The Cross and the Lynching Tree: Introduction, Margin Notes, and Chapter Summaries
James Cone’s, The Cross and the Lynching Tree is an extended reflection on one exquisite insight, namely that the the two forms of torture and death are interconneced. When you think about it, this connection seems obvious. Both are forms of extra-judicial punishment and execution. Both are forms of spectacle torture. Both are devices used by the dominating power to inforce its grip on power. Both are sadistic. Both add shame to pain as a way to heighten terror. Both suspend the victim above the ground to enhance display.
When readers see these similarities, they wonder why they had missed them. Cone goes beyond comparing cross and lynching. He presses the Church, especially White Christians, on why they had noticed this. How is it that Christians perpetrated lynchings, enjoyed the spectacle, and never noticed that they were mimicking Pontius Pilate, the screaming mob, and the Roman legionnaires who nailed Jesus to the cross?
Cone presses his point by showing that the church’s greatest social justice theologian, Union Seminary’s Reinhold Niebuhr, also missed the connection. Cone’s second chapter traces Niebuhr’s public career and writings and finds no awareness that the Cross of Christ and the thousands of lynchings in the United States are similar both as devices of torture and in spiritual significance.
The whole of Cone’s book might be seen as reflection on Paul’s words in Romans 6.5: “…If we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his.”
Even though the White Church, replete with celebrated theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr, missed the connection with between cross and lynching tree, Black Christians who suffered under the threat of lynching were immediately aware that the suffering they endured was akin to that of Jesus himself. Non-churchy Blacks like Countee Cullin and E. Simms Campbell in their paintings or poems clearly associate the lynching victim with Jesus Christ. And in this recognition there flowed a vital spiritual power that brought into being such vibrant Black traditions as the Blues, religious Spirituals, and the separate Black church itself. In other words a kind of resurrection did indeed follow the tragic loss of young Black men.
I’d like to propose a reason for the White church’s failure to link Black suffering with biblical themes that Cone did not touch upon. The reason is simply that our minds are so preoccupied with personal interpretations of Jesus’ crucifixion that we overlook the fact that he shares our deepest struggles.
The most prominent interpretation of the cross, one with which dominates the imaginations of American Christians, follows Anselm’s satisfaction theory. Anselm was a Benedictine theologian in the United Kingdom in the late 11th century. The prevailing economic order of the time was feudalism. Anselm saw a similarity between the endebtedness of feudal peasants and the lord of the manor under whose protection and oversight they labored. Anselm imagined a situation where people tended to owe to their Lord–God–more than they could ever repay. Jesus’ self-offering on the cross satisfies the outstanding debt of the peasants and keeps them debt free. When applied to sinners and their God, this payment of debt is the meaning of salvation.
While this is a cleaver and apt interpretation of Jesus’ cross, it is absent in the Bible and in some ways foreign to the actual events of Jesus’ life. There is, for example, no element of a resurrection in Anselm’s theory.
Despite these drawbacks, the idea that Jesus has paid an overwhelming debt–the satisfaction theory–is taught and preached in Christian churches throughout Europe and the United States. My proposal here is that the dominence that the Satisfaction Theory exerted over the church blinded Christians from seeing that Jesus’ cross saves in other ways as well.
When Christians begin to see Jesus’ cross as exclusively a device to remedy their own sin problem, then they might easily miss the fact that the cross was a logical and organic culmination of Jesus public ministry. The circumstances that brought Jesus to the cross have a tendency to repeat themselves through history. Similar circumstances led young Black men to their deaths by torture at the hands of hate-frenzied mobs.
For several reasons the Satisfaction Theory is losing favor today. Important as it seems, Jesus didn’t not come with the sole mission to take care of people’s sin problem. He came into the world to join them in the human struggle. When suffering people, such as those young Blacks who were lynched, realize that Jesus stands with them because he suffered in much the same way, they experience this solidarity as healing and restoring. It’s also full of promise as the passage from Romans above asserts. “If we have been united with him in a death like his, surely we will be united with him in a resurrection like his. ”
The form that this resurrection took is the subject of Cone’s book.
