More than 55 years separate the photographs of Steve Schapiro and Sheila Pree Bright, but their images are kindred. Take the picture Schapiro took in Selma in 1965. In the photo, an older Black woman stands in a crowd of other Black people clearly waiting for something. She is bundled up against the cold, with a hat and scarves and her overcoat appears sprinkled with rain. Her face doesn’t reflect discomfort so much as determination. The sign she holds in her bare hands reveals why, and its message is stark and clear: “Stop Police Killings.” Then consider Pree Bright’s photo made 50 years later. A crowd in Ferguson, Missouri, is marching down a street. One of the female marchers carries a huge United States flag, hung upside down on a pole in her right hand. Flying the flag upside down is understood as a symbol of distress or danger. The marchers are protesting police killings of unarmed Black people in the city where Michael Brown was gunned down by a white police officer just a year before Pree Bright took the photo.
