Holy Grief

EARLIER THIS YEAR, we lost theologian James H. Cone. “Yes, he was a world historical figure in contemporary theology, no doubt about that,” said professor Cornel West at Cone’s funeral, “a towering prophetic figure engaging in his mighty critiques and indictments of contemporary Christendom from the vantage point of the least of these ... But oh,” West added. “I think he would want us to view him through the lens of the cross—the blood at the foot of that cross.”

More than any other theologian, Cone taught us that we cannot divorce the gospel—Jesus’ suffering and redemption—from the history of violence against black people in the U.S. “Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a ‘recrucified’ black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America,” wrote Cone in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, “and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.”

The same week Cone died, the Equal Justice Initiative opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the more than 4,400 victims of racial violence, including lynching, between 1877 and 1950. “The new museum and memorial ... create space for mourning the untended bodies of loved ones whose killings were covered by dreadful silence,” writes Josina Guess in “Why I Brought My Children to the Montgomery Legacy Museum,” “For every lynching there was a ripple effect of thousands of African-American people uprooted and forced to make a new life on different soil—or more often, concrete—and not allowed full expression of their grief.”

This issue bears evidence of those ripples. For Guess, visiting the museum and monument was a way to help her children “take an unflinching look at our racist past and present, and to give them courage to walk the unfinished path toward justice.” For columnist Lisa Sharon Harper, the museum prompted a new meditation on what allowed generations of white folks to “suppress their own feelings of sympathy and empathy.” And for Jemar Tisby, who writes about the overlooked role of district attorneys in criminal justice, the museum succeeds in drawing “a direct line from past years of slavery to the mass incarceration of the present.” These stories share a holy grief, part of the painfully slow work of setting captives free.