Notes and Chapter Summaries
Introduction Notes:
181: He wants to connect cross and lynching
188: Whites want to forget lynching; Blacks stuff the painful memory down until it erupts. To forget the lynching atrocity leaves us with a fraudulent perspective on our society.
200: The deliverance cone talks about is our legacy of slavery and White Supremacy
208: Preaching about the cross in Black churches reliably evokes powerful responses from the congregation.
247: The thought here is a retrospect on Cone’s efforts to bring his blackness, Christianity, and the civil rights movement into comfortable co-existence. Christianity always seems to stand outside. The church was thoroughly White and contained a quietly White-supremacist outlook towards Christianity. Wasn’t the Perry Valley Church somewhat incompatible with Black America? It certainly had no incentive to be educated about Blacks and their condition in life. Exactly how the church has been White supremacist, I cannot clearly say.
251: It has taken courage to see the obvious, namely that 350 years of slavery and Jim Crow imposed to secure White dominance is incompatible with Christian faith. Likewise, Black, resilience through the suffering under White supremacy indicates an inner spiritual spring of enlivening waters.
259: The cross helped Cone deal with the brutality of lynching and vice versa. They interpreted each other. He wants to give voice to victims as a primary goal of the book.
263: He is interested in how Blacks can survive during a time of such terror Knowing they could be lynched at any moment how does one keep one’s sanity?
Excursus: How do we keep our sanity knowing that terror is coming for our children? “Nothing is more terrifying than the lynching tree.”
Introduction Summary
The introduction works to identify both Cone’s task and the difficulty of the task. This book will be an extended reflection on a cluster of important things: Christianity, White supremacy, Black suffering, and lynching. Cone’s fundamental hunch is that together these factors illuminate each other. But it is neither simple nor obvious how this interrelationship works. Cone knows that when we can bring them together the merger releases deep meaning.
For example, when a Black congregation becomes excited at the moment when the Cross of Christ is preached it is clear that a deep current has been tapped. When Blacks fix their gaze in the ghastly history of lynching, they find a resource for coping with their own on-going suffering. When Cone himself ponders the cross of Christ he sees the horrible legacy of lynching with wiser, stronger eyes. The reverse is equally true. Gaze upon the lynching tree and you understand the cross better.
The reader can understand Cone’s reluctance to write this book. The insight that cross and lynching tree are related exists only in the realm of the hunch and at the moment of vivid personal inspiration. In other words, the linkage between the two isn’t proveable. The task of capturing in words the spiritual threads that run between, say, lynching and Christian faith, must have seemed impossible. Yet, with a lifetime of reflection and the help of wise friends who read Cone’s manuscript, the book was written.
Chapter 1: “Nobody Knows de Trouble I See:” The Cross and the Lynching Tree in the Black Experience
308: There are several parallels between the cross and lynching tree. Both fetched onlookers who gazed upon the victim who was deemed as especially cursed. Both cross and lynching tree were public deaths designed to reinforce community values and community hierarchy. In the case of the cross, it inverts community values and brings a counter message of hope. Hope comes through defeat; suffering does not have the last word.
317: Cone makes the point that on the other side of the cross is (resurrection) victory. Victory is never snuffed out, a fact that attracts people living in hopeless, defeated places.
325: Both the cross and the lynching tree were potent symbols for Blacks in the lynching era 1880 – 1940.
329: Both the cross and lynching tree represent a thirst for an assurance that humanity’s worst need not determine our destiny or the final judgment on human life.
347: Lynching was an extra legal form of terror, which originally was not racialized. Common criminals, Mexicans, Jews etc. could be lynched.
351: Lynching grew out of the shaming of the South, which was defeated by the North. They did not want to be ruled by Blacks.
