*On April 28, a seminary spokeswoman from the Union Theological Seminary, where he was a distinguished professor, announced that Dr. James H. Cone had died at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan at the age of 79.
He was a central figure in the development of the black liberation theology in the 1960s and ‘70s, where he argued for racial justice and the need to interpret the Christian Gospel which elevated the voices of the oppressed. Apart from being a theologian, he was a minister and an author. Cone described the black liberation movement as the interpretation of the Gospel from the perspectives and the lived experiences of those who were part of the lowest racial and economic groups.
He was a determined man who persistently and forcefully spoke of economic injustices, mass incarcerations, and police shootings along with other inequalities that affected the black community. He realized the need for the black community to love and embrace their blackness. He wanted to reclaim Christianity from the white man and show it to be a religion of liberation that deems all of God’s creation to be free and this couldn’t be possible if the community didn’t learn to love itself.
Cone was born in the year 1938 in Fordyce, Ark. He did his bachelors of divinity from the Garrett Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill., before receiving a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from the Northwestern University in Evanston. His 1969 book, “Black Theology & Black Power” is considered among the founding texts when talking about the black liberation theology. His goal was to give voice to the voiceless black masses for the sake of Christ; whose Gospel he believed had been significantly distorted by the theology inculcated in white churches.
He is known to have given many of his students the opportunity to study and find their own theological voices at a time when they did not have any. He encouraged his students to think for themselves and pursue their own ideas, instead of imitating someone else’s, regardless of how popular the former might be.
Talking to The New York Times, Dr. Cone described black theology to be the combination of the views held by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Suggesting that the movement took its Christianity angle from Dr. King and their emphasis on blackness from Malcolm X.
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