To deface, destroy, and, particularly, to burn the United States flag is a highly controversial but constitutionally protected form of protest. The U.S. flag is supposed to be an emblem of democratic freedom and equality for all, but it is essentially a veil obscuring the systemic racism that continues to violate the civil, human, and constitutional rights of people of color.

While she was incarcerated, Beverly Henry worked for sixty-five cents an hour in a prison textile factory sewing United States flags. On the 254th anniversary of the birth of Betsy Ross’s, Beverly wrote an op-ed piece eloquently contrasting the realities of her own life experience, as an impoverished Black woman, lesbian, heroin addict, and an HIV-positive prisoner, to the promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that the flag purportedly represents. What Beverly wrote, and the very fact of her labor—sewing day after day—act on the flag as kind of defacement, altering its meaning by highlighting the incongruity and terrible irony of prison laborers sewing U.S. flags in a prison sweatshop.