By Lawrence Miller

On Thursday night in Sharpless Auditorium, Dr. James Cone delivered the Keynote Address in the Fragmented Bodies of American Lynching symposium. The symposium, which was held over the course of Friday morning and afternoon, brought together academics and theologians from across the country to talk about what we can learn from American lynchings. James Cone’s current work, which focuses on the connection between the Christian cross and the lynching tree, was the jumping off point for the coming day-long discussion.

After a stirring performance of “Soon Ah Will Be Done” by the Haverford and Bryn Mawr Chamber Singers, Dr. Cone, the author of seminal Black Religion text Black Theology and Black Power, presented his lecture to a packed and attentive auditorium. At the front of the room, he proved an experienced and captivating orator. Despite his many years as a professor and theologian, Cone packs a spunk in his expression that you’d typically find in someone with twice as much hair on his head. He speaks slowly, measuring his every word, yet emphatically, each word speaking to effect and in movement of his cause. At times, his speech is reminiscent of a spoken word artist and an intense preacher; his message, though academically contrived, carries the weight of an earnest political activist.

First, Cone discussed the importance of religion in the lives of African-Americans. Religion and theology provides an importance space for blacks in a society in which every other aspect goes against their existence. In a society that denies African-Americans their very humanity, black theology provides an outlet through which blacks can begin to make sense of their “culturally despised” position. At an interesting point, Cone finds Christian symbolism in the decimated body of the lynchee. He likens the image and message of the body wrought on the tree to that of Christ’s suffering on the cross. In the American South, African Americans were “lynched in America as Jesus was in Jerusalem,” positing that “Jesus was the first lynchee.” As Cone entered the meat of his talk, his voice steadily crescendo’d over the audience as the import and freshness of his ideas took hold. Though only a slice of his argument, the connections that Cone found between the act of lynching and the words of the Scriptures were compelling and thought provoking. James Cone stirred ideas in the audience’s head that would continue to be provokingly shifted and realigned throughout the next day of speakers.

Tracey Hucks, the first speaker of Friday morning’s symposium, guided the audience through her reading of James Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man. The story follows a white man after his early exposure to a graphic lynching and his later rise to town sheriff. Baldwin’s story exposes some of the “secret[s] of white racial privacy” by subtly hinting at the white fetishism in exploited black bodies, creating a “ménage de trios with blackness.” Next, Kim Benston delivered a talk explicating the Ralph Ellison short story, “A Party Down at the Square”. The story, told from the standpoint of a young white boy observing the scene of a lynching, demonstrates the phenomenon of creating white identity from the mangled pieces of black Otherness. Ellison’s world is formed by “American culture permeated by racial transactions that establish the possibilities and horizons, perceptions and blindspots in our national self-knowledge.” This literary analysis illuminating the links between racial interrelationships and white identity provided yet another insight into the madness of the American lynchings.

Sandy Alexandre, professor of English at MIT, discussed the possibility of photographic representations of lynchings being viewed as iconic. Gus Stadler, Haverford professor of English, talked about turn of the century audio recordings of lynching and their links to modernity. Stadler discussed what it means for recordings to be staged, even to enhance the sound, and how this fact affects our perspective of the genuineness of the representation. The implications of staged representations, in both photography and audio recordings, came up in the proceeding question and answer discussion. Througout the day, conversation flowed and linked to earlier panelists, constructing a web that might somehow illuminate the vast magnitude brought on by the topic.

Other speakers of the day included: Kevin Miles, professor of Philosophy at Earlam College, Lee H. Butler, Jr., Professor of Theology and Psychology at Chicago Theological Seminary, Natasha Barnes, Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Deborah Barnes, Director of the Aggie Impact Scholars Bridge Program at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. In its cross-disciplinary approach, the Fragmented Bodies symposium came close to substantiating the historical and metaphysical scourge on American and Human existence. Looking at the lynching from the perspective of political, cultural, representational, and religious standpoints, the symposium painted a vivid picture of our national and cultural identities. While the various implications of this cultural phenomenon cannot be exhausted, Dr. James Cone and the distinguished panelists presented interesting and stimulating analyses that made their audience think. If we can use the American phenomenon of lynching as firm strike to the status quo of our thought, we can begin to come to terms with the blatant reality of our American identity.

For more information on the symposium visit haverford.edu/fragmentedbodies/index.php

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