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The Cross And The Lynching Tree (2011)

by James H. Cone(Favorite Author)

4.33 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1570759375 (ISBN13: 9781570759376)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Orbis Books

review 1: "The Cross and the Lynching Tree" is a poignant and moving meditation on the history of lynching in America, its impact on both Black and Euro society in the U.S. and in particular on Christians of both races, and how various groups have responded or failed to respond to the obvious parallels between the cruelest tool of white supremacists and the crucifixion of trouble-makers (including Jesus of Nazareth) by the Roman Empire. Cone gives fresh insights into the egregious history of violence against "Negroes" by "unknown persons" and shows how Martin Luther King, Jr. and Black Womanist theologians far outstripped Reinhold Niebuhr ("America's Greatest Theologian") and others in their theological analysis and use of the lynching tree as symbolic of the sin of our country. C... moreone also shows the impact of both the cross and the lynching tree in African-American art and, finally, offers his own insights into how the lynching tree continues to impact the Black Church and the necessity of coming to terms with the lynching tree for the White Church. An important and compelling book.
review 2: Before I started James Cone’s book, my attitude had the ambivalence of white guilt. Of course I knew that racial lynching was a horrible and shameful part of American history, but I had not had any part in lynching, not even tacitly or attitudinally. On the other hand it is hard to deny that the racial differentials between whites and blacks, in income, education and other measures of well-being, are all traceable to slavery, white supremacy and lynching. And I gained advantage from all of those racial differentials. In other words, I had a whole battle with myself just anticipating the topic of Cone’s book.Fortunately, when I really started to read Cone’s book, he brought me so thoroughly into the experience of the black church that I could feel only awe and appreciation. To be able to see the “terrible beauty” or the “tragic beauty” in the body of a lynched black man is what Christians supposedly profess to see in the crucified Jesus, and yet many of us don’t know what we’re talking about. The idea that blacks in the Reconstruction Era south could live under the constant threat of lynching, and yet maintain a faith in the goodness and meaning of life, puts to shame any facile interpretations of Jesus on the cross. It is the difference between lived, personal experience and detached, self-serving rationalization.James Cone’s main point is the equivalence between the lynching of blacks and the crucifixion of Jesus. Of course the same applies to the genocide of Jews, or of native Americans, or of Rwandans. Though Cone acknowledges Reinhold Niebuhr as an intellectual mentor, and teaches a course on him at the Union Theological Seminary, nevertheless Cone takes Niebuhr to task for not understanding the equivalence of the lynching tree and the cross. Though Niebuhr could understand the “terrible beauty” of the crucified Jesus, and could talk about the importance of speaking truth to power, yet he could not grasp that the lynching of blacks within his contemporary culture called for a response just as much as Jesus on the cross.Cone describes Martin Luther King as reacting in the appropriate way to lynching, willing to put his own life on the line in order to fight, non-violently, the oppression of blacks. Cone describes the civil rights leaders, the black artists, and the women organizers who each in their particular ways faced down death for the sake of freedom and justice. His humbling witness is particularly appropriate on the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, when there is still resistance to equal treatment under the law, and indifference is the same as acquiescence. less

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