"A Man Was Lynched Friday"

On September 16, 2016 (a Friday), Terence Crutcher, a 40-year-old African-American man, was fatally shot by white police officer Betty Shelby in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He was unarmed during the encounter, in which he was standing near his vehicle in the middle of a street.

The shooting led to protests in Tulsa. On September 22, the Tulsa County District Attorney charged Shelby with first-degree manslaughter and later the shooting was labeled a homicide.

Hibbert painted this simple but powerful piece just days after Crutcher was killed.  The painting is a historic reference to the flag which the NAACP used to hang outside of its New York City headquarters in the 1920s and 1930s saying "A Man Was Lynched Yesterday" the day following a report of a man being lynched across the country.  Lynching is defined as: "an extrajudicial punishment by an informal group.  It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged transgressor without legal trial.. It is an extreme form of informal group social control."  Through this piece, Hibbert draws a painful parallel between modern day police brutality and lynchings of the early 20th century.