“Our silence is creating a burden,” said civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson at the launch of The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America at the Brooklyn Museum. “We’ve got to do something to get closer to freedom, and that means talking about some things we haven’t talked about.” The exhibit, which runs through October 8, is a collaboration between the museum and Stevenson’s nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), and it reckons with racial histories we’ve long been asleep to.
There’s some mordant play in this dialogue between old and new. A performance still of Dread Scott from On the Impossibility of a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide (2014) shows the artist grimacing against the stream of a firehose — like the ones police used against Civil Rights protesters — with his hands raised in the now-famous ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ pose of Black Lives Matter. The combination of images insists we understand a continuum of state violence against black citizens from Birmingham to Ferguson, to whatever comes next.
