American theologian, the founder and central figure of Black liberation theology. Born in Bearden, Arkansas — a Jim Crow town his writing returned to repeatedly — Cone took his doctorate at Garrett–Northwestern in 1965 and for most of his career taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he trained the next two generations of Black theologians. He wrote his first book in the months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the uprisings that followed; the anger in the early work is direct, theological, and unapologetic.
Black Theology and Black Power (1969) and A Black Theology of Liberation (1970) make the defining argument: the God of the Bible is a God of the oppressed, and in the American context that means — unavoidably, scandalously — that God is Black, standing with Black people as God stood with the Hebrews in Egypt. The books worked out a theology in which Malcolm X's refusal of white Christianity and King's Christian nonviolent tradition were not opposed but mutually required: liberation requires both the prophetic denunciation of the oppressor and the beloved-community hope of reconciliation, but the denunciation cannot be skipped. God of the Oppressed (1975) is the mature synthesis; Martin & Malcolm & America (1991) is probably his most widely read book, the double portrait that established that the two figures cannot be read separately.
The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011), his late masterpiece, works out a connection that had been implicit in his whole career: the American lynching tree, on which thousands of Black bodies were hung between Reconstruction and the middle of the 20th century, is the theological hinge through which American Christianity can and must read the cross — and vice versa. That white American theology failed to make this connection is, for Cone, the central indictment of the tradition he worked inside and against.