160 - Countee Cullen's "The Black Christ"

Countee Cullen's "The Black Christ"
By James H. Smylie

"Lynch him! Lynch him!" O savage cry
Why should you echo, "Crucify."¹

COUNTEE CULLEN wrote "The Black Christ" in 1929, and published The Black Christ and Other Poems in 1930, just fifty-one years ago. Twenty-six years old, author of Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927), and editor of an anthology, Caroling Dusk (1927), Cullen was already a star of the Harlem Renaissance. In "The Black Christ" he gave a poet's interpretation of Christ's atoning work for all God's children from the perspective of the American black's excruciating experience with lynching. Cullen with his sense of Godforsakenness and his theologia crucis offers insight into his own times, a black view of the atonement, and the motivation and method of the Civil Rights movement, especially under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr.

1929! That was the year of the Great Crash and the beginning of the Depression so devastating for black Americans as well as whites. It was ten years after the fledgling NAACP exposed Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States (1919). Out of 3,224 known lynchings and burnings, often with mutilations, 2,522 of them were Negroes, most for alleged murders, many for alleged rape of white women. This searing report documented the breakdown of due process and the reign of lawlessness in many communities. The KKK burned crosses; it also had a bloody cross to bear. The Reverend F. A. Cullen, the head of Countee's family, was pastor of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in Manhattan and also a member of the New York chapter of the NAACP. There must have been considerable excitement in the Cullen household when the elder Cullen joined others in a successful protest to Woodrow Wilson about the threatened hanging of rioters in Texas immediately after World War I. In the 1920s, Marcus Garvey was hailed as Moses, stirring blacks with the promise of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Black Madonnas and black Christs began to appear in Harlem homes. Countee Cullen made a brief pilgrimage to

James H. Smylie is Professor of American Church History, Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia, and Editor of the Journal of Presbyterian History. Two previous articles, evaluating classic religious novels, have appeared in our pages, Ben Hur (Oct. 1972) and In His Steps (April 1975).
¹ Countee Cullen, On These I Stand (Harper & Row, 1947), 126. This volume contains many selections from Cullen's earlier works as well as "The Black Christ." All references to this particular poem as well as others will be from this volume.

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the Holy Land in 1926. Recovering from an unhappy marriage to the daughter of W. E. B. DuBois in 1928, he spent time writing in Paris. By 1929 Walter Rauschenbusch had been dead for ten years, and Reinhold Niebuhr was just beginning to shake Morningside Heights. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born in Atlanta the same year Cullen wrote "The Black Christ."

Countee Cullen was sensitive to the vocational tension with which he lived. "Yet do I marvel at this curious thing," he once mused about his God-given lyric genius, "To make a poet black, and bid him sing!" Cullen aspired to be, not a black poet, but a poet. He aspired to write, not about the black condition, but about the human condition. But he sang most effectively about the latter when he was most conscious of his own soul's agony. "The Black Christ" illustrates this point. In this long narrative poem, 963 lines in rhymed tetrameter, he correlated Christ's crucifixion-the "world's supremest tragedy," he called it-with lynching. He stated his theological purpose in the opening lines:

How Calvary in Palestine,
Extending down to me and mine,
Was but the first leaf in a line
Of trees on which a Man should swing
World without end, in suffering
For all men's healing, let me sing (104).

To fulfill his aspirations, he dedicated his effort "Hopefully … to White America." For various reasons neither white nor black America listened intently to his verse. Recently, French critic Jean Wagner has given Cullen and his poem its due, despite its flaws. In his Les Poetes Negres des États-Unis (1963; English edition, 1973), he argued that Cullen was the first poet to explore the theological implications of lynching in connection with Christ's crucifixion and Cullen's Christian mysticism.²

I

Cullen was not the first to relate crucifixion and lynching, nor did he compose his song in a theological vacuum. Fundamentalists and Modernists of various grades were locked in abrasive public combat in the 1920s, and heirs of the "social gospel" were interpreting the benefits of Christ's atoning work in terms of an oppressive economic system. The black community, including Cullen's minister father, could not help but be influenced by the doctrines blowing in the wind of the larger Christian community. But Cullen wrote primarily in the context of the black tradition.

