On Friday afternoon, in the rain, Cedric Douglas and two collaborators stood out on Boylston Street, along the Boston Common, and handed out roses to passers-by. Attached to each stem was a black tag printed with the name and a photo portrait of “one of more than 1,000 black people” killed by police in the United States during the past five years.
“This rose represents Terrence Coleman’s life,” read the flower the Quincy artist gave me. Coleman was a 31-year-old Boston man who was shot dead by Boston police when his mother called for an ambulance to come to their home to take the mentally ill man to a hospital on Oct. 30, 2016. (Officers allege that he came at them and EMTs with a knife.) “He didn’t deserve to be shot. I called for help. I didn’t call for a murder,” Hope Coleman has said.
“People don’t realize that this is happening in Boston,” Douglas says. “Terrence Coleman, 31-years-old. They say he grabbed a knife. They didn’t have to shoot him. They knew they were called for a mental situation. … You have a right to go to court and be judged by a jury of your peers, not shot. He got shot in the head. That’s execution style.”
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Douglas’s “Rose Memorial Service” was developed as part of a residency at Emerson College, working with the Boston school’s Public Art Think Tank. It’s a continuation of his “Street Sign Memorial” project, in which he’s designed, had manufactured and installed public signs to honor people who’ve died—for an uncle who passed away from a heart problem; for Coleman; for Odin Lloyd, who was murdered in 2013 by New England Patriots football player Aaron Hernandez. Douglas posted one in Florida for a graffiti writer who died in 2014 from injuries sustained when Miami Beach Police hit him with an unmarked cruiser.
“I felt like that could have been me,” says Douglas, who’s best known as a street artist and graffiti painter around Boston. “I started getting annoyed. Every day there’s video footage of someone getting killed by police. I just don’t get it.”
“When the Parkland shooting happened, I got kind of pissed,” Douglas says. A school shooting gets national attention, but, to him, police killings of citizens seem overlooked. “Why aren’t people talking about this? It’s an epidemic.”
He decided, “I’m going to do my own public service announcement.”
In collaboration with Emerson students, Douglas placed tags around the school, in halls and elevators, memorializing black people killed by police. On Friday, they took the project to the streets.
“It’s just crazy. It’s just so warped,” Douglas says. “The guy who shot up [the high school in] Parkland, he got taken in in handcuffs. The guy from the [Boston] marathon bombing, he got taken in in handcuffs.”
Originally, Douglas planned to memorialize 400 people killed by police in the past five years. But as he collected reports from the news media, he kept finding more dead.
“We discovered just looking at the information, a lot of it’s incorrect. The police, they don’t record. There’s no real database,” Douglas says. More than 1,000 black people have been killed by police in the past five years, he says. “It’s a public service announcement to try to get people to do something about it.”
Previously:
• ‘I Called For Help And They Killed Him’: Mass Action Against Police Brutality March.
• ‘My Son’: A Killing by Police Protested at Boston Police Headquarters.
Help Wonderland keep producing our great coverage of local arts, cultures and activisms (and our great festivals) by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.