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Cone opens the first chapter by focusing on the paradox of the Christian message: The Messiah of Israel and the Savior of the world accomplishes his mission of redemption by undergoing brutal torture and public execution by crucifixion. The cross “inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat” (24); it is a critique of worldly power and domination. The experience of African American men and women in America in the lynching era from about 1880 to 1940 was a time of unfathomably horrid suffering. While lynching was initially a term that didn’t refer to a specific act toward any specific group of people, its historical instantiation quickly crystallized and fixed upon the acts of violence perpetrated against Black people, especially as enacted in death by hanging.
Lynching itself was additionally problematic because it was a mode of extra-judicial community retaliation against a perceived slight or crime; it was an act of “mob violence” (26) and unsanctioned vigilantism that came about largely as the counter-reaction of southern white communities after the Reconstruction Act of 1867 where Black men were granted “franchise and citizenship rights” (26). The public imagination quickly framed the issue as a “them vs. us” dichotomy, and white southerners began to see Black men as violent threats to their community and Black women as corrupting and “salacious Jezebels” (29) who had no place in their neighborhoods.
In retaliation, white communities took matters into their own hands by lynching Black men (and women in some cases) for any perceived slight or half-hearted accusation. Additional sensation was added to these events due to their propensity to become media spectacles and public events to which one would bring a packed lunch and a camera. The ubiquity of the lynching mentality was so pervasive that the Black community could do almost nothing to quench its bloodlust, knowing that “violent self-defense was tantamount to suicide” (34). If one fought back, it would lead to violent retaliation, so the only thing to do in most cases was to silently accept the brutal circumstances, choosing the only mode of de-escalation possible at the expense of one’s dignity. The only way that most could handle the horrors of the time was to turn to other outlets, most significantly the outlets of religion and the blues.
The Black communities quickly took solace in the hope that music could bring to their lives, offering “a collective self-transcendent meaning in the singing, dancing, loving, and laughing” (35). The communitarian aspect of creating something that was uniquely their own and spoke to their own experience was empowering in a way that nothing else quite had been before. When Black men and women couldn’t talk publicly about their fears or the injustice they faced without fear of retaliation, they could resort to composing poetry and song about their perspective on the world. While “the blues offered an affirmation of humanity,” it was “religion [that] offered a way for black people to find hope” (41). Music spoke to their heart, and religion spoke to their soul.
In their Christian faith, the individual could acknowledge that “the lynching tree symbolized white power and ‘black death,’” while also acknowledging, at the same time, that “the cross symbolized divine power and ‘black life’” (41). If their central point of fear was being strung up on a tree as an innocent victim, they could look to the cross where Jesus hung, strung up on a tree as an innocent victim, and in Jesus, they could see the solidarity and love of God who entered into their own suffering as a poor, marginalized victim. The gospel songs they composed “focused on how Jesus achieved salvation for the least through his solidarity with them even unto death” (44). The one thing that could not be taken from them was their hope, their will to live, and their faith; since their faith was not a “thing” that could be exploited or stolen, it was what they clung to most tenaciously.
While the presence of Black churches gave African American citizens their own spaces of worship and respite, they “did not remove their need to wrestle with God about the deeply felt contradictions that slavery created for faith” (50). At a time when their suffering seemed so utterly pointless and unending, the God who came to earth in the person of Jesus seemed silent; this was a major challenge, but one that ultimately led to the protests and marches that would result in the Civil Rights Act and institutional change in the government structures that would lead to slow but genuine change.
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