As Eugene Genovese had reminded us, in Roll, Jordan Roll (1974), black religion was best expressed in experiential terms and with a fusion

² Jean Wagner, Black Poets of the United States from Paul Lawrence Dunbar to Langston Hughes (University of Illinois Press, 1973). Les Poetes Negres des États-Unis first appeared in 1962.

162 - Countee Cullen's "The Black Christ"

of the work of deliverer Moses and deliverer Jesus.³ Just as blacks found it natural to think analogically about the similarity between their own experience of bondage and that of the children of Israel in Egypt, so they thought of Christ's cry of dereliction and death on the cross in terms of their own dark experience with lynching. Blacks looked for identity, dignity, and for the assurance of God's presence with them.

Some whites considered lynching as the crime of crimes, and took steps to control and eliminate the scandal. There is some evidence that it illuminated the theological discussion of the atonement during these years. Conservatives sang about the cross as an "emblem of suffering and shame," on a "hill far away," not down at the end of a dusty street, and insisted that atonement be interpreted in a theological formula of a blood sacrifice made once for all to satisfy divine justice. Liberals were embarrassed with those who sang about the "power in the blood."

Among the liberal options, the young Cullen may have found the concerns of the "Social Gospel" of special interest. Worshiping, he probably sang the hymn of Methodist Frank Mason North, "Where cross the crowded ways of life/Where sound the cries of race and clan," and perhaps he heard his father speak about the prophet, Walter Rauschenbusch. In A Theology for the Social Gospel (1917). Rauschenbusch described the conflict between the kingdom of evil and the kingdom of God. Christ's crucifixion was described as a lynching in an analysis of the atonement, an act of mob spirit and mob action. Acquiescence of the civil and spiritual powers exposed the corruption of and cant about just society. Christ's death demonstrated God's solidarity with the human family, according to Rauschenbusch, not through sympathy expressed at a distance, but by self-sacrificing love, "the chief guarantee for the love of God and the chief incentive of self-sacrificing love in men."⁴ The cross was the motive and method of true believers.

Contemporary liberal professions about bow Christ confirmed "the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man" may have sounded bollow to blacks confronted with lynching in which seemingly respectable Christians conspired. But perhaps Cullen's spirit resonated with something he got from North. It is worth noting that Herman Melville's Billy Budd was published posthumously in 1924 although we have no evidence that Cullen read it.

As a child of the manse, Cullen sang other hymns beside "On a hill far away" and "Where cross the crowded ways of life." "Go down, Moses" and "Were you there when they crucified my Lord" have been a special part of the black consciousness about God's relationship to the black. Cullen could also draw upon the work of sensitive black intelligentsia. In Caroling Dusk, Cullen collected the poems of a number of Negroes, as they were called in those days, who had reflected on

³ Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, The World the Slaves Made (Random House, 1976), 254-255.
⁴ Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (Macmillan, 1917), 254, 271-272.

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deliverance in the black community. One was James Weldon Johnson, who published God's Trombones (1927) to preserve as well as pay tribute to "Black and Unknown Bards" who "sang a race from wood and stone to Christ" and who spoke of Moses and Jesus. In these verse sermons, Johnson recalled the importance of "The Crucifixion" for blacks. He sang of the "gentle Jesus," the "burdened Jesus," the "sorrowing Jesus," the "blameless Jesus," the "loving Jesus," the "lamb-like Jesus," through whom God, with tenderness over the human condition identified and dignified life's sufferers. Johnson placed the sermon on Moses after that on the crucifixion. In it he addressed the "sons of Pharoah" and warned of the "Judgment Day" when "God's a-going to rain down fire." W. E. B. DuBois was another who wrote poignantly of black religion.5 He published The Soul of Black Folks in 1903, the year of Cullen's birth, in which he indicted lynching. In Darkwaters (1920), DuBois collected some of his own prose and poetry in a powerful put-down of the soul of white folk. In "A Litany of Atlanta," written after an outbreak of violence against blacks in 1906, DuBois cried out to the "blind" God, the "silent" God, the "deaf" God:

