The Cross and the Lynching Tree
“Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar tree”
Few white folks would recognize the poem above or connect it to the lyrics from a song sung famously by black blues singer Billie Holiday. In fact, it was her theme song, and she was often barred from singing it except in her more exclusive appearances in New York Café Society. I myself was not aware of it until I read The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James Cone. Though the book was published nearly ten years ago, it still impacts the reader like a brick through your living room window. To me, this book is a must-read for anyone who is trying to make sense of the current state of affairs of our country and the racial strife we see bubbling over in event after event when we turn on the news.
Personally, I was moved to my very core when I witnessed the deliberate death of George Floyd. I so questioned how we as a country could have gone so far off track. But I immersed myself in reading books and viewing documentaries, and sadly I found out I was grieving not for what once was, but for what never has been. James Cone has been trying to tell us this for 40 years, and his efforts achieved only mixed success. My pastor had actually heard James Cone, then a young man, speak at his United Methodist Annual Conference many years ago, and he told me that the audience took what Mr. Cone said very hard (like that brick I mentioned), and I believe he probably sounded like just another angry young black man. But I add now: he had a right to be!
There are many “George Floyd” moments in this book, trust me. If you are a human being with a feeling heart, you will be sickened and outraged by the stories in this book. Like me, you will wonder at times what country did the events occur that you are reading about. Because the justice we all take for granted was absent here, and there was only cruelty and barbarism. From 1882 to 1968 there were about 5,000 lynchings of people, mostly black, in America that are known. Bodies were raped, castrated, tortured, mutilated, burned, and left swinging from a tree or lamppost as a warning to other blacks. These were not just mobs of white-sheeted KKK members doing these deeds in secrecy; some of these lynchings were the main attraction for dress-up Sunday picnics with women and children present. Photographers took pictures of attendees up close with the remains of the victim in the background like macabre “selfies”; so folks could share such photos with their white friends who could not attend.
But James Cone’s book is more than its gut-wrenching stories. He tells how a foreign black race brought against their will to this country to be slaves of white masters, adopted the religion of their white owners, and showed them how to practice it authentically. The symbolism between the cross and the lynching tree was unmistakably linked. The cross was where an innocent victim was crucified for the sins of the world, but a loving God intervened to give him back his life and freedom. And the lynching tree was where many an innocent victim was tortured, burned and hung to satisfy the blood lust of an angry mob. In fact, many lynching victims quoted from the Bible before they were lynched. “The cross was treasured because it enthroned the One who went all the way with them and for them. The enslaved Africans … saw the results of the cross – triumph over the principalities and powers of death, triumph over the evil in this world.” The black race clung to that cross because it symbolized everything to them: their salvation, their freedom, their reason to bear untold hardships because it was not all for naught. They ardently believed that their ending would be linked with the fate of the Christ they followed, and that final chapter is resurrection. The black race was indeed exposing the hypocrisy of the white Christians who persecuted them.
The real travesty of lynching is how quickly the memory of this sin was erased from the public conscience of America. Still today we cannot even pass an anti-lynching law in Congress. Instead we fight over whether or not we should destroy statues of former slave owners or insurrectionists while the resistance to that destruction are the very seeds that fueled the history lynching we are trying to ignore.
James Cone’s well-crafted work first takes us through the political struggles for civil rights. Most of us know this: reconstruction, “Jim Crow,” separate but equal, Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks, civil rights, and the backlash. But what was new to me is that Mr. Cone gives us an in-depth view of the reluctance of white religious leaders back then to make a stand for the black race. Just as the political leaders advised the black race to be patient and be satisfied with small gains, Mr. Cone points out that even Reinhold Niebuhr, the leading theologian of his day, showed the same reluctance. In fact, Mr. Niebuhr was quoted as saying that he believed that “eventually racism would erode away of its own accord.” Mr. Cone said that in his extensive research for his book, he could not find a single sermon, essay, article, or book on the subject of lynching written by a white minister or theologian during this rampant period. I agree with the author when he states that whereas some of the white race were guilty of the deeds, the rest were complicit in their silence.
Then James Cone points out that folks who are embedded in institutions have their hands tied (and maybe their hearts as well) to go against the status quo, yet this is not true of the artist. The artist is free to see the world clearly as the philosophers tell us – the good, the true, the beautiful. The poets, the songwriters, the singers, the artists can create works unbounded by the restrictions of government or religion. Ha, maybe that’s why my Illuman brothers and I enjoy writing and sharing poetry so much. (Maybe that’s why I enjoy so much going to the annual Illuman Poetry Writing Retreat hosted by Brian Mueller and Tom Sparough. Click here if you want to attend the next one in January.)
Let me end this review with this thought. Lately there is some research saying that the trauma suffered by Holocaust victims has been showing up in the offspring of these victims. If this is true, then is it not possible that the trauma caused by these inhuman deeds is being passed on, not only to the descendants of blacks who endured them, but the descendants of whites who inflicted them. As an Illuman brother, I think what a ghastly initiation rite it would be for a young boy to attend a lynching with his father. What kind of man comes from that?
I have great hope that we are on the cusp of a new progressive age in our country. I feel that systemic racism is a shadow we must recognize, own up to, and take steps to eliminate. Without this difficult shadow work, it will come back to bite us again and again and again. I think James Cone said the same thing when he stated that the cross is the burden we all must bear to attain freedom. And for my white brothers on our collective spiritual journey, this means striving to be at long last “set free from being white.”
