Stripping the maritime alphabet of its primary colors except blue and replacing them with muted browns and blacks, Mourning/Warning highlights the relationship of Americans of the African diaspora to water and maritime trade as well as the need for an alternative means of communication in times of emergency and duress. How do you send a warning call that hatred comes constantly in waves?

This set contains alphabetical, numerical, and repeater, or substitute, maritime flags. The repeaters make character duplication possible or in the case patterns of pain, grief, humiliation. The two Mourning/Warning books: An Abecedaria and Numbers and Repeaters serve as the keys for using the flags. Conceived of in Newport, Rhode Island, and completed in New Haven, Connecticut, the M/W flags set serves as a method of memorializing the slain and wronged, and of teaching our children and ourselves to be vigilant and wary in hostile terrain, where your skin color makes you an easy target.

There are 26 flags, three repeater flags are variant in size.