Bewildered we are, the passion-tost, mad with the madness of a mobbed and mocked and murdered people; straining at armposts of Thy Throne, we raise our shackled hands and charge Thee, God, by the bones of our stolen fathers, by the tears of our dead mothers, by the very blood of Thy crucified Christ: What meaneth this? Tell us the Plan: give us the sign!

In "The Prayers of God," DuBois directly connected crucifixion with lynching. Reflecting on the judgment scene in Matthew 25, DuBois puts into the mouth of a troubled white:

Thou?
Thee?
I lynched Thee?

When did I lynch you, Lord? Inasmuch as you lynched one of the least of these "niggers," you lynched me. DuBois wanted the God of the "lamb-like Jesus" to vindicate those who suffered from the oppressive pharoahs of this world.6

Writing in his preface to Caroling Dusk, in which he included poems of Johnson and DuBois, Cullen claimed that his problem was a conflict between his Christian-self and his pagan-self. He exposed this struggle in his first book of verse, Color. "What is Africa to Me?" he asked in one. In another, he offered a "Pagan Prayer," using some "Social Gospel" phrases and addressing his own need:

Our Father, God; our Brother, Christ,
Retrieve my race again;
So shall you compass this black sheep,
This pagan heart. Amen (12).

⁵ James Weldon Johnson, God's Trombones (Viking, 1927), 39-43, 45-52.
⁶ W. E. B. DuBois, Darkwater, Voices from Within the Veil (1920; Schocken Books, 1969),25-28,249-252.

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In "Heritage," Cullen expressed this tension even more poignantly. He confessed that he belonged to "Jesus of the twice-turned cheek," but he was uneasy about making Jesus, with "precedent of pain" (27), black like himself:

Lord, I fashion dark gods, too,
Daring even to give
You Dark despairing features where,
Crowned with dark rebellious hair,
Patience wavers just so much as
Mortal grief compels, while touches
Quick and hot, of anger, rise
To smitten cheek and weary eyes.
Lord forgive me if my need
Sometimes shapes a human creed (27-28).

Cullen did not resolve his tension in these early poems. As early as 1922 he began to link Christ's crucifixion with the via dolorosa of the American black. He wrote of "Christ Recrucified":

The South is crucifying Christ again
…
Christ's awful wrong is that he's dark of hue
The sin for which no blamelessness atones;
But lest the sameness of the cross should tire,
They kill him now with famished tongues of fire,
And while he burns, good men, and women, too,
Shout, battling for his black and brittle bones.⁷

This early cry of the heart against this obscene violence of the lynch mob and the lynch spirit, turning from rope to faggot, reverberated in Cullen's heart throughout the 1920s. In 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti were hanged in Boston, and Cullen expressed his disagreement with the decision and with capital punishment in general. Apparently finding no comforting analogy in his pagan-self, he turned to his Christian-self for insight to help him with his excruciating problem.

Cullen transformed his problem into one of the human condition. How does "Calvary in Palestine" extend down for "all men's healing," Cullen asked in the opening lines of "The Black Christ"? Christ "by his loss," bought "redemption on a cross." But how? Cullen does not interpret Christ's crucifixion in terms of a sacrifice to satisfy wounded honor or a debt for human sin, but rather in terms of theo pathes, the God who is with us and for us in our human agony.

