The Cross and the Lynching Tree

Cone opens the first chapter by focusing on the paradox of the Christian message: The Messiah of Israel and the Savior of the world accomplishes his mission of redemption by undergoing brutal torture and public execution by crucifixion. The cross “inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat” (24); it is a critique of worldly power and domination. The experience of African American men and women in America in the lynching era from about 1880 to 1940 was a time of unfathomably horrid suffering. While lynching was initially a term that didn’t refer to a specific act toward any specific group of people, its historical instantiation quickly crystallized and fixed upon the acts of violence perpetrated against Black people, especially as enacted in death by hanging.

Lynching itself was additionally problematic because it was a mode of extra-judicial community retaliation against a perceived slight or crime; it was an act of “mob violence” (26) and unsanctioned vigilantism that came about largely as the counter-reaction of southern white communities after the Reconstruction Act of 1867 where Black men were granted “franchise and citizenship rights” (26). The public imagination quickly framed the issue as a “them vs.