The Cross and the Lynching Tree

The final chapter begins with the narrative of a Black woman who just happened to be the wife of a man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Haynes Turner was a Black man known to quarrel with a white man who had just been murdered, Hampton Smith. Since the mob that had gathered couldn’t find the man accused of the crime (one Sidney Johnson), they decided to lynch Haynes instead. Hayne’s wife Mary, eight months pregnant at the time, raised her voice in protest at this horrific miscarriage of justice and was lynched herself. Cone recounts the horrific crime in detail—she was arrested by the local sheriff, who then turned her over to the mob. She was “stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death” before “a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death” (170).

This lurid scene shows that even though women made up only 2% of lynching victims, their stories are no less horrific or worthy of attention. Often, it was not the threat of death that served as the greatest existential threat to Black women but fates even worse in the form of sexual assault and degradation. In addition, when Black men were lynched, Black women “not only suffered the loss of their sons, husbands, brothers, uncles, nephews, and cousins but also endured public insults and economic hardship” (173) as a result. The depths of the suffering of women created a deep challenge to their faith. Cone points to the great work of the woman long considered “the pioneer of the anti-lynching crusade” (176), Ida B. Wells.

Wells began her work in the anti-lynching movement in 1892 when three of her friends were lynched in Memphis. Motivated by this, she launched into action, giving speeches, writing editorials, and publishing pamphlets for the cause: “Our country’s national crime is lynching” (177), she wrote at the head of one of her essays. She pointed out the outright hypocrisy of many of the advocates for lynching. One of the primary accusations against those who were lynched was sexual assault, but she demonstrated that in the case of the lynching of her friends, for instance, it was “envy of black economic success” (178) that had been the motivator, not sexual violence.

Relevant to the author’s topic, of course, is that Wells attributed her great success and motivation to her faith in God, a faith that convicted her to a place where action was the only choice and remaining passive and silent was no longer possible. This did not mean that her faith was never tested or that she never saw her circumstances as an obstacle to be overcome in times of trouble; far from it. She wrote, “The heart almost loses faith in Christianity when one thinks of…the countless massacres of defenseless Negroes” (181). Once again, the senseless violence perpetrated against the innocent was a serious and genuine obstacle at times. Criticizing the white communities of supposed Christians, she was forced to conclude that it was nothing but mere hypocrisy “because it either openly supported slavery, segregation, and lynching as the will of God or it was silent about these evils” (182). However, one of the most effective and lasting female voices in this arena happened to be one set to music.

The infamous rendition of “Strange Fruit” sung by Billie Holiday was, in her own words, a protest and was later dubbed by Time Magazine as “the best song of the century” (185). The song is one of resistance, placing the victim at center stage: “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 trees” (185). What is even more curious is that the lyrics are adapted from a poem written by a Jewish school teacher who wrote the poem as a reaction to his experience of seeing pictures of lynching victims. The song raises a stark question: “How could white Christians reconcile the ‘strange fruit’ they hung on southern trees with the ‘strange fruit’ Romans hung on the cross at Golgotha?” (186). The song served as an accusation for all who heard it, for no white person could listen to it with an easy conscience, exposed and stripped bare, indicted for their silence, inaction, and complicity in the atrocities delivered against Holiday’s people.

While not every Black woman could have the influence of Billie Holiday, it remained a fact that in the churches, women continued to have an enormous impact, often making up “more than 80 percent of the membership” (194) in community churches. This ratio was reflected in the enormous support of women in the civil rights marches and protests in the years to come, and it was women who usually most radically embodied the notion of redemptive suffering, participating in “redeeming America through nonviolent suffering” (198). While it is true that certain women, as theologians, have challenged the breadth of the notion of redemptive suffering—Cone cites the work of Delores Williams as one who would challenge certain interpretations of this concept—the notion is still relevant through the notion of service and the reorientation of justice in relationship. No matter what, the cross can never be separated from the gospel message of liberation and “as lived and understood in the African American Christian community” (203).