Cullen had explored other interpretations of the atonement. In "The Shroud of Color" which appeared in Color, he described the awesome clash between cosmic powers, between God and evil, God's archangels, angels and Christ against Lucifer, all in Miltonian terms:

And strange it was to see God with his back
Against a wall, to see Christ hew and hack
Till Lucifer, pressed by the mighty pair,

⁷ Wagner, 335.

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And losing inch by inch, clawed at the air
With fevered wings; then, lost beyond repair,
He tricked a mass of stars into his hair;
He filled his hands with stars, crying as he fell,
"A star's a star although it burns in hell."
So God was left to his divinity,
Omnipotent at that most costly fee (20).

God so triumphant and so distant did not appeal to Cullen. It did not do justice to the mystery of human suffering and sacrificial love, and God's own concern for the human condition. In the same poem, Cullen explored another dimension of atonement. While he expressed his own lack of "strength to sacrifice," he submerged his own "puny grief" in the struggle of "all dark people" in "life's abattoir," and he looked to a "mighty surge" of suffering through which blacks would overcome the world in victory (22). This turn away from Christ to the collective suffering of black people as redemptive was not really satisfying. In "The Shroud of Color," he expresses a lingering doubt with a reference early in the poem to Abraham and Isaac:

… hast Thou, Lord, somewhere I cannot see
A lamb imprisoned in a bush for me? (17).

II

Cullen's last and longest attempt to deal with this tension of atonement is "The Black Christ." He sings about a black boy, Jim, growing to manhood, proud and handsome, about his temptation to reject the faith in the face of injustice, about his crucifixion for the sake of love, and murder, and about his resurrection appearance. He sings about Jim's brother, who acknowledges Jesus as well as Jim as of the same kin (106). This brother is the narrator, perhaps Cullen himself, who faces his own rebellion when his brother is lynched and his own trial of faith. And Cullen sings about the mother, "Job's dark sister" (136), who embodies Calvary's sorrow in her heart, yet is "still unconquered Lady, Faith" (106). She is the instrument through whom God's Spirit works to keep her sons faithful. And through this black passion play, Cullen expressed his own credo about Christ's atonement.

The mother is a Black Madonna, the Christ-bearer, and her long-suffering as a handmaiden of the Lord indicates how important the black mother has been for the household of faith. She knows the South as a "cruel land" (107) which has bled her and hers. She speaks of her own "soul's ecstasy" ( 108) to her boys:

No man…. can batter down
The star-flung ramparts of the mind.
So much for flesh; I am resigned,
Whom God has made shall he not guide? (109).

Her resignation is lightened by the confidence of a deliverance, and in confessing God's mighty acts, she recalls Moses and Israel to her children:

166 - Countee Cullen's "The Black Christ"

Once there had been somewhere as now
A people harried, low in the dust;
But such had been their utter trust
In heaven and its field of stars
They had broken down their bars,
And walked across a parted sea
Praising his name who set them free (110).

Wise with the experience of suffering, she is deeply disturbed about what the "cruel land" may do to her sons, and she attempts to fill their hearts with the power of a new affection for Christ.

Jim passes through a dark night of the soul and is tempted to unbelief or other deities. Part of an "imperial breed," Jim is outraged at the injustices he sees about him. In whispered tones he speaks to his brother about the most recent lynching in the neighborhood. "Why?" Jim asks. "Maybe God never thinks at all-Of us…." "Likely there ain't no God at all," he protests, clothing his doubts with the words of a man trying to put away boyish things:

Nay, I have done with deities
Who keep me ever on my knees,
My mouth forever in a tune
Of praise, yet never grant the boon
Of what I pray for night and day.
God is a toy; put him away (115-116).

Unable to put away all thoughts of a God who helps, he raises other possibilities. He contemplates animism, making a god

… of wood or stone
That you can call your very own….
Better an idol shaped of clay
Near you, than one so far away (116).

