The Cross and the Lynching Tree

James Cone was an American academic and theologian who spent most of his life and academic career focused on issues of Black liberation theology. Born in Arkansas in 1938, Cone was raised in the segregated town of Bearden and was raised a Christian in a Methodist congregation, the Macedonia African Methodist Episcopal Church. After attending college, Cone received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1965 and would eventually be hired onto the faculty at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1969, where he would stay for 49 years until his death in 2018.

Growing up in the segregated south, Cone experienced first-hand as a child the effects of racism, bigotry, and fear of racially motivated violence. He recounts in the book his experience of fearing for his father's safety, whose return from work he would anxiously await in the evenings. Cone’s experience as a Black man was essential to the direction in which he took his academic career, becoming one of America’s foremost critics of white supremacist literature and practice, authoring almost a dozen books—not to mention scores of shorter essays and countless lectures—that center and focus on issues of race, religion, and culture.