What was supposed to be an innocuous display celebrating Halloween sparked outrage among Brooklyn neighbors, who decried brown paper cutouts depicting children being hung as racist.
The dolls, cut out of brown paper with nooses around their necks and hanging in a window across from an elementary school, were supposed to represent characters from a horror movie, WPIX reported.
"There's no way unless you have been living under a rock for the last 40 years that you could even imagine putting a picture of black children hung by a rope and think that was OK," Pastor and the Rev. Jason Henrickson told WABC during a protest Thursday in front of the building.
The windows are across the street from an elementary school.
"It's either willful ignorance or, at worst, it's racist," parent Kirsten John Foy told WABC.
Homeowner Dany Rose, who also owns Art Shack Brooklyn, a ceramics studio, apologized for the display.
"The images were based on the horror movie 'Annabelle,' but because they were made of brown kraft paper and hanging from strings, they were deeply racially offensive," Rose said in a statement, WPIX reported. "I hope to meet with local leaders, including P.S.11 teachers and administrators, to identify the best way forward to promote racial justice and to use my example of white privilege as a teaching moment."
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