Or better still, Jim muses, "God should be/This moving, breathing frame of me; Strong hands and feet, live heart and eyes; …" What of the gods of Greece and Rome, gods fit to be sung, those who serve human desire especially for revenge-now!

"Bow down and worship us," they said.
"You shall be clothed, be housed and fed,
While yet you live, not when you're dead.
Strong are our arms where yours are weak.
On them that harm you will we wreak
The vengeance of a God though they
Were Gods like us in every way…." (117).

Faced with this "night/Of doubt," in her son, the mother patiently confesses her faith. For her "spirit's latter birth" she claims no vision, no "risings from the dead," no "quiverings of earth," no "Damascus road," no "need to view/His side, or pass … fingers through/ Christ's wounds" (118). She trusts that through all suffering "We and eternity are knit,/Death made a myth, and darkness lit" (119). Moreover, she believes that God uses what seems weak and foolish in this world to bring to nothing those things which appear wise and powerful:

167 - Countee Cullen's "The Black Christ"

The slave can meet the monarch's gaze
With equal pride, dreaming of days
When slave and monarch both shall be,
Transmuted everlastingly,
A single reed blown to sing
The glory of the only King (119).

Cullen records no immediate response of Jim and his brother to this motherly concern.

III

After temptation, then crucifixion, and a rebellious son dies as a man of sorrows. Jim, proud, handsome, and imperial, meets his mother and brother next in panic, fleeing the sickening howls of "two-limbed dogs" on their way to lynch him (120). The occasion for this lynch mob and lynch spirit is Jim's love for a white girl and his murder of a white man. Cullen describes the sequence of events. Jim-"Spring's gayest cavalier" (119)-is attracted to and falls in love with a white girl. It is an innocent love "(Taught on a bloody Christless road)," without regard to "hue and race," without regard to "rank or caste," a love which from the heart of both lovers was a voice "high and clear" (122). Jim and his lover are discovered together by a white man, violating what one southerner has called the South's "gynecolatry." This "bit of crass and filthy clay" strikes the woman for a slut. Because this man laid a "hand on spring" and insulted his love, Jim laid a hand on the defiler, striking and killing him, as Moses did the Egyptian (123-125). As Jim breathlessly tells of his plight to his mother and brother the lynchers close in for mob action. When the "Blood-sniffing crowd" (128) breaks into the home of this cowed holy family, Cullen borrows from the passion narratives of the Gospels to describe the surrender of Jim to his tormentors. He leaves to his brother a word of reassurance and instruction so that his death may not be in vain:

Brother … then prove
Out of your charity and love
That I was not unduly slain,
That this my death was not in vain.
For no life should go to the tomb
Unless from it a new life bloom,
A clearer faith, a clearer sight,
A wiser groping for the light (129).

And to his mother, grief-stricken, though dry-eyed, he confesses his faith:

Mother, not poorer losing one,
Look now upon your dying son (129).

Beaten, as Jesus was before him, he is dragged out and hanged on a "virgin tree/Awaiting its fecundity."

This crucifixion stirs outrage in Jim's brother. He is now tempted as he had not been before with his own dark doubts until his brother

168 - Countee Cullen's "The Black Christ"

appears again in resurrection and causes his own "soul's ecstasy." With no eyes to see or ears to hear, he turns his anger against his mother's childlike submission to this work of evil. He mocks her faith:

… Why was he flung
Like common dirt to death? Why, stone,
Must he of all the earth atone
For what? …
… Christ who conquered Death and Hell
What has he done for you who spent
A bleeding life for his content?
Or is the white Christ, too, distraught
By these dark sins his Father wrought? (132-133).

Hearing these blasphemies, the mother holds fast. The God to whom she traveled, Cullen writes,

Was judge of all that men might do
To such as she who trusted him
Faith was a tower for her, grim
And insurmountable…. (131-132).

