“They put him to death by hanging him on a tree.”–Acts 10:39

“The white South’s perspective on the Reconstruction was told in Thomas Dixon’s enormously popular novel The Leopard’s Spots (1902), which sold over one million copies. It was followed by The Clansman (1905). Both novels portrayed the Klan as redeemers of the South. D.W. Griffith transformed Dixon’s novels into that cinematic masterpiece of racist propaganda The Birth of a Nation (1915), first seen at the White House and praised enthusiastically by President Woodrow Wilson. Whites, especially in the South, loved Birth and regarded seeing it as ‘a religious experience.’ It ‘rendered lynching an efficient and honorable act of justice’ and served to help reunite the North and South as a white Christian nation, at the expense of African Americans. After seeing Birth, one white man in Kentucky left the theater so excited that he shot and killed a fifteen-year-old African American high school student.” (5)

“But now, without slavery to control blacks, new means had to be devised, and even a new rationale for control. This was supplied by black men’s imagined insatiable lust for white women. Because of their threat to white womanhood, black men must be carefully watched and violently kept in their place, segregated and subordinated. Sexual intercourse between black men and white women was regarded as the worst crime blacks could commit against Anglo-Saxon civilization. Even when sexual relations were consensual, ‘race-mixing,’ mockingly called ‘mongrelization,’ was always translated to mean rape, and it was used as the primary justification of lynching. It was the moral and Christian responsibility of white men to protect the purity of their race by any means necessary.” (7-8)

“Blacks knew that violent self-defense was tantamount to suicide; even affirming blackness in a world defined by white power took great courage. Whites acted in a superior manner for so long that it was difficult for them to even recognize their cultural and spiritual arrogance, blatant as it was to African Americans. Their law was not designed to protect blacks from lynching, espeically when blacks acted as if they were socially equal to whites. Should a black in the South lift his hand or raise his voice to reprimand a white person, he would incur the full weight of the law and the and the mob. Even to look at a white person, he would incur the full weight. ofthe law and the mob. Even to look at white people in a manner regarded as disrespectful could get a black lynched. Whites often lynched blacks simply to remind the black community of their powerlessness. Unemployed blacks passing through an area with no white man to vouch for them could easily fid themselves on a prison chain gang or swinging from a lynching tree. There were many ‘sundown towns’ in the South and the North–some with signs warning, “N——, don’t let the sun set on your head,’ and others with no signs but which could be fatal to blacks who happened to be passing through.” (12)

“‘I had never in my life been abused by whites,’ wrote Richard Wright in Black Boy, as he reflected back on his boyhood in Mississippi, ‘but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings.’” (15)

“For all his exquisite sensitivity to symbols, analogies, and the moral dimensions of history, was he ultimately blind to the most obvious symbolic re-enactment of the crucifixion in his own time? Niebuhr’s focus on realism (‘facts of experience’) and the cross (tragedy) should have turned his gaze to the lynching tree, but he did not look there, even though lynching trees were widely scattered throughout the American landscape.” (37-8)

“Niebuhr’s call for gradualism, patience, and prudence during the decade when Willie McGee (1951), Emmett Till (1955), M.C. ‘Mack” Parker (1959), and other blacks were lynched sounds like that of a southern moderate more concerned about not challenging the cultural traditions of the white South than achieving justice for black people. He cited the distinguished novelist William Faulkner and Hodding Carter, a Mississippi journalist ‘with a long record of fairness on the race issue,’ in defense of gradualism, patience, and prudence, so as not to push the southern white people ‘off balance,’ even though he realized that blacks were understandably smarting under such a long history of injustice: ‘We can hardly blame Negroes for being impatient with the counsel for patience, in view of their age-long suffering under the white man’s arrogance.’ Yet, Niebuhr continued in the same essay, ‘The fact that it is not very appealing to the victims of a current injustice does not make it any less the course of wisdom in overcoming historic injustices.’” (39)

“Niebuhr said, ‘we told the ministers the farm would not unnecessarily challenge the prejudices of the south. That is a matter of expediency. Economic cooperation is so necessary that it is worth establishing it even if scruples must be sacrificed to prejudices in the matter of social and educational relationships.’ … 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.’” (46)

“In contrasts to his friend Abraham Heschel, a close friend and supporter of Martin Luther King Jr.. Niebuhr made no effort to engage in dialogue with black religious leaders and scholars or to develop friendship with black people with whom he could learn about race as he did with Jews.” (52)

“Although the Baldwin-Niebuhr dialogue did not reveal sharp disagreements, it did reveal different levels of passion in their responses, a gulf. of emotional orientation to the racial crisis, reflected in the bombing. Baldwin, identifying with a powerless black minority, was seething with rage, ready to say anything to get white Americans to stop such violence, while Niebuhr, identifying with the powerful white majority, was calm and dispassionate in the face of what most blacks regarded as an unspeakable evil.” (54)

Baldwin: “I don’t mean to say the white people are villains or devils or anything like that [but what] I do mean to say is this: that the bulk of the white…Christian majority in this ocuntry has exhibited a really staggering level of irresponsibility and immoral washing of the hands, you know…. I don’t suppose that…all the white people in Birmingham are monstrous people. But they’re mainly silent people, you know. And that is a crime in itself.” (55)

Rabbi Joachim Prinz: “When I was a rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime…the most important thing I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problems. The most urgent and most disgraceful, the most shameful, the most tragic problem is silence.” (55)

“What Niebuhr said about love, power, and justice helped me to understand that moral suasion alone would never convince whites to relinquish their supremacy over blacks. Only Black Power could do that, because power, as Frederick Douglass said long before Niebuhr was born, concedes nothing without struggle.” (58)

Read the famous article “Skin in the Game” by Eric Ward (about how antisemitism animates white nationalism) by clicking here.

Buy the The Cross and the Lynching Tree on Amazon.