Tired of the epidemic of police killing people in the USA, artist Dread Scott printed the words “A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday” on a flag. He got the idea in 2015, right after the police shot Walter Scott in the back as he was fleeing after a control for a non-functioning brake light. The work is an update of the flag that the NAACP flew from their national headquarters window in New York in the nineteen-twenties and thirties the day after someone was lynched. This form of silent protest read: A Man Was Lynched Yesterday and was part of the organisation’s anti-lynching campaign.
Dread Scott, A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday, 2015. At Porta San Felice. Photo: Valentina Cafarotti
The NAACP flag, A Man Was Lynched Yesterday, 1936
During the Jim Crow era, one of the many ways white U.S. citizens terrorised Black people (but also Jews, gay people, immigrants, catholics, radicals, labour organisers, Latinos, etc.) was by lynching. Often public. Some 4,742 people were victims of these acts of race terrorism in the US between 1882 and 1968. The vast majority of them were black.
For many Black people today, the police instill the same fear as the lynch mobs of the past century. It is a threat that hangs over all Black (and Brown) men. Even when they carry no weapon, they run the risk of being killed by the police for any reason.
Dread Scott, A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York
The flag was exhibited on the facade of the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York in 2016, in reaction to the police killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. The gallery was eventually forced to remove the flag from the front of the building after legal intimidations from their landlord. An echo of what happened in 1938 when, threatened to lose its lease, the NAACP had to discontinue the practice.
Dread Scott, A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday, 2015. At Porta San Felice. Photo: Valentina Cafarotti
A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday was part of the public programme of Art City Bologna, a series of events that accompanies the contemporary art fair each year. The curators of the event hung the black flag over Porta San Felice, one of the ten historic Gates of the city. The flag, its warning and its criticism travel uncomfortably well through history and space. Although Bologna is far away from New York or Baltimore, we should never take for granted basic human rights, especially not in Europe where adherence to far-right ideologies is on the rise. And although Italian police officers are nowhere near as trigger happy as their U.S. counterparts, there have been a number of incidents in recent years that strongly suggest police racism. I’m thinking about Moussa Diarra killed by a police officer in Verona (Matteo Salvini cheered his death with a cruel tweet saying “He will not be missed”.) Or the young Ramy who was killed in a scooter accident likely caused by the man driving police car (again, Salvini’s comment on the event demonstrated a total absence of compassion.) Or migrants tortured by Italian police officers in Verona. There are many other cases.
“My art often looks at how the past sets the stage for the present but also exists in the present in new form,” Scott writes. “This artwork is an unfortunately necessary update to address a horror from the past that is haunting us in the present.”