Suddenly God gives to Jim and his mother the sign of the prophet Jonah when Jim shows his "vital self" (134) in a resurrection appearance, thus providing, as do the Gospels, the eschatological ground for belief. While the lynching was an experience of abandonment, resurrection was the sign and seal of God's presence even in tragedy. Jim is able to see, with his mother, the grace and glory of the Lord in Christ's work of atonement ( 134).

Cullen transforms the existential black experience into a universal message about Christ's passion and triumph. Out of Jim's temptation, crucifixion, and resurrection, Cullen arrives at his interpretation of the atonement, expressed in a brother's words:

If I am blind he does not see;
If I am lame he halts with me;
There is no hood of pain I wear
That has not rested on his hair
Making him first initiate
Beneath its harsh and hairy weight.
He grew with me within the womb;
He will receive me at the tomb.
He will make plain the misty path
He makes me tread in love and wrath,
And bending down in peace and grace
May wear again my brother's face (137).

IV

Countee Cullen left his readers problems with both form and substance. Some critics were not kind with regard to the form of "The Black Christ." They were disappointed, as was Granville Hicks writing for the Nation, because the poet was not developing properly. The critics considered the rhymed tetrameter used for the narrative and meditations in the epic arbitrary, constricting, and unconvincing. One

169 - Countee Cullen's "The Black Christ"

even called it comic. Unfortunately, Cullen had not taken into consideration that T. S. Eliot published the Wasteland in 1922, and that poets were exploring new idioms to express a sense of alienation. He picked Milton as a model by which to explore America's racist wasteland, and his contemporaries considered him anachronistic. With rhymed tetrameter he trivialized the awesome. He failed to move the lost generation even though some recognized the maturity of his theme. Here they strained at meter and rhyme and swallowed a camel, and probably discouraged Cullen who wanted so much to be considered a poet.⁸

Blacks, made more militant than Cullen by the Garvey movement and more troubled by the Depression, did not fully appreciate the poet's effort either. But DuBois, who had been Cullen's father-in-law for a brief period, was kind. He noted in 1929 that "The Black Christ" was a poem of "religious mysticism, of beauty, and finish." DuBois himself was moving further and further toward Marxism, economically, politically, and religiously, and away from his Christian roots.⁹ Langston Hughes, part of the Harlem Renaissance like Cullen, demonstrated in his poetry what he thought of attempts like Cullen's to express a viable Christian theology in the face of frustration. In 1933, Hughes wrote "A New Song" about Christ:

The day is past
I know full well now
Jesus could not die for me-
That only my own hands,
Dark as the earth,
Can make my earth-dark body free.

In a still more angry verse, Hughes showed his alienation. In "Goodbye Christ" he made a decisive break by blaming "popes and preachers" for selling Christ out to Kings and Czars and Rockefeller:

Christ Jesus Lord God Jehovah
Beat it on away from here now.
Make way for a new guy with no religion at all.
A real guy named
Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin,
Worker ME -
I said, ME
Go ahead on now.
You're getting in the way of things Lord
And please take Saint Becton
Of the Consecrated Dime
And step on the gas, Christ
Don't be so slow about moving;
Move.¹⁰

⁸ See, e.g., Granville Hicks, "Illumination," The Nation, March 12, 1930, 303-304; The Southern Workman, February, 1930, 92-93; The Christian Century, June 11, 1930, 757-758.
⁹ DuBois, Book Reviews by W. E. B. DuBois (compiled and edited by Herbert Aptheker, Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1977), 143.
¹⁰ Wagner, 438; Benjamin E. Mays, The Negro's God (1938; Atheneum, 1968), 238-239.

