‘Stop Killing Black People’: How a Minneapolis designer branded a movement
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Terresa Hardaway remembers a pivotal moment with the rapper Common a few years back.
It was 2021 at the first anniversary of the police murder of George Floyd. Hardaway was handing out t-shirts she had designed at an event at George Floyd Square in Minneapolis.
The black tees were emblazoned in a chunky white type, including the phrases “Black Lives Matter” and “Abolish the Police.”
Common donated and picked up one that said “All Power to the People.”
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“Right there, he took off his shirt, put on the ‘All Power to the People’ shirt, and just kept walking through George Floyd Square,” Hardaway says. “It was the coolest thing. I was like, “Oh my god, this is so awesome.’”
Common wore the shirt on stage for a performance with Sounds of Blackness, the Grammy-winning Minneapolis vocal and instrumental ensemble. Photos of him in the tee spread online, along with Hardaway’s expressive block-letter design, which she named “Stop Killing Black People.”
“You don’t know what he’s saying, but you know what he stands for,” Hardaway says of the widespread photos of Common in her design. “That’s the moment we needed to capitalize on. I think that the Civil Rights Movement did that really well.”
What do we wear to the next protest?
For years, Hardaway has been asking herself: “How do you brand a movement?” Hardaway is an associate professor of graphic design at the University of Minnesota, where she is the director of the Design Justice Collective.
Hardaway is also the owner of Black Garnet Books and the co-founder and creative director of Blackbird Revolt. Hardaway and co-founder Jordon Moses started the design studio in 2017 to respond to a question:
“What do we wear to the next protest?”
In the years that followed, Hardaway grew increasingly disturbed by police killings of Black people filling the news and social media. Then the pandemic hit, followed shortly after by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
“All of this was so overwhelming, and I had to find a way to kind of focus that down and figure out and process why I live in a country that hates me so much,” Hardaway says.
So she started to sketch, drawing letter forms on an iPad.
“Being able to draw and let it in and use letters to sort of tell that story and give it character is something that helps me concentrate,” Hardaway says.
Hardaway drew inspiration from Black activist design throughout history.
She points to simple, bold designs, including the black-and-white flag the NAACP made in the 1930s that said “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday,” and the red-and-white “I Am A Man” posters used during the Civil Rights Movement.
She also looked to the work of graphic artist Emory Douglas, the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, whom Hardaway brought to speak at the University of Minnesota in 2019. Emory created the visual identity for the Black Panther Party and human rights, Hardaway says, before digital tools were available.
“How do I make this message scream as loud as possible and be super high contrast?” Hardaway says. “I did that by not using color in my work and really thinking about — Okay, Emory Douglas was doing this with an X-Acto knife. How do I give it that same feeling of urgency?”
Letters of intent
She began thinking of each letter as an individual person, relating it to how it takes all sorts of people working together to make a movement, bringing with them their trauma, healing, skills and quirks.
In the Blackbird Revolt studio in downtown Minneapolis, Hardaway looks up at a sign imprinted with “Stop Killing Black People.” She points to the word “Stop.”
“The ‘S’ is this really wonky, strange-looking letterform, but the T and that horizontal stroke fit really nicely right there inside the counter space of the ‘S,’” Hardaway says.
“These letterforms feel really awkward by themselves,” she continues. “But then, all together, it's like, ‘Oh, wow!’ This is a unifying message that we can actually take and now put on a flag or paint on a banner or shout out in front of a police precinct, and it begins to have a much bigger impact when we are all together.”
In April 2021, Hardaway attended the protests in Brooklyn Center for Daunte Wright, who was killed by police officer Kimberly Potter. She remembers hand-drawn signs smearing in the falling snow and protestors growing cold.
“How do I brand what's happening here, unify us, keep us warm, and also use this moment when we are getting news coverage to continue expressing our message?” Hardaway remembers thinking.
‘Not Instagramable or glamorous’
Hardaway says the Blackbird Revolt team and other volunteers raised about $30,000 to screen print t-shirts, hoodies, waterproof signs and buttons with slogans already being chanted at protests.
They distributed thousands and thousands of items for free — or what Hardaway calls “distro,” which she has since written about in the 2023 book she co-edited, “An Anthology of Blackness: The State of Black Design.”