354: Whites were simply not going to associate on an equal basis with Blacks. The dividing of the South into military districts afforded Blacks some protection from mob violence.
358: Klan members were protected by neighbors who would not vote on juries to convict.
363: “Birth of a Nation” portrayed lynching as honorable justice. It became a point of unity between North and South. By 1930, 90% of White southerners had seen “Birth of a Nation.”
374: Anti-Black terror left Black America in a state worse than slavery.
392: Image of Black women transformed from docile slaves to aggressive, sexualized “Jezebels.” Black men became rapists.
493: Much history of lynching given here. It is significant that it appears to have united North and South. Lynching occurred throughout the country. They were spectacle torture. The Blues arose out of the lynch culture as a way to express the horror and suffering of Blacks. Blues as an art form was a way of hanging…
510: Until their humanity would be restored.
521: Blacks through this suffering showed a capacity to survive and hang on to their dignity.
531: The Blues gave Blacks a way to speak back to lynching and overcome its terror.
550: Even Blacks who never saw a lynching nor were abused by mob violence lived in precarious proximity to death.
550: The Juke Joints were places where Black joy and energy could flourish.
598: Religion—a way for black people to find hope in the walls of the Church Blacks experienced the divine power of the cross. Maybe it was a symbol so gruesome, so lurid, that it somehow could stand next to the lynching tree and take some the tree’s dark power from it.
633: Christianity allowed Blacks to go down with Job, with Paul, with the Hebrew people, into Exile, with Jesus to the cross knowing that God was always faithful to lift them from the pit of despair.
671: The cross was central to the Black Christian experience.
675: The cross was comparable to the lynching tree and because of this held power to remind that God was present with them.
711: Black people also had a deep identification with Jacob and his struggle at Jabbok
744: Black people struggled with God in White America.
779: Blacks needed to leave White Churches in order to experience the power of the cross in addressing the difficulties of their experience.
782: Faith receives its authenticity when it is questioned. I think what he is saying here is that Blacks initially found Christian faith silent and indifferent to their struggles. But when challenged, the deep contradictions of the cross began to speak deeply to Blacks.
787: Even God’s existence is questioned. It seems that where this is leading is to the discovery that God in Christ shows up on the cross, or maybe on the lynching tree. Story of youth hanged by Nazis told by Wiesel.
792: The lynching period (1880 – 1940) felt like the most God-forsaken time.
807: The spirituals, church, with the cross at the center gave birth to the Black freedom movement in the 1950’s, 60’s spirituals, soul of movement, blues= individual expression of defiance, Church was anchor.
810: The Cross powered peopled and sent them into the street seeking social change.
Chapter 1 Summary:
Cone begins his first chapter by observing that there are several parallels between the cross of Jesus and the lynching tree terror that stretched between 1880 and 1940, mostly in the Southern States. Both cross and lynching tree are wooden upright structures used to hang victims. Both are forms of spectacle torture designed to shame victims publicly. Both were used to reinforce social dominance by one group or cultural standard. And both have had an impact on Black Americans, especially those living under the terror of being lynched.
Cone gives some history of lynching. Four uniquely Black practices were born out of and were vitalized by the terror of lynching:
- the blues musical form,
- Christian spirituals,
- the Black Church,
- and the juke joint.
Despite the grim terror that inspired these expressions of Black identity, each of them brims with energy and joy.
There is probably a fifth benefit that grew out of the horror of lynching, namely African American’s deep attachment to the Cross of Jesus. The shadow of the lynching tree was a continuous terror for the Black Community for almost a century–between 1882 to 1968. Cone reminds the reader that the preaching of the cross in Black churches always awakens an outpouring of spiritual energy. Cone offers the image of the cross standing beside the lynching tree as if these are two symbols arising out of the same horror, human cruelty vented both on God and other people. The cross and lynching tree shed light each other. Both proclaim that cruelty and death will never have the final word. As resurrection and reconciliation follow the cross of Jesus, some grace will also follow in the trail of the lynching tree.