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Hughes' mode was to catch the mood of blacks. He was more like the rebellious Jim than Cullen attempting to come to terms with his Christian over against his pagan self. When critics mentioned Cullen's theme, they either missed or dismissed it. A reviewer in The Christian Century suggested that the poet made the "lynched Negro the savior of his race," and when Benjamin Mays mentioned the poem in The Negro's God (1938), he distorted it by concluding that Cullen thought God was "too far away to help" and was therefore useless. J. Saunders Redding, in his volume To Make a Poet Black (1939), called Cullen's effort feeble, the "childish mysticism of a bad dream," and evidence of a fear to face stern reality, unlike, perhaps, a DuBois or a Hughes.¹¹

Actually few critics really discussed "The Black Christ" until Jean Wagner gave it extensive analysis in Les Poetes Negres des États-Unis, in which he took seriously the theological dimension of the poem. The first striking aspect of this passion is the importance of the mother, who "traditions" her sons, passing on to them at one level her own "soul's ecstasy" about Moses and about Jesus, a Mary as well as "Job's daughter," who suffers yet who transcends in faith and hope and love. In this theologia crucis, Jim is a Christ-figure, one in "a line/Of trees" extending down from Christ. Jim is not the savior, but rather the one whose own death points back to Christ. Christ is the continual evidence that God stands at one with us in our human condition and our travails.

In developing Jim, Cullen had the same trouble Melville had with Billy Budd. Like Billy, Jim is tempted and rebellious, but resists temptation. Like Billy, Jim kills another man. While Billy goes to the gallows to satisfy the demands of the king's law, Jim hangs on the tree for his challenge of the racist taboo and his impulse to avenge innocent love. He also satisfied the demands of custom and law. Here the figure of Moses may fuse with that of Jesus. Jim, like Billy, becomes a judgment on the injustices of the society. But Jim is not portrayed as the savior. God through Christ is the savior, and the new Calvary leads back to the first, where God identified with our human condition and dignified our lives even when we meet with the most arbitrary human estrangement and alienation. The experience of lynching illuminates the meaning of the "old rugged cross" on a hill far away, and makes existential the question of the spiritual, "Were you there when they crucified my Lord." Cullen showed his theological acumen in other ways.

While he does not describe in this poem a bodily resurrection so important to Fundamentalists in his day, he did know the importance of resurrection. When he described the appearance of Jim's "vital self"perhaps a Bergsonian conception-he also indicated that crucifixion without resurrection and hope would lead to despair. Moreover, Cullen also saw that faith and hope in the Christian must manifest themselves

¹¹ The Christian Century, June 11, 1930, 757; Mays, 229; J. Saunders Redding, To Make a Poet Black (McGrath, 1939), 112.

171 - Countee Cullen's "The Black Christ"

in love. That is the last invitation which Jim gives to his brother to prove that his death has not been in vain. What Redding calls "childish mysticism" in Cullen, Wagner calls a "Christ-mysticism" and desire for union with Christ which is as old as the gospel itself.

Cullen did not dissolve the brutality of crucifixion in the abstraction of a correctly phrased doctrine of the atonement. He wanted his readers to experience the first Calvary and God's sacrificial love by looking on lynching. Lynching was a sacramental reminder of God's solidarity with the human family, first demonstrated in Christ's crucifixion. Moreover, in the summons of a life of hope and love, Cullen suggested that the cross was the source of our common brotherhood in suffering and a paradigm for Christian living.

In his poetic musings, Cullen may have reminded blacks of an old time religion, described by Mays in The Negro's God, which preached submission to oppression and promised compensation in a cloudy cuckoo-land-of-bye-and-bye. In any case, Cullen seemed to resolve the tension between his Christian and his pagan self and was himself satisfied. In 1946, he issued a collection of verse in a volume entitled On These I Stand just before his premature death of that year. He republished "The Black Chirst" and a number of the poems already mentioned as a reaffirmation of faith. He included, for example, "The Litany of Dark People" from Copper Sun. There he maintained that while the black may be crucified, still would he confess Christ:

… no assault the old gods make
Upon our agony
Shall swerve our footsteps from the wake
Of Thine toward Calvary (53).

