On November 13, 1970, police raided Judson Memorial Church as Faith Ringgold, Jon Hendricks, and Jean Toche finished Day 5 of their art show, “The People’s Flag Show.” The charge? Desecrating the U.S. flag.
The artists’ NYC exhibit responded to the 1967 conviction of an art gallery owner who presented artwork using the flag to criticize the Vietnam War. Ringgold and her colleagues encouraged their fellow artists to submit work resisting censorship and repression. One artist even burned the flag.
After the artists were each fined $100 for “mutilating the flag”, they said, “We have been convicted, but in fact it is this nation and these courts who are guilty.” After all, the U.S. was guilty of “mutilating human beings” throughout its history.
With the help of the ACLU, their convictions were overturned. Ringgold would continue to remaster the flag in her work. The state could spread the narrative that the U.S. symbolized freedom, but as an artist, she flipped that narrative.
In 1989, the Supreme Court decided that flag burning was a protected right. However, protest and dissent are still criminalized today. Artists like Ringgold immortalize the reminder that, as much as U.S. authorities claim that the U.S. is the land of the free, its reign of global and domestic terror has proven otherwise.