Chapter 1: “Nobody Knows De Trouble I See”
The opening chapter takes its subtitle from the lyrics of an old spiritual to underline the intensify awareness of the chasm which often exists between history as a series of objective factual events and history as the subjective written account of those facts. The examination of this theme is commenced with the example of how the humiliating torture and execution of a convicted criminal was transformed into an story which inspired the most powerful religion in the history of the world. The point being made is that people interpret the facts of history according to the narrative perspective in which it is told. The history of lynching African-Americans has not been told from their perspective because it is a subject that is more easily left unspoken. Shame, humiliation, and fear conspired to keep their version of history unwritten while the perspective of those doing the lynching was splashed heroically across the screen in fictional images in Birth of a Nation while the ugly truth of factual imagery was suppressed by being kept out of history textbooks.
Chapter 2: “The Terrible Beauty of the Cross”
The focus of this chapter is on the ironic complicity of organized Christianity in the systemic effort to enact coercive fealty to authority upon black America through the act of lynching. Lynching is placed into juxtaposition with the Roman punishment of crucifixion in which the point was far less about punishing the criminal than sending the message to others to beware the consequences of overstepping their boundaries. The author also re-introduces conceptualization of written history as propaganda for its writers by analyzing the wide gulf—a gulf that can only be explained as a result of the power of controlling the facts of history by shaping and, if necessary, perverting the perspective of it—that separates the views of white Christian and black Christians toward understanding the symmetry of the cross and the lynching tree. The subject of lynching has no trouble inherent connecting the Roman cross for execution and the hanging tree for lynching as twin towers of terrorism while those connected to the legacy of carrying out lynching have historically seemed to be genetically averse to admitting this connection.
Chapter 3: Bearing the Cross and Staring Down the Lynching Tree
The focal character of Chapter 2 is Reinhold Niebuhr, a mostly unknown figure out the world of religious study today, but a man who composed the Serenity Pray and was conferred upon by Time Magazine as a the most important American Protestant since Jonathan Edwards. Cone’s criticism of Niebuhr for what can essentially be boiled down to a sort of lip service support of black Christian concerns in America (which even many positive review of the book question) is immediately situated for comparison against the central focus of this chapter: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It should be noted that Niebuhr was an outspoken supporter of King at a time when this was not necessarily true of equally influential white theologians. King is the focal character, but in the sense that he becomes a symbol of all those involved in in the civil rights movement which had the corollary effect of starting the transformation of the written history of lynching. The central event of that transformation was the startling murder of a young boy that has become perhaps as familiar with Birth of a Nation today, but when Dr. King organized his March on Washington was still locked in the faults of unknown history to most of white America: the lynching of Emmett Till.
Chapter 4: The Recrucified Christ in Black Literary Imagination
This chapter opens with the poem by noted Harlem Renaissance writer Countee Cullen, “Christ Recrucified” which directly addresses the crucifixion of Christ in metaphorical terms as a lynching. The chapter is punctuated throughout with excerpts from poetry, slave narratives, song lyrics and other creative texts which appropriate history as a subject of artistic expression. Such artistic expression has long been the means of conveying “secret histories” composed by the oppressed whose story was excited from the official historical record. The history of lynching and what is seen as a brutally obvious link to crucifixion which can only be purposely unseen through concerted denial has been passed down from generation to generation in black America while remaining virtually unknown to white America because of a systematic suppression via the academic curriculum reaching across all disciplines, not just history.
Chapter 5: “Oh Mary, Don’t You Weep”
This chapter opens with a brief snatch of lyrics from the haunting jazz ode to the victims of lynching, “Strange Fruit” before launching into one of the most horrific accounts of mob violence one can imagine: a young pregnant black woman being stripped, lynched, set on fire and having her unborn child cut from her body where it fell to the ground and was stomped to death. All in front of witnesses that included children. Making this story all the more unbelievable is that Mary Turner suffered this abomination because she dared to protest the earlier lynching of her husband, Hampton who—get ready now—was only chosen as a victim because the idiotic members of the lynch mob could not locate the actual target of their hideous pursuit of justice and instead settled on an acceptable replacement. From this beginning the chapter begins a trek through the historical record to demonstrate how woefully misplaced is any possible conception that lynching in America was somehow a tiny dark blot upon history represented by an impossibly small number of exclusively male victims, most of whom probably were guilty of one crime or another. The focal characters of this chapter are those female African-America artists whose journalism, histories, poems and songs have become metaphorical offspring of the courageous women who stood by Jesus during the crucifixion when all the male apostles were busy fleeing, denying and hiding from their responsibilities. Billie Holiday, Ida B. Wells, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harp become the face of the collective spiritual faith in Christ expressed through lamentation.
