[1] The artwork is titled after Jim Crow laws, which enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States.

Directly below across the whitewashed wooden slats is an almost featureless face of a black figure with glowing red eyes.

This head sits atop of a withered body, which dissolves into a skeletal arrangement of ribs and limbs.

As if to indicate the importance of this natural phenomenon, Basquiat spelled out "MISSISSIPPI" across the river in large golden letters.

[3] Historian Charles Payne recounted that the state had the highest rate of lynchings, recording 539 between "the end of Reconstruction and the modern civil rights era.