[Lynching] is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob. It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an “unwritten law” that justifies them in putting human beings to death without complaint under oath, without trial by jury, without opportunity to make defense, and without right of appeal.
Ida B. Wells
The violence of lynching is a blot on our nation’s history that continues to threaten the rule of law in analogous ways today. The May 25, 2020, death of George Floyd, a Black man, under the knee-hold of a Minneapolis police officer attests to this. As we interrogate this fiercely racist act of police brutality, and the many preceding it, various lenses can be employed to derive new meanings. James H. Cone, one of the fathers of Black Theology, provides us with an interpretation that we might overlook: the Black Jesus who dies on the cross to overcome the violence experienced by Blacks. As he wrote in his last work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, “to understand what the cross means in America, we need to take a look at the lynching tree in this nation’s history.”
While Black Lives Matter plays a vital role in battling police brutality, the larger movement has been marred by acts of violence, sometimes by protestors who are rightfully angry over entrenched racism and classism, sometimes by law enforcement agencies, and sometimes by anarchists. Cone can provide guidance to this ongoing struggle by balancing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his Beloved Community, with Malcolm X and Black Power. Cone stressed that Black and White people have experienced the most violent and loving encounters, yet still remain brothers and sisters. As such, “[a]ll the hatred we have expressed toward one another cannot destroy the profound mutual love and solidarity that flow deeply between us.”
While oppression has existed since before our founding, King and Malcolm X fought for racial and economic justice in the face of the Jim Crow laws of their time. American historian C. Vann Woodward’s 1955 book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, recollected and described such oppression, which King later drew upon. In the book, Woodward claimed that Jim Crow laws were not inevitable in light of “forgotten alternatives” that never materialized. King, in his March 25, 1965, speech following the Selma to Birmingham March, agreed with Woodward that during the Reconstruction era, “the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow . . . and when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, (Yes, sir) he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.” Woodward later recollected that King dubbed his book the historical bible of the Civil Rights Movement, though the veracity of this label is at issue. Similarly, in her 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander argued that Black males have been segregated within a new racial caste system, built upon the old de jure one, and known as the school-to-prison pipeline. For her contribution, Cornel West called Alexander’s book the secular bible for a new social movement. One could argue that Cone’s life work, in turn, provided us with the theological bible for the same enduring cause.
In this Article, I invite you to join me in transposing Cone’s Black theology into a register that engages the systemic and institutional racism behind George Floyd’s lynching and its aftermath. In Part I, I explore the development of James Cone’s Black theology as he brings King and Malcom X together to mediate his own anger over the racialized ordering of our society. In Part II, I link Cone’s interpretation of the lynching of the Black Christ to police brutality and the death of George Floyd. In Part III, I relate Cone’s development from rage to resurrection to the ongoing movement sustained by Black Lives Matter but defaced by violence. Finally, in Part IV, I interrogate the rule of law in our post-Floyd nation. Drawing upon the international law of human rights and a strategy called “targeted universalism,” I propose that we can move toward a reconciliatory eradication of systemic racism and a hope-filled “resurrection” of our democracy.