The Cross and the Lynching Tree: Exploring Religion and Race in the Elementary Classroom

We explore what happened during a literature discussion in a fifth-grade classroom when the students and teacher interpreted the experience of enslaved Blacks through "the cross." We also examine a digital video two of the students created about riots that ensued in Cincinnati after an unarmed African American teenager was killed by a White police officer. We begin with a framework that integrates culturally responsive teaching with Critical Race Theory (CRT). We then explain how we needed to include another perspective, Black liberation theology, to more richly frame, understand, and make explicit links among religion, racism, and suffering. Implications center on what we might learn from the teacher and children in this classroom, especially about the spaces that might be cultivated in classrooms when the topics of religion and the history of enslaved peoples intersect.—