Detroit man covered his lawn with 52 crosses, photos to show Black Lives Matter

There have just been so many.  Dead. Seemingly one after another. Black and gone. Adults and children alike.

Detroiter John Thorne was tired of it. Tired of the deaths. And tired of the way the names cycled into the news only to be forgotten until the next Black body was gone.

 “We hear these names, but sometimes we forget, because there have been so many names,” an anguished Thorne said. “And I thought, ‘How do we find a way to honor these people so we don’t forget that they lived a life, and their lives were all tragically cut short.' ’’

Thorne thought about his Catholic religion.

“In the Catholic church, we do crosses for babies who have been aborted during Right to Life Month in October. That’s nice, but I kept saying, 'But these people lived. They had faces. They had names.' ”

He decided to put crosses with those faces and their names across his front lawn in Detroit’s University District. It was his way of saying that Black Lives Matter.

The lawn adorned with 52 crosses, including a large one for the countless others — known and unknown — is proving to be a popular attraction. More importantly, it is becoming the conversation starter he was aiming for — conversations he hopes will lead to better lives for everyone. He has one particular someone in mind: his son, John II, who turns 14 in August.

“I just want to make a better nation, a better world for my son,” said Thorne, executive director of the Detroit Catholic Pastoral Alliance, a community development organization. “I shouldn’t have had to have the police talk with him for his 12th birthday.”

Black parents know that talk, especially if they have a boy.

“I had that conversation before I had the conversation about sex with him because it’s so real right now,” Thorne said. One of the lessons: “When you walk out of the house, that hood doesn’t go on your head. Put the hood back on your neck. We want people to see you, and your face so they’re not threatened by you.”

The hoodie became a prominent description of Trayvon Martin, who’s among the 52. Remember that name? He’s the 17-year-old African American shot and killed by a neighborhood watch patrolman who thought him suspicious.

But victims of violence by police and vigilantes are not the only ones represented by crosses on Thorne’s lawn. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are on the front row because he also wanted to recognize “those who died fighting for justice, trying to find a way for us to have equal justice in this country that we love.”

While the display was Thorne’s idea, he enlisted his son and two friends to help put his vision into reality. The father and son were joined by Albert Strickland of Detroit and Elesia Green of Highland Park.

They cut the wood, printed and laminated the photos, and did research to create biographical sketches for each of the people represented on the lawn. A mail-stand encourages visitors to take and read pamphlets they printed with those sketches.

The most challenging part was narrowing down a list to 52. They’re still adding names and faces.

Thorne decided to put it on his front lawn because he didn’t need to ask anybody’s permission, and he knew it would be visible among the stately well-kept brick homes in one of Detroit’s diverse neighborhoods.

 Among the 52 is Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago who was accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. Klan members took him from his relative’s house; his severely battered body — eyes gouged out — was found in a river.      

"You’ll see Emmet Till, who for me, started the Black Lives Matter movement because when his mother made that decision to have an open casket and show the world what happened to her son, it was the first time that type of attention was drawn on a Black death,” Thorne said.

In her autobiography, Rosa Parks said thinking about Till and others was why she refused to give up her seat on that Montgomery, Alabama, bus.

Thorne said he has received no complaints from his neighbors. Many have thanked him. Hundreds of people have stopped by from early morning to late night to see the display since it went up June 14.

One of the neighbors who heard about it and stopped by is Bill Pringle, who also happens to be an assistant curator of the Detroit Historical Society.

 “I thought it very powerful and very sobering,” Pringle said. “It forces you to stop and think and appreciate the weight of history and your place in it.”

Pringle was so impressed he asked Thorne to donate a few of the crosses to the Detroit Historical Museum after he takes it down.

“It’s our mission to tell Detroit stories and why they matter,” Pringle said. Thorne’s collection fits their mission to tell contemporary stories that are history in the making.

Thorne said he’s pleased the memorial will be a part of the society’s collection.

He is surprised by the amount of attention the exhibit is receiving, but he doesn’t want it to stop with admiration and respect. Television crews have come by, and he woke before 6 a.m. one morning to see about 30 bikers admiring the memorial.

“You see those names, it has to call us to action,’’ he said. “We have to do something that will change our communities, our city, our nation, our world. This is a visual that should cause us to do something more.”

 What?

“We gotta get people to vote,” he said. “ We can’t stop when people stop going down to the protests. There’s still work to be done. We have to be engaged.”

One name stands out for the moment.

“In a very odd and strange way, we had a perfect storm with the death of George Floyd. It’s sad that he had to die the way he had to die, but for once, the whole nation was at home because everything hadn’t been opened up, so the whole world saw this and it caused the whole world to take action.”

Thorne, 42, a single father, has seen other moments pregnant with hope come and go. 

“For the first time, I really feel people are listening, but I don’t know,’’ he said. “Every time we feel we’ve gained something and we’re moving in the right direction, we get lax. It’s great for the moment, but people get lax and they stop. In order to really heal from the racial oppression that we’ve had in this country, it’s an ongoing conversation; it can’t be ‘Oh, I went to a rally one time and now racism is healed.’ It’s much larger.’’