The Cross and the Lynching Tree

James Cone was an American academic and theologian who spent most of his life and academic career focused on issues of Black liberation theology. Born in Arkansas in 1938, Cone was raised in the segregated town of Bearden and was raised a Christian in a Methodist congregation, the Macedonia African Methodist Episcopal Church. After attending college, Cone received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1965 and would eventually be hired onto the faculty at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1969, where he would stay for 49 years until his death in 2018.

Growing up in the segregated south, Cone experienced first-hand as a child the effects of racism, bigotry, and fear of racially motivated violence. He recounts in the book his experience of fearing for his father's safety, whose return from work he would anxiously await in the evenings. Cone’s experience as a Black man was essential to the direction in which he took his academic career, becoming one of America’s foremost critics of white supremacist literature and practice, authoring almost a dozen books—not to mention scores of shorter essays and countless lectures—that center and focus on issues of race, religion, and culture.

However, Cone was not without his critics, which generally fell into one of two camps. The first group focused on his use and championing of liberation theology, an approach to Christian teaching and practice that emphasizes the Church’s need to make political liberation and material welfare its primary goal. Most Christian groups and denominations consider this a heretical or warped view of the Christian message, which, while greatly emphasizing care for the poor and marginalized, still prioritizes spiritual matters of salvation over earthly concerns. The second group of critics accused Cone of placing too much emphasis on general observations, painting with too wide a brush when referring to the experience of Black suffering in America or, conversely, to white oppression and violence.