Simply for the way it collects and preserves the stories of dozens of African American survivors of the lynching era, Angela D. Sims’ Lynched should be considered required reading for every US citizen. But in explicating the theological, sacramental, ethical, and ecclesiological significance of these memories, Sims makes a vital contribution to the field of theology as well. Sims’ work may at first appear to duplicate or expound upon the arguments developed by James Cone in The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011). But, in addition to beginning her research several years before Cone's work was published, Sims pursues different theological questions than Cone. While Cone finds theological meaning in what happened on “the lynching tree,” Sims searches for theological truth in how African American individuals and communities remember this era.
Complementing the way M. Shawn Copeland uncovers the sacramental consequences of antiblackness, Sims compares the process of remembering lynching to symbolic baptism, which she describes as “a symbolic immersion that plunged and invited me to journey with the participants into repressed, suppressed, reconfigured, and ritualized memories” (5). This comparison is fascinating and provocative. In future work, perhaps Sims could answer the question this comparison poses: what is the resurrection that follows in the wake of this deadly act of remembering?
Although she does not directly engage with his work, her description of “remembering lynching” as a type of death challenges or at least complicates Johann Baptist Metz's theory of memory. For Metz, memories of history's victims qualify as “dangerous” because they threaten to disrupt the narrative that sustains their oppressors’ power. But for some of the elders whom Sims interviewed, it was silence that helped to keep them alive. Sims identifies two ways in which African American people used silence as strategies for survival: the first draws upon “a tradition of knowing shrouded intentionally in silence as a strategy to deter unwanted attention” (8) from volatile and violent whites; in the second, black parents refrained from talking about lynching around their children in order “to exercise agency as they determined ways to shield their children from the horrors of domestically sanctioned terror” (9). As one elder explained, his family did not discuss lynching “because [doing so would] accomplish what lynching was designed to accomplish—to strike fear in [their] hearts” (107).
Reflecting upon her interviews with African American elders, Sims similarly notes that many of them fostered “a determination not to be controlled by internalized rage against persons who choose to behave inhumanely” (48). Especially by comparing the process of remembering lynching to drowning, Sims suggests that memory is circumstantially rather than unconditionally life giving. She similarly encourages scholars to consider the ways in which the silence of oppressors differs from the silence of the oppressed.
While political and liberation theologies tend to advocate political transformation, Sims reflects upon the experience of living in space that one cannot change. African American survivors of the lynching era teach us that “living between now and not yet requires an ability to imagine what a divine occupation in places and spaces that may remain unaltered during multiple generations may require of me” (86). Her focus on memory enables her to reflect upon the subjectivity of time and space. To this end, she invites her reader to “imagine walking past killing sites on a daily basis” (91). She similarly challenges her readers to let themselves be transformed by the memories of African American elders. For example, what today stands as “an upper-income human-made waterfront community” was once “a lynching ground.” Their memories haunt, unsettle, and disorient us. We cannot know the violent past our seemingly beautiful or bustling hometown or neighborhood is hiding. This holds especially true given that stories of near lynchings are even harder to recover than stories of unfortunately successful ones. White spaces are typically perceived as uniquely safe, tranquil, and even ordinary. The memories Sims collects unveil them as volatile and violently antiblack.
Sims’ attempt to “identify similarities between justifications for preemptive strikes and a culture of lynching” does not fully succeed (44). Despite this misstep, Sims ably demonstrates the ongoing and underappreciated theological importance of the lynching era.
