The Fire This Time

After the Charleston shooting in 2015, Emily Raboteau takes her children to see the recently reopened High Bridge in New York City. The bridge connects the Bronx with Harlem and was closed for over forty years. The events of that summer, which also saw the death of Michael Brown, make Raboteau wonder how she should talk about the police with her young children. 

The family walks to The High Bridge in the heat. The Charleston shooting and the shooting of Michael Brown by the police are fresh in Raboteau’s mind, as are the deaths of Freddy Gray, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and Tamir Rice, exacerbating her outrage. These events provoked citizen protests, demonstrations of civil disobedience, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Vintage and new slogans resounded throughout this resistance. 

Raboteau’s four-year-old son complains about the heat and the long walk to The High Bridge. A Ben Sargent cartoon called “Still Two Americas” depicts a black and a white boy leaving home. The white boy’s mother urges him to wear his jacket, and the black boy’s mother lists how he should behave to avoid suspicion related to racial profiling. Raboteau resists the stance of both mothers and prefers to tell her kids to notice and enjoy the world around them when they leave home. 

Raboteau and her husband lead their grumpy children through the thick heat. At a set of stairs, her son lay on the ground in protest. A nearby train horn improves her son’s mood. He, like all children, wants distance from his parents, despite Raboteau’s desire to shield him from danger. 

The family meets an elderly European man who explains the history of The High Bridge, including its role in introducing indoor plumbing to New York City. They walk across the bridge to the Bronx, and on their way home, Raboteau spots a mural in her neighborhood for the first time. 

Located on a familiar corner in Washington Heights, the bright mural reads, “KNOW YOUR RIGHTS!” (161). With comic-style imagery and captions, the mural shows people of color interacting with police and states, in Spanish, Americans’ right to film the police. Raboteau photographs the mural (her photograph appears beside the text) for its loving consideration of young people of color who may not know how to engage with police officers. She appreciates its location in an area where police target people of color, as well as the mural’s healing presence in her community. 

A Chilean artist named Cekis created this and several other Know Your Rights murals as part of a public art commission by the People’s Justice for Community Control and Police Accountability. Raboteau finds and photographed several of them at their locations throughout New York City that summer. 

Another Know Your Rights mural in Harlem shows a woman with a bullhorn and a caption recommending that people record an officers’ identifying information when they are detained. Raboteau’s photograph of the image (printed beside the text), shows a bearded man walking beside the mural and his shadow. The mural addresses stop-and-frisk procedures in New York, which police began using in the 1980s. They target young men of color for random searches. A federal court outlawed stop-and-frisk in 2013, and Raboteau is grateful her children won’t be stopped and frisked. 

The power of the Know Your Rights murals, says Yul-san Liem of People’s Justice, comes from their blend of text and image, as well as their location on public thoroughfares. Liem explains how the organization came after the many deaths and assaults of unarmed black men by New York police.

The Bushwick, Brooklyn Know Your Rights mural, created by Dasic Fernandez, proves difficult for Raboteau to find. She asks a group of students for its location, but they give her conflicting answers. One of them, a girl named Esperanza, walks her half an hour to the mural. The mural, like the others, recommends with text and visuals that people film police, and one image is a young woman pointing to her eye. In Raboteau’s photograph (included), a young woman walks by on the phone; behind her, a figure in the mural films a police officer with his phone.

In the next neighborhood, Long Island City, Queens, Raboteau encounters a barefoot woman arguing with an invisible man. The Know Your Rights mural (photograph included) is black text against a white background, urging people to record information, footage, and injuries during and after an altercation with a police officer. Raboteau’s photograph shows a woman walking into the intersection next to the mural, an image that juxtaposes the woman’s apparent sense of purpose with the danger the mural implies.

In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Raboteau sees the next Know Your Rights mural, which recalls Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing by portraying one of its most important characters. In the film, the character Radio Raheem is killed by the police, setting off protests just as the deaths of Rodney King, Freddie Gray, and Michael Brown did. Raboteau participated in the Ferguson-fueled protests in Harlem but went home before the crowd surged across the Triborough Bridge and shut it down. The Bed-Stuy mural warns against such rebellion, urging people to comply and remain calm when detained by police. The man in Raboteau’s photograph of the mural (included) wears headphones.

Raboteau’s visit to the Bronx mural captures a photograph of a woman staring at her phone, as behind her the man in the mural films a police officer handcuffing a man. Raboteau feels wary of her surroundings in this neighborhood, called Hunts Point. The mural invites passersby into the filming man’s point of view, and Raboteau herself looks like this man as she photographs the mural and the distracted woman walking by.

In sequence, Raboteau’s photographs appear different but show the love and protection of the mural-makers for fellow New Yorkers. Raboteau compares the Constitution, which proclaims equal rights but metes them out unfairly, with the outmoded High Bridge. She imagines assembling the images of the walkers in each photograph as a zoetrope, each walking toward progress, symbolized by a bridge. The final photograph depicts two children, presumably Raboteau’s, standing beneath a mural.