The Cross and the Lynching Tree: The Failure of Imagination

Last updated on: March 1, 2019 at 11:45 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

The Cross and the Lynching Tree: The Failure of Imagination 2019-03-01T23:45:40-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Joining a team can bring on a dull imagination. We start thinking within the team culture and understanding ‘those people’ only by our team’s hot takes.

With our opposition, we drop mics, not dialog.

The failure of a world class (liberal) theologian like Rienhold Niebuhr to support desegregating his church is a sad lesson of the limits of compassion and the power of white supremacy. Niebuhr was a socialist and perhaps that shows another limitation to theological liberalism. He had too much sympathy for socialism and too little concern regarding the lynching tree. Team white liberalism glossed over the horrific evils of the Soviet Union and Jim Crow.

Professor James H. Cone exposes the American side of this error*:

Was not that lynching alone enough for Niebuhr to know that white supremacy could not be ignored in searching for economic justice, or explicating the meaning of the Christian gospel in America? Niebuhr himself preserved class solidarity at the expense of racial justice, which many liberal white-led groups were inclined to do when fighting for justice among the poor.

Cone blames the conservatism of Niebuhr for his failure, but mostly it was that Niebuhr followed the concerns and cares of the white liberal elite: socialism, soft on Marxism, progressive on race without making much of a difference.

Yet Cone must be read and understood. Cone’s errors had little cultural impact, but what he got right was ethical genius. He saw the moral imperative to end lynching now, an accomplishment yet to be achieved. Of the lynching of Emmett Louis “Bo” Till he writes:

Because he had whistled at a white woman and reportedly said “bye baby” as he departed from a store on August 24, 1955, Emmett Till was picked up four days later around 2: 00 a.m., beaten beyond recognition, shot in the head, and thrown in the Tallahatchie River, “weighted down with a heavy gin fan.”

Nothing should be said, no counter-argument made about any side issue, until justice is done for the murder of Emmett Till. We must recollect his murder lest it happen again and because it happened. This was a lynching, one of five thousand, that was done (according to the killers) for white supremacy.

It was horrific and it happened in the lifetime of many Americans.

This lad’s killers were acquitted by a jury. If American, this must be known to understand anything happening in our time. A Christian moral imagination sees the death of Jesus. A limited imagination cavils, quibbles. When I sit with Christian academic leaders and they minimize Jim Crow, they ignore that souvenir photos of lynching could be purchased.

The Christian must fight injustice: against the unborn, against Emmett Till. When we see injustice we see Jesus:

Jesus, my darling Jesus, Groaning as the blood came spurting from his wound. Oh, look how they done my Jesus.

———————————————

Cone himself had a failure of imagination when it came to Marxism for which he is rightly called out intellectually by Professor Anthony Bradley.

Read the brilliant The Cross and the Lynching Tree by Professor James H. Cone.

I dedicate this post to my childhood friend Marty, an African-American man given a lobotomy by the state of New York progressives for the crime of being an African-American child.

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