The Cross and the Lynching Tree
James H. Cone
Orbis (2011). 202 pp.
Book Review
I begin with a confession. Every year, usually sometime in April, as Lent turns toward Good Friday, pastors search for an analogy for what Fleming Rutledge calls the “godlessness of the cross”—a haunting phrase that reminds us that before it became a religious symbol, the cross was a state-sponsored symbol of terror, a mode of execution wildly unbefitting our typical conceptions of God. Every year, I lapse habitually (and simplistically) to the electric chair. Surely that will get the point across. How wrong I have been. Enter James Cone: “In the United States, the clearest image of the crucified Christ was the figure of an innocent black victim, dangling from a lynching tree” (p. 93). How had I missed this? How had I never thought of this? How embarrassing.
I am not alone, it seems: “White theologians do not normally turn to the black experience to learn about theology” (p. 64). This myopia is, on the one hand, a failure of experience and solidarity. More still, it is a failure of memory: if anything surprises, Cone writes, it is “how quickly an understanding of the full horror of lynching has receded from the nation’s collective memory” (p. 165, quoting Fitzhugh Brundage). Most striking, though, it is a failure of theological imagination. Even in the lynching era, virtually all white theologians, along with many black preachers, “[failed] to see the parallels between the cross and the lynching tree” (p. 94). With lynching unavoidably in public view, many failed to see.
The Cross and the Lynching Tree, the mature fruit of the long-time Union Seminary professor and leading liberation theologian James Cone, forces readers to look, and so, perhaps, to see. In doing so, it redresses not an imbalance but a heresy, an injustice: “Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a ‘recrucified’ black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy” (p. xv). And, I would add, no genuine understanding of the cross. Along these lines, the trajectory of the book is elegant. It traces a path from unseeing to seeing, exposing those who have not looked (chapter 2), telling the stories of those with the courage to look (chapters 3-5), and so forcing the reader to look in the process.
In chapter 2, Cone explores the failure of America’s leading white theologian of the 20th century, Reinhold Niebuhr, to address matters of racial injustice in any sustained way. Niebuhr’s own theological and ethical proclivities—a robust theology of the cross, a realist approach to ethics, a grounding of theology in the facts of human experience—should have sensitized him to the connection of cross and lynching tree, and so to a more robust call for justice for subjugated blacks (pp. 33-38). How did he miss this? For Cone, this is partly the moderating influence of Niebuhr’s notion of “proximate justice” (p. 71; cf. 48-49), but more fundamentally, Niebuhr simply did not live, talk, rub shoulders with black people (pp. 40-58)—a failure of experience that led to a “cool rationality” on matters of race, but not a “madness in the soul” (p. 56).
Chapters 3-5 then turn consciously and deeply, by way of correction, to black experience in America in order to “learn about theology”—that is, “to teach America about Jesus’s cross” (p. 64). Chapter 3 is an extended reflection on the centrality of the cross in the life and ministry of Martin Luther King Jr. The cross challenges and subverts norms (p. 70), comforts and affirms (pp. 85-86), offers the way of vicarious suffering (pp. 86-89), and establishes hope (p. 91). King’s crucicentrism is not a detached dogmatic account of the cross, but born out of the crucible of his own suffering. Most importantly, it shows an awareness of the lynching tree—the “real cross bearers in his American context”—which makes all the difference (pp. 70 and 73).
Chapter 4 turns to black artists, poets, novelists, and the like. It is these figures, argues Cone, who make explicit the connection of cross and lynching tree. What detached theology obscures, the lived reality of artists reveals: “It takes a powerful imagination, grounded in historical experience, to uncover the great mysteries of black life” (pp. 94-95). And that is just what well-known figures like W. E. B. Du Bois (pp. 101-08) and Langston Hughes (pp. 113-17) had and did, along with lesser-known figures like Countee Cullen, Walter Everette Hawkins, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Allen, Robert Hayden, James Andrews, Claude McKay, Lorraine Hansberry, the list goes on. In song, poetry, novel, photography, and other forms, black artists of the lynching era confronted their audiences with the devastating reality: “The South is crucifying Christ again,” and this time “he’s dark of hue” (p. 96, quoting Cullen).
