities were usually completely segregated and, as a result, were often wholly cut off from one another. Even claiming to share the same faith, the racially segregated churches failed to share anything real about their lives—it was up to those tangentially related to the faith communities (Christian artists or artists formed by a Christian culture and worldview) to highlight the need for shared experience and reconciliation. However, this reconciliation could only occur if the absolute truth was illuminated about the reality of their common experience.

“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. This liberating religious tradition is what Hughes and other black poets inherited, and it was the source for their identifying Christ as black and recrucified on the lynching trees of America. It was a kind of ‘commonsense’ theology—a theology of the grassroots, for which one needed no seminary or university degree in religion.”

The Black Christians identified most strongly with the Gospel message that focused on bringing freedom to captives and help to the poor. The Magnificat— Mary’s song about lifting up the lowly and casting down the proud—and the Beatitudes—the teaching of Jesus that the poor and sorrowful would be happy and blessed—were natural tenets to fix one’s mind upon in these circumstances. These teachings also were natural inspirations for creating their own literary and artistic tradition, weaving the Gospel message into song, poetry, and preaching.

“Although women constitute only 2 percent of blacks actually killed by lynching, it would be a mistake to assume that violence against women was not widespread and brutal.”

The easy mistake, statistically speaking, is to look at the numbers and conclude that lynching almost exclusively victimized men. The problem with this is that it completely ignores the reality that most of the most brutal victimization of women occurred without the death of the victim (i.e., acts of sexual violence) and that it was women who had to pick up the pieces after the deaths of their fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers. In addition, people were far more likely to notice violence against male victims than against female victims simply because of the more public nature of these community lynchings.

“It was fitting for a Jew to write this great protest song about ‘burning flesh’ because the burning black bodies on the American landscape prefigured the burning bodies of Jews at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.”

The famous Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit” was written first as a poem in 1937 by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish man, in response to a Southern lynching. The horrors of the Holocaust, when millions of Jewish men, women, and children were kidnapped, experimented upon, and murdered in Nazi camps, had not yet happened, but in just a few years, the cultural experience of the Jewish and Black communities in the early 20th century would become very similar. Their parallel intimacy with suffering and grief became so analogous that it was quite fitting—almost prescient—for Holiday to record the song version of the poem in 1939.

“Black men seemed less able to navigate the complex relationship between survival and dignity in the violent patriarchal South. Just out of slavery, they wanted to be men, just like white males—providing economic support and physical protection for women and children—but they were not permitted to do so. As a result, black men tended either toward violence, which often placed them on lynching trees, or toward passivity, which led to the loss of dignity: few other options were available.”

The desire of Black men to be seen and respected as men, in the same way that white men would have been, often led them to inescapable Catch-22 situations. On the one hand, they could stand up for themselves (which would often involve some degree of violence or physicality), resulting in altercations that could easily lead to their being lynched. Or, on the other hand, they could choose the path of least resistance out of a desire to de-escalate a situation and choose passivity and submission, an attitude that ended up degrading their sense of dignity and honor. Neither option was acceptable, nor could neither be sustained for very long, ultimately leading to the wave of action that resulted in the Civil Rights Act.

“Nowhere were hope and resistance more abundant than among women. Every black male minister knows that he would have no church without the women who make up more than 80 percent of the membership.”

Throughout history, women in any community have been an unwavering force of support, without which no community could have survived. Sociologically speaking, faith communities are composed of a female majority, and so the churches needed to speak to and with women to survive and enact change. The light of hope that refused to be extinguished in the African American communities was kept burning largely thanks to their women.

“If God loves black people, why then do we suffer so much? That was my question as a child; that is still my question.”

The author lets the reader into his mind to the genesis of the route his academic and authorial career had taken him. As a child growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, his experience was that of segregation, hate, and violence. He naturally would have seen white children thrive in a way that his peers did not and could not, and even as a child, this made his inquisitive mind seek an answer. He tells the reader here that, in many ways, this same question he raised as a young child was still his question and the reason for the current book.

“The Christian Gospel is God’s message of liberation in an unredeemed and tortured world. As such, it is a transcendent reality that lifts our spirits to a world far removed from the suffering of this one. It is an eschatological vision, an experience of transfiguration, such as Jesus experienced at his Baptism (Mk 1:9-11) or on Mt. Tabor (Mk 9:2-8), just before he set out on the road to Jerusalem, the road that led to Calvary.”

The primary factor of hope in the Christian message is that it is a message of transcendence, a message that brings news of freedom, happiness, and glory. While action is needed to transform this world in preparation for—and in imitation of—the world of blessedness to come, the fact remains that even when justice is not ultimately served in this current life, ultimate justice will always be restored in the end. The ability to receive the gospel's message and put one’s faith in Jesus upon the cross can make the experience of suffering in this life bearable; if this life is not the end of the story, then it can be endured even in great sorrow.