Edward J. Blum, co-author of The Color of Christ, explains how depictions of Jesus mirror America's fraught racial history. When the idea of a blond-haired, blue-eyed Christ took hold:
Up until the late 1800s, Blum says Americans were comfortable with Jesus' Semitic roots and depicted him with brown eyes. But as waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants came to the United States, some Americans "became concerned that it was changing the face of America too much, changing it racially, changing it religiously." In the early 20th century, there was an attempt to distinguish Jesus from his Semitic background. Religious writers and artists who were advocating for immigration restrictions began to depict Jesus with blond hair and blue eyes.
And the origins of a black Jesus:
During the 1920s and 1930s, we see people out of W.E.B. Du Bois' circle drawing Jesus as a Southern black man who is lynched, basically. And then the second time we see it is during the civil rights movement, during the mid- and late-1960s and the 1970s … that Jesus is more Africanized. He might have an Afro, he might wear a dashiki.
The Dish 