Rev. Dr. James Cone. (Photo by Tom Zuback)
For 40 years, the Rev. Dr. James Cone has sought to articulate the message of the gospel using the language that emerged out of the African American experience of slavery, lynching, racism, and oppression. In a recent sit-down with the AFRO, Cone discussed his latest book, ‘The Cross and the Lynching Tree,’ and his quest to write theology—in his words—the way Louis Armstrong blew his trumpet or Billie Holiday sang ‘Strange Fruit.’
Cone says he was called to this task by the emergence of the Black Power movement in 1966, shaped by popular figures like Malcolm X (who by then had already been assassinated), which viewed Christianity as a White man’s religion, inimical to the lives and concerns of Blacks in America.
“I had to find a way to bring together what I felt in my heart and in my head: a unity between Martin and Malcolm; Black Power and the Civil Rights Movement. Otherwise, I was split open,” said Cone of his early work on Black liberation theology, first an essay entitled ‘Christianity and Black Power,’ and later his first book, ‘Black Theology & Black Power,’ written not long after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.
“I wrote that book because I had to. It was trying to make sense out of all of what was happening among young Black people and the Christian faith. . . . The ‘Black’ in ‘Black theology’ comes from Malcolm X. It is mentioned first, because I’m Black first, before I was a Christian. And then the ‘theology’ in ‘Black theology’ comes from Martin King, and that Christian identity I could not let go.”
It was an identity passed on to him from his parents, and from Macedonia AME Church in Bearden, AR, where Cone grew up. But more than a family legacy, it was an identity that had shown him an example of love in the face of hate that made resiliency in the face of oppression possible.
“I experienced that love in the face of White supremacy. I saw it existentially in my parents; they had no hate. I saw it in my church; they had no hate. We had love for White people too, and we prayed for them in church. And I never heard any expression of hate in the Black community or in my family toward White people. I felt an affection and a love, not only for each other, but for poor White people who don’t know what they’re doing.”
Cone says that it was this love, grounded in a love of self, that allowed African Americans in places like Bearden to live lives of dignity and raise their children to become prominent theologians like himself, in the face of brutal violence at the hands of Whites.
“I wanted to try to describe the power of their religion, of their story, of their words,” said Cone of the community that raised him.
Those words were key for the articulation of Black theology, says Cone, who explained that it would be impossible to speak of a Black Christianity without using the language Black people created out of English in order to give voice to their own experience, a language contained in the music, humor, preaching, and literature of the African American tradition and which gave Cone the very insight that led him to develop Black liberation theology in the first place.
“Using their language is a way of expressing my love for myself,” said Cone, whose most recent work, ‘The Cross and the Lynching Tree,’ takes White Christianity to task for failing to address the most obvious parallel to the cross in American society, the extra judicial killings at the lynching tree, and which continue today in examples like the deaths of Trayvon Martin or Mike Brown.
But ‘The Cross and the Lynching Tree’ is also a defense of one of Cone’s more challenging ideas, that of redemptive suffering, the notion that out of Black suffering can come the redemption of White America. To attempt such a redemption was the mission of Martin, but it was Malcolm that provided the means.
“If you don’t have a healthy respect of yourself, loving the brutal hater, loving the White supremacist, can destroy you as a human being. You’ve got to love yourself first, and Malcolm is indispensable for telling Black people what it means to love themselves. That’s why I said Malcolm and Martin got to go together. . . . That redemptive love is possible, but it has to begin with yourself.”
Cone acknowledges that many find this idea of redemptive suffering and redemptive love difficult, especially since it would seem to require a Black solution to a White problem. And while he does not know why this particular burden has fallen to Black people, Cone says it is far preferable than the burden of hatred.
“I’d much rather be a part of African American history, than White history. I’d rather be a part of the people who have been resisting, and creating a vision of humanity about love and justice. I’d much rather be a Nelson Mandela, a Desmond Tutu, than a part of the apartheid system that tried to kill them, so I much rather be a part of Black people’s history, King and Malcolm and that history, than a part of the history of lynching, people who lynch people, I don’t want to be that. So if being a part of that history means I’ve got to love the lyncher, yeah, I’ll do that. I don’t want to hate people who were lynched, I don’t want to be a part of hating groups, so I say for my own humanity, for my humanity, I’ll carry that burden.”
ralejandro@afro.com