Chapter 2: “The Terrible Beauty of the Cross and the Tragedy of the Lynching Tree: A Reflection on Reinhold Niebuhr”
1047: No one is comparing cross and lynching tree.
1053: Nearly 5000 lynchings. No one before has compared these lynchings with Jesus crucifixion.
1068: I think this chapter will be a reflection on why lynching eluded theologians.
1073: Niebuhr, despite his prominence, overlooked the connection. This explains why African Americans have needed to develop their own theological imagination.
1103: Cone gives a brief overview of Niebuhrian social ethics, emphasizing that democracy and justice are approximations of the love that Jesus requires tempered by human sin.
1113: Cone contrasts Barth and Niebuhr. The former begins with the reality of God and moves to the world, the latter begins with the facts in the world. This pertains to Blacks in the sense that one would think that the fact of lynching would have a big impact on Niebuhr.
1113: Cone contrasts Barth and Niebuhr. The former begins with the reality of God and moves to the world, the latter begins with the facts in the world. This pertains to Blacks in the sense that one would think that the fact of lynching would have a big impact on Niebuhr.
1131: Cone moves to discuss Niebuhr’s use of Nietzsche’s term transvaluation of values, which illuminates Jesus’ weakness.
1160: Niebuhr recognizes the upside down power scheme in the Gospel message. Jesus is weak, shamed, and powerless. And in these states he triumphs.
1187: Niebuhr paid attention to the gradualism of William Faulkner and Hodding Carter than to MLK.
Excursus: This chapter is an exposition of the failure of the Church, even at the point of its most promising theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr.
1226: Niebuhr was even able to write persuasively about the failure of empathy in those who don’t walk in another’s shoes.
1230: Niebuhr had been on the ground when he was a pastor in Detroit, a hotbed of racial tension
1250: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in contrast, apparently could feel empathy as demonstrated by his trip to NYC.
1268: Niebuhr reflected little real interest in Blacks and wrote little about them.
1448: Niebuhr’s passion for Jewish concerns contrasts with his relative silence on Black concerns and suffering.
1485: Cone gives expansive coverage to a radio dialogue between James Baldwin and Reinhold Niebuhr following the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama
1552: Later in cone’s career he returned to Niebuhr, reading Moral Man and Immoral Society.
1593: At length, when cone took his professorship at Union, Niebuhr read his first book, Black Power and Black Theology.
1624: Cone mentions two Black preachers who clearly made the connection between lynching and crucifixion: E.T. Wellford and John E. White.
1649: The lynching tree is Jesus’ cross in America
Chapter 2 Summary:
This chapter runs through much of Reinhold Niebuhr’s career as one of America’s foremost theologians. Cone laments and is obviously exasperated by the fact that Niebuhr, who is manifestly capable of understanding Black sorrow and rage, never appears to “get it” about what America’s Black population needs. Niebuhr misses numerous opportunities to dig into Black experience and pain. Repeatedly, he declines to engage in Black suffering in any sustained way. He takes his cue from Hodding Carter and William Faulkner rather than Martin Luther King and ends up with a gradualist approach to an issue that requires revolutionary change. Needless to say, Niebuhr fails to make the connection between the cross of Jesus and the lynching tree. As a consequence, Niebuhr’s otherwise influential career is marred by his mediocre response to Black issues. As Cone assumes his own teaching responsibilities at Union, he returns appreciatively to Niebuhr’s writings. Nevertheless, America’s foremost Black theologians and ethicists never make the connection between the cross and the lynching tree.
Chapter 3: “Bearing the Cross and Staring Down the Lynching Tree: MLK’s Struggle to Redeem the Soul of America”
2112: Cone recounts the 1955 Emmitt Till lynching. MLK eulogized Till in a service in Atlanta. The lynching was one catalyst that arguably launched the civil rights movement.