He also included a poem written in 1929 called "Mood" in which be suggested some of his own restiveness and impatience with things as they were. Yes, he belonged to "Jesus of the twice-turned cheek" and remembered Jim's words about love. But he complained:

God knows I would be kind, let live, speak fair,
Require an honest debt with more than just,
And love for Christ's dear sake these shapes that wear
A pride that has its genesis in dust,
The meek are promised much in a book I know
But one grows weary turning cheek to blow (85).

"The Black Christ," according to this collection of poems, was Cullen's strongest attack on "man's consistent cruelty/To man" (114-115).

V

Martin Luther King, Jr., born the same year Cullen wrote "The Black Christ," hailed in his mature years as the Black Moses, incarnated in his own person and work the central insight of Cullen in his poem about the crucifixion. Reinhold Niebuhr suggested, in Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), that Gandhi might provide help to

172 - Countee Cullen's "The Black Christ"

blacks in dealing with powerlessness and injustice in America.¹² There is no question that King profited from Gandhi's freedom struggle in India, and biographers such as Leone Bennett in What Manner of Man (1963) emphasize over and over again the Gandhian connection. But so often attention is given to Gandhi at the expense of King's dependence on the person and work of Christ. Bennett, by the way, opens his biography by indicating Gandhi's own attraction to the Galilean. He tells of a visit in 1935 of American blacks to Gandhi who unexpectedly asked them to sing one of his favorite songs: "Were you there when they crucified my Lord."¹³

While there is no evidence that King read Cullen's poem, King did know Cullen as a poet and referred to him. Using insights from Gandhi, from Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr, and Anders Nygren's Agape and Eros (1938, 1939), King developed his view of suffering love into a force to challenge the conscience, customs, and laws of America. In Strength to Love (1963), a collection of sermons, King notes that while the world looks upon Christ's crucifixion as weakness and foolishness, Christians see there God's power and wisdom to lift up the last, the least, and the lost. It is not simply a guarantee of God's self-sacrificing love and identification with the human condition, but also it is the incentive of sacrificial love among human beings for human beings. It is not a paradigm for cowards, but for those who are strong in faith and hope and love.

King maintained that it was only through suffering love that we could love the enemy, even modern Pharoahs, curb desire for retaliation and the humiliation of others, and bring about reconciliation and healing to all people, black and white.¹⁴ As King joined with his followers to sing "We shall overcome," he was considered a Black Moses in the line of Marcus Garvey. King himself wanted to be more like Jesus. He deliberately chose Easter week of 1963 to hold demonstrations in Birmingham to witness to the one in whose footsteps he was trying to walk. He paid for his witness by being lynched, not by hanging, not by fire, but by being shot and killed by an assassin's bullet. King's death, in Cullen's vision, was another leaf in "a line/Of trees" bringing "Calvary in Palestine" down to us for "all men's healing."

Cullen lost some of his lyric powers and his reputation as a poet after the publication of "The Black Christ." He did not die the death of a martyr in protest against human cruelty to other human beings. He lived the quieter life of a school teacher to go to an early grave in 1946 mourned by over three thousand who attended his funeral. Apparently he had spoken a word which at least some of his generation heard. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote about "The Black Christ" in 1945 that it ought to be read by people as soon as they are mature enough to comprehend

¹² Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Soeiety (1932; Scribner's, 1948), 254.
¹³ Leone Bennett, Jr., What Manner of Man (Pocket Book, 1968), 1-2.
¹⁴ Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love (Pocket Book, 1964), passim.

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it.¹⁵ Cullen looked upon Jim's lynched body, reflected upon Christ's crucifixion, and rested upon God's love:

O Form immaculately born,
Betrayed a thousand times each morn,
As many times each night denied,
Surrendered, tortured, crucified!
That love which has no boundary;
Our eyes have looked on Calvary (135-136).

¹⁵ Blanche E. Ferguson, Countee Cullen and the Negro Renaissance (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1966), 115.