"The 'Lynching Tree' is a metaphor for race in America..." Professor James Cone
November 23, 2007
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL.
Our subject in this hour is one you don't hear discussed very often in politics or around the dining table. It's buried so deeply in the American psyche that rarely does anyone bring it front and center. Our silence on it is one reason we have so much difficulty coming to terms with race in America. I'm reluctant to raise it even now, because it's anything but a comfortable subject for television. But I went online not long ago and listened to a speech at Harvard University that I simply can't forget and I wanted you to meet the man who delivered it.
JAMES CONE: …blacks and whites and other Americans who want to understand the meaning of the American experience need to remember lynching.
BILL MOYERS: His name is James Cone and he has a powerful message about seeing America through the experience of the cross and the lynching tree.
JAMES CONE: ..to make sense out of the cross, the central symbol of the Christian faith, and the lynching tree…
BILL MOYERS: That's right - the cross on which Christians believe Jesus Christ was crucified in the Roman Empire, and the lynching tree that meant agony and death for thousands of black people. Their connection is the subject of our broadcast. Be forewarned: you will see some disturbing images.
JAMES CONE: Yes, that is a noose…
BILL MOYERS: In the past few months we've all seen these chilling reports:
REPORTER: ...one in Farmingdale and just yesterday in Roosevelt. Those two..."
BILL MOYERS: Nooses tied to a school yard tree in Jena, Louisiana.
REPORTER: ...historically reserved for white students…
BILL MOYERS: Nooses left for a black member of the US Coast Guard.
REPORTER: ...at New London, Connecticut…
BILL MOYERS: A noose on the door of a university professor's office here in New York City.
REPORTER: ...here at Columbia University…
VOICE: ...because today it's a noose and tomorrow they trying to put some bodies head in it…
BILL MOYERS: The reappearance of nooses is a haunting reminder of the dark side of American history, when after the civil war black Americans were forced to live in the shadow of the lynching tree. Thousands of human beings, tortured and hanged by the neck until dead.
BILLIE HOLIDAY SINGING Southern trees bear strange fruit... ...blood on the leaves and blood at the root, black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze...
JAMES CONE: ...'fruit hanging from the poplar trees'. Billie singing her signature song.
BILL MOYERS: James Cone knows that song well. As one of America's pioneers of black theology, he has never been able to forget its message, and he wants his students at Union Theological Seminary here in New York City, to remember it, too.
JAMES CONE: ...so that the brutal facts of history, keeps that from being a sort of pie in the sky thing.
BILL MOYERS: James Cone has been at Union Seminary since 1969, teaching systematic theology through the black experience in America...
JAMES CONE: ...it seemed to me that Martin and Malcolm represented two poles of my identity.
BILL MOYERS: He grew up in rural Arkansas, and soon found his calling in the church. He was ordained by the African Methodist Episcopal Church and went on to the life of teacher and scholar. Among his many books and articles are these - MARTIN & MALCOLM & AMERICA, BLACK THEOLOGY & BLACK POWER AND GOD OF THE OPPRESSED - all translated in nine languages.
JAMES CONE: ...not many black theologians and preachers have made an explicit...
BILL MOYERS: Right now he's thinking through how the cross and the lynching tree enable us to interpret America today.
JAMES CONE: ...so I want to start a conversation about the cross and the lynching tree and thereby break our silence on race and Christianity in American history.
BILL MOYERS: And Dr. James Cone is with me now. Welcome to THE JOURNAL. Glad to have you.
JAMES CONE: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
BILL MOYERS: That old Billie Holiday number that-- that we played, Strange Fruit-"Southern trees bear strange fruit, blood on the leaves and blood at the root. Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze. Strange fruit hanging from the poplar tree." I mean, nobody sings that anymore. You don't hear it. But, yet, that is deep in our DNA, is it not?
JAMES CONE: Yes, it's deep. Because lynching is so deep. And that song is about lynching. It's about black bodies hanging on trees. And that's deep in the American experience. Particularly after the Civil War. But, it's connected with slavery too. Although, lynching didn't take place in slavery because black people were worth too much.
BILL MOYERS: I didn't know that.
