James Hal Cone was born in Fordyce, Arkansas on August 5, 1938. He received a bachelor of divinity degree from Garrett Theological Seminary and a master's degree and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. He became a central figure in the development of black liberation theology in the 1960s and 1970s. He spoke about racial inequalities that persisted in the form of economic injustice, mass incarceration, and police shootings. He joined the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in 1969 and was appointed to the distinguished Charles A. Biggs chair of systematic theology in 1977.
He wrote several books including Black Theology and Black Power, A Black Theology of Liberation, Crosscurrents, and The Cross and the Lynching Tree, which received the Grawemeyer Award in Religion in 2018. He died on April 28, 2018 at the age of 79.
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