The assassination of Abraham Lincoln 150 years ago this month was the precursor to the domestic terrorism that would be unleashed on black Americans for the next century. Reconstruction became far more punitive than had Lincoln lived. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln sent the message there would not be retribution toward the South but rather reconciliation. In his closing remarks Lincoln stated: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.” But Reconstruction as it was implemented after Lincoln’s death, rubbed the prospects of black equality in the faces of Southern…
The assassination of Abraham Lincoln 150 years ago this month was the precursor to the domestic terrorism that would be unleashed on black Americans for the next century.
Reconstruction became far more punitive than had Lincoln lived. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln sent the message there would not be retribution toward the South but rather reconciliation.
In his closing remarks Lincoln stated:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.”
But Reconstruction as it was implemented after Lincoln’s death, rubbed the prospects of black equality in the faces of Southern whites, who were unwilling to concede social standing.
Marred by overall economic strains and federal occupation, whites blamed blacks as much, if not more so, as they did the North for federal Reconstruction.
By 1876, with the Hayes-Tilden Compromise, Reconstruction came to an end, and putting blacks back in their “natural” place became the priority throughout the South.
White Democrats regained political power and Jim Crow laws were instituted. And lynching became the modus operandi to sustain the status quo of fear.
From 1882 to 1968 there were nearly 200 anti-lynching bills introduced in Congress. Only three passed the House. They died in the Senate because Southern Senators effectively filibustered the legislation. Seven presidents between 1890 and 1952 petitioned Congress to pass federal anti-lynching laws to no avail.
The irony of Lincoln’s death and the subsequent embrace of lynching is that black Americans were caught between the cross and the lynching tree.
Defined by Theologian James Cone, the cross and the lynching tree are held together by paradox. One serves as the foundation for followers of the teachings of Jesus.
It is the epicenter of inconvenient love. Inconvenient love is where the horizontal crossbeam of human imperfection intersects with the vertical crossbeam of divine perfection. It symbolizes in the Christian faith the place that, for a 3-hour-period, one witnesses forgiveness, compassion, and comfort provided to others at a most inconvenient time for Jesus of Nazareth.
Many Africans were brought to this country by way of a forced immigration policy. And from the country’s inception, it has wrestled with the incongruence between the bondage that it practiced and its illustrious mission statement:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men were created equal endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
But the paradox of slavery continued to haunt the nation. The 3/5 Compromise in 1787 couldn’t solve it, the Missouri Comprise in 1820 couldn’t solve it, and neither could the Kansas Nebraska Act in 1854. It would require a Civil War and the lives of more than 600,00 Americans and one president, along with the passage of the 13th Amendment which abolished slavery and the 14th Amendment which guaranteed due
process and equal protection to all American citizens, and voting rights to black men.
But these actions provided additional momentum for the Suffrage Movement; women wanted the right to vote in all 50 states, which led to the ratification of the 19th Amendment.
Even with Brown v. Board of Education, which helped overturn 58 years of legalized Jim Crow, there remained a tension between the law and the practice.
So we needed Rosa Parks to keep her seat in Montgomery, four students at North
Carolina A&T to ask for a cup of coffee at Woolworths in Greensboro in 1960, a letter from a Birmingham Jail, a March on Washington, and the valiant efforts of others before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed.
That inspired students at the University of California in Berkeley and the Free Speech Movement. Along that same line, the protesters rose who questioned the morality of the Vietnam conflict.
The cross symbolizes the vain attempt to kill holy love. The lynching tree
symbolizes the attempt to kill the nation’s evolving morality.
We keep moving down that bumpy, unpaved, and unpredictable road that leads to resurrection. But that lynching tree keeps shadowing us. This is our American Calvary.
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