2127: Instead of inspiring fearful cowering, the Till lynching sparked defiance and fearlessness in Black communities across America.
2130: Emmitt Till’s mother displayed her son’s battered body so people could see what White supremacists could do. She further wondered aloud whether Emmitt’s death could save the world from lynching, given the fact that Jesus death could save the world.
2162: Cone describes the anguish and spiritual struggle of lynched victim’s family members.
2179: Till was the sacrificial lamb of the civil rights movement. Cone asserts that it is Till’s death which drove America’s Blacks into the streets newly unafraid of death. He goes on to say that Christianity provided the energy for Blacks to rise up.
2192: MLK, throughout his public life, knew his life was on the line. This awareness extended back to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Cone draws the distinction between activism and simply teaching in a seminary classroom.
2222: Cone resumes criticizing Niebuhr for his disengagement. Niebuhr was silent when Till was lynched.
2247: MLK was reared in a church setting and was constantly hearing about and singing about the cross.
2262: Cone gives examples of the African American Church’s reverence for the cross, and the piety that connected Blacks with the pain and grief of Jesus’ crucifixion.
2279: One way to speak about what Cone repeatedly struggles to make clear is to use the language of “accompaniment.” God accompanies Blacks and thus establishes solidarity with them through Jesus’ death. Suffering from lynching and other abuses, Blacks realize that in Jesus’ crucifixion they have solidarity with God. The pain and shame they feel has blessedness to it because it ushers them into the experience Jesus endured.
2283: Cone gives examples of the similarities between the cross and lynching tree by mentioning similar aspects. Both, for example, were terribly lonely.
2295: Salvation for Blacks is not rescue from the lynching tree but the confidence that Jesus is powerfully united with them.
2300: Cone returns to stories from MLK’s life.
2316: Describes a lynching witnessed by MLK’s father.
2344: The book reflects on MLK’s midnight telephone death threat and Martin’s prayer, in which God freshly shows Martin that his calling is to lead and stand for freedom. This assurance allows him to take the bombing of his home serenely.
2348: King sees Jesus and the example of non-violence.
2374: There is a strong connection between standing courageously and a sense of vocation, which MLK clearly had.
2398: Cross-bearing became a theme and focus in King’s life.
2402: cone reflects on Simon of Cyrene who was a Black man who helped Jesus bear his cross.
2405: The cross lay at the heart of King’s resilience and endurance of daily danger for 12 years.
2410: Cone credits the cross with giving King the freedom from fear and the courage to tirelessly work for racial justice.
2418: King spoke daily about his death.
2426: King talked also about the cross.
2439: Later, King objected to the Vietnam War and suffered much criticism for his stand against it.
2456: King believed that only a cross-bearing life could break the power of violence and counter evil.
2460: MLK increasingly drew energy from Jesus’ death and resurrection. King experienced a divine affirmation on his ministry. Here again is a clear statement of the idea and this solidarity is saving. The accompaniment banished deep aloneness.
2470: Also, in the solidarity with Jesus, King channeled his suffering and hardships into creative energy.
2524: If through the cross, Jesus establishes an accompanying solidarity, it is a difficult relationship. Suffering, even with Jesus presence, is always difficult and the person suffering must struggle to move forward.
2524: King’s final trip to Memphis was much like Jesus’ decision to go to Jerusalem.
Chapter 3 Summary
The third chapter is a sustained look at the energy and inspiration that MLK drew from the cross of Christ. Beginning with the lynching of Emmitt Till, the Civil Rights movement that began in the mid-1950’s, was a continual life and death struggle, especially in the South. As with Jesus’ ministry, Martin Luther King’s non-violent resistance attracted violent retaliation often from governments and police. King himself was repeatedly harassed and threatened with death. Through the years that King headed a significant branch of the Civil Rights movement, he more and more drew spiritual energy from the cross. He saw his own path, like that of Jesus, ending in death. Towards the end of his life, he was more and more certain that death awaited him. This sense that Christ accompanied him came to a culmination one night following a telephone death threat. In fear, King prayed and received a sense of God guiding him forward in his vocation of leadership in the Civil Rights Movement. King’s movement was founded on the principle that only love could dislodge hatred and violence.
