4. Dread Scott, A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday, 2015
From 1920 until 1938, the N.A.A.C.P. would mark lynchings by flying a stark black-and-white flag from its New York headquarters on Fifth Avenue. “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday,” read the banner, confronting the residents of a northern city with the horrifying regularity of these murders. In 2015, the artist Dread Scott felt that the banner was just as grimly necessary in the present-day United States as it had been nearly a century earlier. He produced his own version of the flag, updating the text to read “A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday,” in response to the fatal shooting of Walter Scott by a South Carolina police officer. “During the Jim Crow era, Black people were terrorized by lynching … It was a threat that hung over all Black people who knew that for any reason or no reason whatsoever you could be killed and the killers would never be brought to justice,” said Scott. “Now the police are playing the same role of terror that lynch mobs did at the turn of the century.” The flag went on display on the facade of Jack Shainman Gallery in New York during a 2016 exhibition organized by For Freedoms, the artist-run political action group founded by Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman. The piece became a source of national controversy when it remained on view above the street after a deadly sniper attack on police officers in Dallas, Texas, sparking a wave of threats to the gallery from people who felt that the work encouraged violence against police. Finally, the gallery removed the flag and displayed it indoors following pressure from the building owner. In 1938, the N.A.A.C.P. ceased flying the original flag after the organization’s landlord threatened eviction. — Z.L.
