By Parties unknown

I was recently shown this picture called "By Parties Unknown" by Hale Woodruff. It depicts a lynched black man left on the doorstep of a church.

The significance of 'a tree' and 'hanging from a tree' are deep within the Christian tradition. But for me it's the unknown person here that seems to be powerful when I look at this picture.

My friend who shared this with me said the following (she cites James Cone's reference to it in his book 'The Cross and The Lynching Tree'):

For Cone, this imagery is something that black artists and poets and writers and musicians could see clearly and spoke about clearly, but theologians and ordinary Christians did not...

You can’t see it too well here but where the rope in the Parties Unknown image meets the ground, flowers are growing. There is beauty to be found in the midst of pain.
 
As James Cone writes: “The beauty in black existence is as real as the brutality, and the beauty prevents the brutality from having the final word. Black suffering needs radical and creative voices, prophetic advocates who can tell brutal and beautiful stories of how oppressed black people survived with a measure of dignity when they were not meant to. Who are we? Why are we here? And what must we do to achieve our full humanity in a world that denies it?”