Chapter 4: “The Recrucified Christ in Black Literary Imagination”
2803: Black artists saw what White theologians missed, namely the solidarity between Christ on the cross and the lynching tree.
2808: The clearest image of, and the functional repeat of Jesus’ crucifixion, is the image of the lynched Black man in the American South.
2813: Black artists tended not to be conventionally religious. Nevertheless, they served as Christianity’s prophets and witnesses of Black suffering.
2817: Lynching was the ugly center of life after emancipation.
2821: The lack of theological imagination in White American Christianity is stunning to Cone.
2833: The artists of this period bore a heavy burden.
2839: Black ministers also failed to connect the cross and lynching tree. Artists, however, got it.
2952: Countee Cullen was a poet associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
2858: Nothing was more of a contradiction to Christian values than lynching. Yet White ministers said nothing.
2862: Walter Everette Hawkins: “A Festival in Christendom” 1920 wrote a poem about hypocrisy of White Christians at lynching.
2895: Gwendolyn Brooks, Pulitzer Winner, 1957: “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock.” Sees Jesus as lynchee.
2895: James Allen’s “Without Sanctuary” 2003. Photography.
2905: Originally photographs were used among revelers to extend and memorialize the spectacle. Allen collected lynching photography. Audiences were moved. Whites today are the descendants of the lynchers and the revelers.
2929: The US Senate issued an apology in 2003 to families of all lynching victims, but failed to enact an anti-lynching law. The House of Representatives passed several anti-lynching bills, only to have them fail in the Senate.
2938: In response to this failure, the NAAPC and Communist Party sponsored anti-lynching exhibitions in 1935.
2942: Generally, black artists addressed Black audiences. Non-Black artists addressed White audiences. E. Simms Campbell: charcoal drawing: “I Passed Along this Way” 1935. Christ carrying cross with Black lynching victim.
2946: Hale Woodruff: prints. Associated with Harlem Renaissance.
2950: Christianity was a common language between Whites and Blacks. White hypocrisy is on glaring display.
2954: Julius Bloch (German) Oil painting. “The Lynching” 1934. The Christ in crucifixions (paintings) was often Black.
2959: W.E.B. Dubois. His faith, while not conventional, aligned with Christianity and anticipated a better world.
2964: Dubois wrote extensively about lynching. Dubois: “Riddle of the Sphinx,” “Jesus Christ in Texas.” Depicts Christ as Black.
2984: Dubois: “Second Coming” Christ is depicted as a Black baby.
2995: Against America’s White Church: Dubois belt that if Jesus came to America he would have hobnobbed with Blacks.
3004: Dubois: “Christmas in Georgia,” “The Gospel of Mary Brown.” This is a retelling of Luke’s Nativity story with Black characters living in a humble cabin in the South. The story culminates with a lynching and surprisingly a resurrection.
3055: The element of faith in Black experience is mixed with understandable doubt which comes from suffering.
3059: Dubois: “Easter.”
3063: Atlanta Race Riots, 1906. Several lynchings happened. For Dubois this suffering did not snuff out his faith.
3081: Robert Hayden: “Night, Death, Mississippi” (1962) Uses voices of sadistic White lynchers.
3107: James Andrews (1939) compares burning of Black man to animal sacrifice.
3114: Claude McKay. Sonnet “The Lynching”
3137: Lorraine Hansberry: (A Raisin in the Sun) “Lynchsong.”
3176: Christ turns menacing when symbolized in White Lynchers.
3186: Walter White: Rope and Faggot (book) Christianity fostered a fanaticism that encouraged lynching.