The book culminates, then, with chapter 5, in which Cone highlights the sometimes-subtle, sometimes-public, always-prophetic role of black women in the black struggle for justice. The pioneer of this struggle is Ida Wells (pp. 126-33), and its central insight given poetic form in Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit” (pp. 134-38), as famously performed in 1939 by Billie Holliday. The last couplet of the first verse (“Black body swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees”) weaves together, in haunting fashion, cross, lynching tree, and Eden’s forbidden fruit—humanity’s grasping after the latter leading to the evils of the former. In this chapter, powerful themes of anguish and hope, doubt and trust, faith and despair, the problem of suffering, and the hypocrisy of white Christianity rise painfully to the service, testified to by the witness of black women, “the oppressed of the oppressed” (p. 121).
What, then, can be said about this powerful, personal, aching book? This is liberation theology at its most beautiful and best—a theologia crucis rooted in a sustained conversation between Scripture and praxis. Using the social location of black Americans—particularly black suffering, made visible in the icon of the lynching tree—Cone bears witness for white America to the gospel of the cross, a gospel it claimed but betrayed. Refusing to ignore black experience in this country, Cone invites the lynching tree to illuminate the meaning of the cross, and allows the cross to speak all its “terrible beauty” over the tragedy of the lynching tree (pp. xviii, 162). This is the inescapable, relentless, and tragically correct thesis of the book: the cross and lynching tree mutually interpret one another (see, e.g., pp. xix, 63, 92-93, 160-63, 166), as the cover of the book so subtly (and beautifully) suggests. This point needs to be driven home. It is the lynching tree that interprets the cross: skandalon kai mōria, Paul might say (1 Corinthians 1:23). Scandal and folly to us, perhaps, but also, paradoxically, “the power and wisdom of God” (v. 24).
If it is the lynching tree that interprets the cross, then it is also the lynched who truly understand—who see—the cross: “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are” (vv. 27-28). The Cross and the Lynching Tree is, at bottom, a black midrash on 1 Corinthians 1:18-31—a poignant and painful commentary on the heart of Paul’s gospel. To put it bluntly, Abel Meeropol saw, and Reinhold Niebuhr did not. Fired in the crucible of suffering—the chief icon of which is the lynching tree—my black sisters and brothers simply understand the cross more deeply than I do, and so see the gospel more clearly as well. When it comes to the cross, there is a hermeneutical “advantage” to suffering; to truly see the cross, suffering seems a prerequisite. This will stay with me long after the details of the book have faded from memory.
There is one final, still more challenging, step to Cone’s argument. It is not just that the lynching tree interprets the cross, nor that the lynched alone see. It is that those who suffer most see with greatest clarity. To follow the logic and trajectory of the book, it is not enough to say that Meeropol saw and Niebuhr did not. One also feels compelled to say that Meeropol saw more clearly than King himself. In Cone’s narrative arc, a fog lifts on the gospel as the fog of suffering descends. In this sense, the book paradoxically gets harder and more hopeful to read as it goes along, for insight deepens as suffering intensifies. This raises a host of questions about suffering, but the ones I can’t shake are these: in our (laudable) rush to alleviate suffering, do we remove the sufferer from a position of hermeneutical privilege—a place from which one most clearly sees? Is the avoidance of suffering—itself a “privilege”—actually a deep handicap? Most directly: in the present, this penultimate time in which we live, is suffering good or is it not? This is unresolved in Cone (compare, e.g., pp. 92, 147-48 and 150), but this is not a criticism. I suspect it’s unresolved in Scripture as well.
In giving us this book, and in “giv[ing] voice to black victims” (p. 21), James Cone has given us a gift—the chance to see the cross anew, painful as it is to look. If the white church in America today, co-opted by seemingly every vision but the cross, is to regain something of its Christian witness, I suspect the first step is to listen to the voice of the lynched church, wherever she is found, beckoning us to the cross. If we listen, perhaps God will relent, and in his mercy use the black church to teach the white church what it is to be orthodox again—to believe and live the cross. The last word, then, belongs not to me, but to Howard Thurman, as quoted by Cone, “By some amazing but vastly creative spiritual insight, the slave undertook the redemption of the religion that the master had profaned in his midst” (pp. 133-34). In this country, God, let it be so.
This resource is part of the series More than Imago Dei: Theological Explorations on Race. Click here to explore more resources from this series.
Benj Petroelje is the Pastor of 14th Street Christian Reformed Church in Holland, MI. He holds a PhD in New Testament from the University of Edinburgh. Benj is a member of the St. Peter Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
