First Post
A while back I read about half of James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Seems like a good time to finish it. I used the connection last night in class to try to get a sense of the dynamics of a Roman crucifixion.
First, crucifixion was about power. It showed Jews who was boss, and it wasn't them. Cone says of growing up in Arkansas, "White people were virtually free to do anything to blacks with impunity."
Second, a cross was about shame and disgrace. The Romans crucified people along a main route to enter a city like Jerusalem. The victim was naked, completely exposed. People watched, just as in the 1930 picture of the lynching in Marion, Indiana.
If this comparison angers some, we begin to understand what Paul meant in 1 Corinthians 1:23 when he said that the cross was a stumbling block to Jews.
Chapter 1
I reviewed the first chapter of James Cone's book The Cross and the Lynching Tree this morning. It gives a small taste of the slavery and post-slavery struggles of African-Americans in the south. As the great-grandson of an Union soldier whose roots are in Indiana, these were not my struggles.
(I might add that my great-grandfather and his generation would be infuriated to see confederate flags in Indiana and the north. In the comments I made it clear that the north was full of its own hypocrisy, with the KKK, redlining, and other racist features.)
I grew up with little sense of how the lives of others with a different color skin are usually more complicated (which is what is meant by the phrase "white privilege," something you don't even know you have--it is more about subtractions that are not added to your life than additions of negatives of which you are aware).
The sentences I want to quote from chapter 1 are these:
"They found in the cross the spiritual power to resist the violence they so often suffered."
"Faith was the one thing white people could not control or take away."
Chapter 2
"Between 1880 and 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus."
______________
Cone spends this chapter reflecting on Rienhold Niebuhr, who had much to commend him but was still not a perfect man when it came to race.
"Man's [sic] capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." Niebuhr
"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime." N
"People without imagination really have no right to write about ultimate things." N
Niebuhr was a gradualist when it came to matters of race.
Cone concludes: "Niebuhr had 'eyes to see' black suffering, but I believe he lacked the 'heart to feel' it as his own." "Niebuhr took no risks for blacks."
______________
MLK disagreed with Niebuhr's gradualist approach.
"It is hardly a moral act to encourage others patiently to accept injustice which he himself does not endure." MLK
"It has always been difficult for white people to empathize fully with the experience of black people." Cone
"There is no justice without power."
"There is very little justice in any educational institution where black presence is less than 20 percent of the faculty, students, and board members."
This was an interesting and convicting chapter.
Chapter 3
Chapter 3 of Cone's book focuses on MLK.
The chapter begins with the story of Emmett Till, who visited Mississippi in 1955 and was killed for whistling at a white girl. This would be something like the last straw. "If lynching was intended to instill silence and passivity, this event had the opposite effect."
Much of the chapter sketches MLK's relation to his fears and potential death. His home was bombed early on in 1956. And of course he was assassinated in Memphis. One theme he both inherited and continued was that the cross is the answer to the lynching tree.
Here are some quotes:
"Suffering always poses the deepest test of faith."
"We do not know what we truly believe or what our theology is worth until 'our highest hopes are turned into shambles of despair.'"
"In the end there was no way to prevent someone from killing him." "Suffering is the inevitable fate of those who stand up to the forces of hatred."
"He did believe that his suffering and that of African Americans and their supporters would in some mysterious way redeem America from the sin of white supremacy."
Benjamin Mays said of Jesus -- "The chief trouble with Jesus: He was a troublemaker."
Chapter 4
Chapter 4 of Cone's book was difficult because within it you could see the faith crisis that white ("Christian") violence caused in African-Americans of the early 1900s and even to today. To see a lynched individual as a "recrucified Christ" helped because in this image Jesus identifies with suffering rather than being the perpetrator of it.
One startling aside is that I grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida without (as far as I remember) ever hearing of Rubin Stacey, who was lynched there in 1935.
The chapter addresses the way black artists like W. E. B. DuBois and Langston Hughes interplayed the cross and the lynching tree. It was hard for both of them to detach Christianity from the white oppressors who so strongly espoused it.
"The church to-day is the strongest seat of racial and color prejudice," DuBois wrote. He also wrote, "If Jesus Christ came to America, He would associate with Negros and Italians and working people."
Thinking of Langston Hughes, Cone wrote, "It was not easy for blacks to find a language to talk about Christianity publicly because the Jesus they embraced was also, at least in name, embraced by whites who lynched black people."
A final note is the irony that it was only last Wednesday that Congress finally passed an anti-lynching bill. Such a bill was first introduced into Congress 120 years ago. Imagine that. Cone mentioned its failure to pass over the years when he wrote this book 15 years ago.
What is wrong with this picture?
Chapter 5
Chapter 5 of Cone's book looks at the struggles and contributions of black women toward the achievement of the Golden Rule in American society and thus the realization of a truly Christian nation.
Langston Hughes put it this way: "Let America be America again... America never was America to me." MLK also sought "to redeem the soul of America."
Black women made up about 2 percent of blacks killed by lynching. On the other hand, there were those individuals who did not believe a black woman could be raped by definition.
Women played key roles in voicing the need to see the Golden Rule played out for all America. Ida B. Wells was so vocal that she was often marginalized even within the black community. Here are some of her words: "The nation cannot profess Christianity, which makes the golden rule its foundation stone, and continue to deny equal opportunity for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the black race."
She was critical of D. L. Moody, who segregated his revivals to appease whites in the South. "Our American Christians are too busy saving the souls of white Christians from burning in hellfire to save the lives of black ones from present burning in fires kindled by white Christians." In this chapter Cone is critical of liberal theologians like Rauschenbusch who said nothing.
Billie Holiday's song Strange Fruit is an example of black women using song to draw attention to the evil of lynching. The words to the song were written by a Jewish man in New York after seeing the famous picture of the lynching in Marion, Indiana in 1930. At the 1964 Democratic convention Fannie Lou Hamer gave a speech called, "Is this America?" LBJ was not pleased, but the Voting Rights Act would be passed the next year.
Conclusion
Finished the conclusion of James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Cone was born in 1938 (recently died in 2018). His childhood memories stretched back into the time before the civil rights movement, to a time when he could be nervous if his father did not come home on time.
Clearly, although Cone was a Christian and taught at a Christian seminary, he wrestled with Christian faith because of its close association in his world with lynching and white supremacy. But he had an experience of God's transcendence in worship. As Mircea Eliade has said, "once contact with the transcendent is found, a new existence in the world becomes possible."
"God was also present at every lynching in the United States." "Every time a white mob lynched a black person, they lynched Jesus." "As I see it, the lynching tree frees the cross from the false pieties of well-meaning Christians."
"Blacks and whites are bound together in Christ by their brutal and beautiful encounter in this land."
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