3197: (p. 113) Cone characterizes the lyncher’s faith as static and inherited.
3206: Dubois sees art, without apology, as a kind of beneficial propaganda. Langston Hughes, poet laureate of Black America wrote, “Christ in Alabama,” which angered Whites. Also, “The Bitter River”
3248: Communists defined racial justice as central to their program and attracted Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Hughes traveled to Russia: “good Morning Revolution.” Hughes: “Goodbye Christ.”
3295: Lots of resistance to Hughes from Blacks and Whites. Aimee McPherson organized demonstrations against him.
3304: Sometimes the artists themselves are criticized and ostracized.
3308: White (and White supremacist) founding and control of church’s has in part fostered White Christian complicity with White Supremacy.
3312: Black slaves had only White religion in which to “carve out” religious meaning for their own situation. They wisely went to the Bible; they saw God’s identification with the poor and communicated this message in songs and sermon.
3316: Commonsense theology.
Chapter 4 Summary
Cone moves to a survey of artists and authors who recognized the link between lynching and Jesus’ suffering and death. These were not always Christians but, unlike the White Christian Church they readily saw the parallels between Christ’s fate and the horrible history of lynching in America. To a surprising degree, artists and poets who brought the depravity of lynching to museums and publications were often themselves subject to censure and criticism.
Chapter 5: “Oh Mary, Don’t You Weep”
3552: It’s important to remember that women were lynched too. Moreover, they played a critical role in resisting lynching and White supremacy.
3566: Sometimes women were substituted for Black men who may have escaped the mob.
3571: Most lynched women were challenging White Supremacy. Women comprised 2% of the lynching victims.
3584: Additionally, Black women suffered economic hardship and relationship loss when male family members were taken from them by the mob.
3592: Black suffering created solidarity with suffering biblical figures like Job. They especially identified with Jesus.
3614: Only in dance and singing we’re Blacks able adequately to express how they felt in their struggle.
3618: The contradiction in Black religion was the tension between doubt and trust. Doubt came when evil seemed so overpowering that God seemed defeated or absent. Trust brought heroic perseverance and creativity in living under oppression.
3622: While Black men could contemplate and even succeed at running away, Black women, often with children could not.
3637: Ida B. Wells (b.1862) was a pioneer in anti-lynching activism.
3643: Frederick Douglas acknowledged Well’s remarkable work. His letter recognized the hypocrisy and blindness of the Christian Church.
3646: Wells sued a railroad successfully.
3651: The lynching of 3 men launched Well’s career against lynching.
3660: Wells was militant in her cause and moderate organizations shunned her. Often lynching was defended as a measure to protect White women.
3669: Whites tolerated no competition from Blacks.
3677: Rape was a pretext for lynching about 1/3 of the time. Often sexual contact between Black men and White women was consensual. Cone relates story of the minister’s wife in Elyria, Ohio who had a consensual affair with a Black man, William Offett. The minister, upon hearing his wife’s admission to having the affair, arranged for Offett’s release from prison.
3694: Well’s in “The Truth about Lynching,” insisted that it was untrue that Black men raped White women any more frequently than any other race.
36713: Ida Wells was deeply spiritual as were her parents.
3731: Wells asked explicitly about the hypocrisy of the White Church in view of its tolerance of lynching. She called on White liberals to speak out on lynching.
3742: Wells was particularly critical of Dwight Moody who segregated his revivals.
3746: Wells was more proud to be Black, a race that had not deeply compromised itself. The author, Cone realized that White religion was fraudulent.
3755: Wells felt that opposition to lynching was a bare minimum in order to achieve legitimacy as a Christian organization or church.
3759: Wells, in all of her writings, never made the connection between Jesus’ cross and lynching.
3763: Wells never thought of herself as an orator. She was plain spoken.
3778: Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” was strongest statement against lynching.
