The violence of lynching is a blot on our nation’s history that continues to threaten the rule of law in analogous ways today. The May 25, 2020, death of George Floyd, a Black man, under the knee-hold of a Minneapolis police officer attests to this. As we interrogate this fiercely racist act of police brutality, and the many preceding it, various lenses can be employed to derive new meanings. James H. Cone, one of the fathers of Black Theology, provides us with an interpretation that we might overlook: the Black Jesus who dies on the cross to overcome the violence experienced by Blacks. As he wrote in his last work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, “to understand what the cross means in America, we need to take a look at the lynching tree in this nation’s history.”