James H. Cone

James Hal Cone was born on the fifth of August 1938 at Fordyce in Dallas County, Arkansas, the son of Charlie M. Cone — a self-employed woodcutter — and Lucy Cone, a domestic worker and lifelong member of the Macedonia African Methodist Episcopal Church at Bearden, Arkansas, where Charlie Cone served as a trustee. Cone was raised in the Macedonia AME congregation and the surrounding Black Baptist culture of southern Arkansas. He completed Bearden's segregated Shorter Junior College in 1956 and the bachelor's degree at Philander Smith College in Little Rock in 1958.

He took the Master of Divinity at the Garrett Biblical Institute of Northwestern University in 1961 and the Ph.D. in systematic theology at Northwestern in 1965 with a dissertation on Karl Barth. He taught at the Adrian College of Methodist theology in Michigan from 1966 to 1969 — the years across which the Detroit riot of 1967, the assassination of King in 1968, and the formation of the Black Power movement produced what he would describe as his theological re-birth. He moved in 1969 to the Union Theological Seminary in New York and remained there as professor of systematic theology for the following forty-nine years.

His foundational books — Black Theology and Black Power of 1969, A Black Theology of Liberation of 1970, The Spirituals and the Blues of 1972, God of the Oppressed of 1975 — produced the academic discipline of Black liberation theology and established it as a recognised subfield within global Christian theology. The four books advance the cumulative argument that the Christian doctrine of God is unintelligible apart from God's identification with the historical condition of the oppressed; that in twentieth-century America that meant identification with the Black community in particular; and that any Christianity which does not identify Christ with the Black struggle for liberation is not Christianity but a different religion that uses Christ's name.

His final book — The Cross and the Lynching Tree of 2011 — took as its central subject the parallel between Roman crucifixion and the lynchings of southern reconstruction. He produced fourteen books across his Union career and trained the second generation of African American academic theologians — Delores Williams, Dwight Hopkins, Kelly Brown Douglas, Eboni Marshall Turman.

He died of cancer at New York on the twenty-eighth of April 2018, at seventy-nine.

He is honored here as the founder of Black liberation theology.