James H. Cone argues that Black Liberation Theology in the United States developed independently from Liberation Theology in Latin America in his book For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church. Where have we been and where are we going. 

James H. Cone (1938 – 2018) was deeply influenced by Karl Barth, Jürgen Moltmann, and many other theologians that frequent the PostBarthian. Cone studied Karl Barth and did his doctoral dissertation on Karl Barth's theology, and was deeply influenced by Barth's life and works. Cone was also influenced by Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and black preachers and authors that argued Jesus is Black. Cone also credits himself (amongst others) for developing and formalizing Black Liberation Theology and Black Theology, exemplified by his books Black Theology & Black Power (1969), A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), and many others.

Before Cone developed Black Liberation Theology and more generally Black Theology, there were little to no theological publications on either subject. Cone argues that the seminaries and theological academia were entrenched in white supremacy, which had been a mechanism for keeping blacks suppressed in a long history extending back to the American Slave Trade, and this prevented blacks from publishing theological works. Cone argued that academia had been swept up into liberal Protestant universalism and consequently ignored that Jesus sided with the oppressed specifically, and not with everyone irrespectively. This universalism was unwilling to recognize the specific persecution of blacks and the Ameri-Indians. James H. Cone developed a specifically black theology to assert that God sided with the oppressed because God did not ignore blackness and the evilness of whiteness. The goal was to abolish White Jesus. James H. Cone's Black Theology was a unique and needed statement and it was not respected by white Christianity.

Before James H. Cone, there were few published black theologians due to the intrinsic white supremacy in academia. So initially, Cone did not have any theological heirs that he could utilize to lay a foundation for his theology. James H. Cone praises Jürgen Moltmann for his world-renown Theology of Hope (1964, 1967 ET) because it provided Cone a world-class theologian that was aligned well with his own Black Theology (because Black Theology is a theology of hope specifically for the oppressed) and because it provided a credible source that could not be ignored.

When James H. Cone encountered Liberation Theology as it emerged from Latin America, it surprised him (especially Gustavo Gutiérrez's A Theology of Liberation) because it had persuasively attacked western white liberal theology using similar polemics as his own. Cone explains that Liberation Theology was not accessible until it was translated because it was primarily written in Spanish, which was not spoken by black theologians. James H. Cone was disappointed in Liberation Theology because it focused on the problem of classism and ignored racism despite the millions of blacks that lived in Latin America and Brazil.

James H. Cone explains that Black Liberation Theology is similar to Liberation Theology of Latin America because of the identity of the gospel with liberation but they differ because Black Theology emphasizes racism specifically and not classism (although later on, Cone includes classism, sexism, and other themes). Cone says that Liberation Theology (Latin America) was embraced by white supremacists because it allowed them to adopt the theme of liberation that had strongly criticized their liberal Protestantism while allowing them to ignore their racism.

Jesus is Black, baby! James H. Cone exclaimed (along with others). Cone did not claim that Jesus was a black person (as some had before Cone), but instead, Cone argued that Jesus embodied blackness, and therefore Jesus must be identified as black. Cone rightly argues that Jesus specifically identified with the lowly and the oppressed. He was a man of suffering his entire life, and blackness embodies Jesus most specifically in America today.

The #RollUpSeries contains lightly edited informal articles sourced from @PostBarthian twitter threads including this one:

James H. Cone argues that Black Liberation Theology developed independently from Liberation Theology in his book "For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church. Where have we been and where are we going." pic.twitter.com/hBIocCjKRx

— PostBarthian (@postbarthian) June 10, 2020