“We raised funds on our social media platforms for gas masks, umbrellas, hand-warmers, gloves, hats, socks, water, snacks, flashlights, antibacterial lotion and any other requests from frontline protestors,” Hardaway wrote.
They took the same approach for the screen-printed protest gear. It was “free to Black people — don’t even worry about paying for it — donation requests for anyone else,” Hardaway says.
Fellow designer and Blackbird team member Kelsi Sharp says it was the first time she became aware of the concept of mutual aid.
“People were flabbergasted that it was free,” Sharp says. “Because what we see a lot of in the years since is: People want to buy their way into liberation and abolition and it's like, ‘Nope, you can't buy this. This is free.’ So I thought that was really powerful.”
Sharp remembers painting 16-foot-tall letters of the Stop Killing Black People type on banners to march with or hang on the sides of buildings.
They also painted a mural using the lettering that says “Black Futures,” which can still be seen in the parking lot of the University of Minnesota Urban Research and Outreach-Engagement Center in North Minneapolis, between the Minnesota African American Heritage Museum and the Minneapolis Police 4th Precinct building.
Sharp says at the time, it was hard to recognize the impact of the design because everyone was in survival mode.
“We were literally taking boxes directly from the manufacturer,” Sharp says, “and handing them out to people, like, literally rip open the box and hand them out to people. It was not Instagramable or glamorous.”
Breaking the grid
Los Angeles-based designer and scholar Dori Tunstall says the free community distribution was key to the design’s power.
“I saw it everywhere,” Tunstall says. “To see it everywhere was reaffirming of our existence. It's literally a visualization of Black Lives Matter.”
Tunstall is the author of the 2023 book “Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook.” She wrote the foreword for Hardaway’s “An Anthology of Blackness.” Tunstall was also the first Black person to hold the position of dean of faculty design at Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, or anywhere in the world.
The type, Tunstall says, also reaffirms design as a language of protest. The signs and apparel would not have had the same impact, Tunstall says, if the lettering was done in, say, Helvetica, “the ultimate corporate typeface.”
“If someone's walking down the street with a sign, you may only see it for let’s say a maximum of 30 seconds,” Tunstall says. “So you have to get the feel of it instantly — the feel of anger, rage, injustice, all these things that are carrying the message of why people are out in the streets.”
Tunstall says Hardaway is at the forefront of the present-future generation of designers and educators who are making design relevant to Black and brown communities, joining peers such as Tré Seals in Washington D.C., who designs typefaces named for leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois, Carrie Chapman Catt and Rubén Salazar.
The styling of Hardaway’s type itself is an act of protest, Tunstall says.
“For the design nerd, it breaks the grid,” Tunstall says. The Stop Killing Black People type is jumbled and nonlinear, she explains, in contrast to the minimalist Swiss style grid that is dominant in graphic design.
“Its closeness, compactness, breaks the grid in a way that says: This is coming from a place and people that is not European, but actually fights against the structures and the regulation that this European system has imposed upon us,” Tunstall says.
‘You had to be there to get it’
The design lives on. Hardaway has made the type open source and free to download as set of graphic elements (rather than a font you can type with on a computer). It comes with a disclaimer: Hardaway says use the type for “abolitionist purposes and not for your little birthday parties, unless it’s an abolitionist birthday party.”
Blackbird Revolt is using the lettering for upcoming Juneteenth celebrations.
Hardaway is also curating a group exhibition about the intersection of Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty called “Resist & Reclaim” at the Goldstein Museum of Design.
It will feature 20 Black and Indigenous women and femme artists. Using her lettering, Hardaway screen-printed 20 jean jackets with the phrase “Resist and Reclaim” and sent them to the artists as a base canvas for an artwork. The exhibition will open in November.
Around the Twin Cities, Hardaway still sees the fruits of the early “distro” of the design.
In May, a sign with “Say Their Names” painted in Hardaway’s lettering leans against the raised fist sculpture at the intersection of 38th and Chicago, where George Floyd was killed.
“I still see that today in people's windows, I see people having it on the back of their backpacks,” Hardaway says.
“If I don’t know anything, I know that someday they were with me at one point at one of these protests, because we didn't sell it. You had to be there to get it.”
Correction (May 23, 2025): An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of Black Garnet Books.