JAMES CONE: So, they're-- oh, no-- no. They didn't lynch them during the time of slavery. It's after slavery. And it's in order to control the community. It's to put fear and terror in their hearts so that they would be forced to obey and stay out in the fields and work and not loiter. And to remember that whites controlled the world. Even though the south lost the war, they are still in control of their section of America.
BILL MOYERS: After the Civil War.
JAMES CONE: After the Civil War.
BILL MOYERS: I mean, it was--
JAMES CONE: That's when lynching started.
JAMES CONE: They wanted to remind black people that they were in charge and that whites controlled, for the same reasons why Romans-- crucified people in the first century.
BILL MOYERS: It worked, didn't it?
JAMES CONE: Yes, it worked.
BILL MOYERS: It worked.
JAMES CONE: It worked to a certain degree. It only worked in the sense that it reminded black people and white people that whites actually had political and social control and economic control. But, they didn't have control of their humanity. See, that's what religion is about. Religion is a search for meaning when you don't have it in this world. So, while they might have controlled the black people physically and politically and economically, they did not control their spirit. That's why the black churches are very powerful forces in the African American community and always has been. Because religion has been that one place where you have an imagination that no one can control. And so, as long as you know that you are a human being and nobody can take that away from you, then God is that reality in your life that enables you to know that.
BILL MOYERS: And even though you're living under the shadow of the lynching tree.
JAMES CONE: Even though you're living under the shadow of the lynching tree. Because religion is a spirit that is not defined by what people can do to your body. They can kill your body, but they can't kill your soul. We were always told that. There is a spirit deep in you that nobody can take away from you because it's a creation that God gave to you.
Now, if you know you have a humanity that nobody can take away from you, they may lock you up. They may lynch you. But, they don't win.
BILL MOYERS: But when you were growing up in that part of the world -- well, we grew up only about a hundred miles or so apart. I grew up in east Texas. You in southwestern Arkansas. I'm a little older than you. But, we come out of that same culture. Did you in your community, Fordyce and Bearden, talk about lynching very much?
JAMES CONE: Yes, my mother and father did-- my mother and father did. We didn't talk so much about it publicly. But, my mother and father talked about it all the time. They told us stories about lynching. I think that happened with many black families. It's that we didn't talk about it much publicly like in schools and in churches. But, we did talk about it at home.
BILL MOYERS: In the white community of my deeply segregated hometown, I honestly don't remember our talking about it.
BILL MOYERS: When my father died, I found in his effects a yellow newspaper from Paris, Texas where he was born and lived. And I lived there for a little while. And it was a lynching- a photograph of a lynching near his farm. Five thousand people had come to watch this man lynched.
JAMES CONE: Yeah--spectacle lynchings were-- were especially prominent just after the Civil War and in the beginning of the 20th century, spectacle lynchings. And they didn't stop until the 30s, the late 1930s.
BILL MOYERS: How do you explain the current spate of the appearance of the noose again? Up comes this story right here from the suburbs of New York. A noose found in the basement-a locker room of the village police department. The deputy chief of police is black. And then you've got Jena and you got what happened at the Columbia, near your office. You think these people who-- do you think they understand what that's the symbol of? Of what actually happened to human beings when that noose was placed around the neck? Or is this just some kind of-- you know, some kind of grim game?
JAMES CONE: Well, you know, you don't have to know all about the Nazi hol-- Holocaust to understand what a swastika is. You don't have to understand all about the history of lynching to know what a noose is. Everybody knows that. Somehow, that-- that gets-- you don't have to know that history. It's in-- it's in American culture. As you say, it's in the DNA. It's our-- it's white America's original sin and it's deep. Like, for a long time, we didn't want to talk about slavery. They don't like to talk about 246 years of it. Then a hundred years of legal segregation and lynching.
Now, you don't get away from that by not talking about it. That's too deep. Germany is not going to get away from the Holocaust by not talking about it. It's too deep. So, America must face up that we are one community. We-- you know, if anybody in this society-- if anybody is brother and sister to the other, it's black people and white people because there is a-- there is a tussle there that you cannot get out of. It is a-- it is deeply engrained in our relationship to each other in a way that's not with anybody else-- [To see the entire transcript and the video, go to: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11232007/watch.html ]
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