3792: The lyrics were composed by a Jewish man, Abel Meeropol (Lewis Allen), who wrote the song after viewing a lynching photo taken by Lawrence Beitler.
3803: Sometimes Jews were lynched.
3815: Holiday and “Strange Fruit” build on the work of anti-lynching activists. Subsequent singers who covered this song gave it their own interpretation.
3824: The song forced Whites to remember lynching and it was banned from some radio shows.
3865: Strange Fruit put Blacks at the foot of the lynching tree. “Were You There?” put them at the foot of the cross.
3869: Ralph Ellison said that Black people have blues, jazz, spirituals, and dance in place of freedom. The struggle to survive with one’s dignity was important.
3887: Women were also active in churches, NAACP, and other male-led organizations for equal rights for Blacks.
3894: At first, Black church women were more like Booker T. Washington, accommodation, not protest.
3903: After WWI, Black women became more assertive. They made an appeal to White women.
3914: Anti-lynching women’s associations made the plea that lynching made organized government its prime victim.
3923: The women’s work organizationally was really the beginning of the civil rights movement.
3985: Fannie Lou Hamer: All of these women in the Black Freedom movement were Christians. Durkheim’s definition of religion goes beyond communicating with God. The person who believes is stronger because of it.
4025: Black church has generally consisted of Black preachers and women in the pews.
4039: Redeeming America through non-violent suffering.
4047: Black liberation theology emerged out of Black people’s struggle with nonviolence (Christianity) and self-defense (Black Power)
4060: Here is a view of salvation through the cross that rejects suffering as only pathway.
Chapter 5 Summary
Cone dedicates a chapter to the important women of the Black freedom movement. Women made a unique and effective contribution not only through their suffering under Jim Crow and the lynching crisis, but also as artists and organizers. Cone devotes most of his attention to Ida Wells an early anti-lynching activist, Fannie Lou Hamer, an effective civil rights organizer, and Billie Holiday whose rendition of “Strange Fruit” brought lynching’s horror to a wide mixed-race audience. Ida Wells’ roughhewn plain-spokenness pioneered same insight that Cone advances, namely that White Christianity, which can permit without protest the practice of lynching, is disqualified from to be considered “Christian.” Virtually all of the women mentioned were deeply spiritual and drew heavily on their spirituality as a motivator in their activism.
Conclusion Summary
The author takes a personal turn at the end of Cross and the Lynching Tree. He recounts his own long journey both as a Christian and as a Black American wrestling with the spiritual evil of lynching. Early in the chapter he notes that significant turning point experiences of Jesus, Paul, MLK, and Malcolm X had the effect of making clear God’s calling or vocation. Cone reflects on the Cross of Christ, making the point that it drives Christians not towards gauzy spirituality but towards the hard realities of everyday life. Paradoxically, the Cross stands for life’s greatest pain and cruelty while being an unimaginable form of torture. Despite the Cross’s pain it also is the God-chosen pathway towards resurrection and renewed life. It is the paradox of the Cross that makes it such a powerful symbol for people undergoing unimaginable suffering at the hands of a cruel dominant group. Cone makes the point that abstract theories of the cross, such as Anselm’s satisfaction theory are unsatisfactory because they abstract Jesus’ suffering out of the context of his life and the social setting in which the cross was raised. Cone joins his voice with others who criticize those who would valorize suffering as a value in itself. The cross’s true power, Cone concludes is that it establishes a deep solidarity between Jesus and sufferers—like the 4000 victims of lynching in the Jim Crow era. Here then is the master clue for the cross’s ability to save. God doesn’t take away the suffering of an oppressed group such as American Blacks in the century after chattel slavery was made illegal. God instead joins the victims and enters into their pain. And at length in God’s power Jesus also emerges alive and whole. The great hope implied is that those who have been Jesus companions in suffering, such as the lynching victims, will also be his companions in victory and new life. It’s in this hope that the struggling descendants of America’s slaves continue to draw vitality.
